Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD), officially the County of Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, is a law enforcement agency serving Los Angeles County, California. LASD is the largest sheriff's department in the United States and the third largest local police agency in the United States, following the New York Police Department, and the Chicago Police Department. LASD has approximately 18,000 employees—9,915 sworn deputies and 9,244 unsworn members. It is sometimes confused with the similarly-named but separate Los Angeles Police Department, which provides law enforcement services within the city of Los Angeles, which is the county seat of Los Angeles County, although both departments have their headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.

The department's three main responsibilities are to provide municipal police services within Los Angeles County, courthouse security for the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, and housing and transportation services of inmates within the county jail system. In addition to providing municipal police services to the unincorporated communities within Los Angeles County, it has contractural arrangements to provide police services for 42 of the 88 independent cities within Los Angeles County. LASD also has contracts to provide police services for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Metrolink.

In 2021, it was confirmed that numerous separate gangs of deputy sheriffs within the LASD had been known to be operating since the 1970s. These gangs engaged "in a pattern of on-duty behavior that intentionally violated the law or fundamental principles of professional policing," including racial profiling, police brutality, police corruption, and other misconduct.