He was an unarmed cop in England. Now he leads the commission that reviews LAPD shootings
- Django Sibley is the new executive director of the Los Angeles Police Commission, an all-civilian panel that oversees the LAPD and investigates when officers use deadly force.
- Sibley began his career as a police officer in the United Kingdom, where he says he learned early on about de-escalation — partly because he didn’t carry a gun on duty.
It wasn’t long after becoming a police officer in the northern English town of Hull in the 1990s that Django Sibley realized patrolling without a gun meant “policing by consent.”
His beat was the town’s public housing tenements, and Sibley said he quickly worked out that people responded better to persuasion than threats of force or arrest. De-escalation hadn’t yet hit the mainstream in law enforcement, but Sibley recalled spending most of his days doing just that.
For the record:
10:08 a.m. Dec. 24, 2024An earlier version of this article said Django Sibley became a police officer in Hull, Britain, in the 1980s and left to pursue studies in Liverpool. He joined the force in the 1990s, after attending college in Liverpool.
Instead of taking a “more coercive” approach, Sibley said, he tried to persuade people to act in their own self-interests.
“You have to deal with violent situations usually through … taking the time to listen to people, get to know them,” he said.
Those early lessons have stuck with Sibley, 52, since moving to L.A. more than two decades ago and recently becoming executive director of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the civilian panel that oversees the police department and reviews shootings by officers.
Authorities have said Brian Williams, a top deputy to Mayor Karen Bass, is suspected of sending an anonymous threat about a bomb inside City Hall in October.
Sibley, who started his new role in September, said his prior experience gives him a unique perspective about when police should resort to drawing their weapons.
In his new position as executive director, Sibley will act as a liaison between the LAPD and the commission, which acts much like a corporate board of directors by setting policies and providing direction for the department. He will also advise commissioners on one of their most important roles: their weekly deliberations behind closed doors about whether officer shootings and other serious uses of force were appropriate.
Being involved in law enforcement in the U.S., he said, has said opened his eyes to the challenges of policing a country that — unlike England — is awash in guns. The presence of firearms can make even routine calls go south quickly, he said.
Guns were a rarity in Hull, Sibley’s childhood home. After his family briefly moved away when he was a teenager, he returned to join the police force. The seaside town 150 miles north of London had seen an explosion of crime and drug use after the collapse of the local fishing industry and decades of economic decline.
Sibley believed he could make a real difference because he understood what worked — and didn’t — for the local cops.
It was wisdom gained, he said, “really from watching the police fail in the place where I was living.”
The City of Los Angeles agreed to pay $30 million to thousands of people affected by gang injunctions. But court records show around half of the money remains unclaimed, and a federal judge ordered an audit of the city’s management of the fund earlier this year.
A medical issue forced him out of the field and into a desk job. He decided to go back to school, entering graduate school at USC in 1999 and getting hired at the oversight body that was helping monitor the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. In 2004, he was hired as a special investigator for the LAPD Inspector General’s office, which serves as the investigative and auditing arm of the police commission.
Sibley eventually rose to the rank of assistant inspector general in charge of all investigations of serious police uses of force, including shootings.
While the total number of police shootings is down nearly a quarter from the same point last year, Mayor Karen Bass has made decreasing lethal force one of her law enforcement priorities. LAPD officers have opened fire 27 times on people so far this year, killing 11 people and wounding an additional nine.
Critics who attend the commission’s weekly meetings at police headquarters often accuse the body of being a “rubber-stamp” for the department’s violence against citizens. Too often, they argue, the board has reached an “in policy” ruling in cases where the officers’ own aggressive actions escalated an encounter.
Sibley said he understands the frustration by some of the body’s critics, but said they don’t always acknowledge progress toward reform.
Sibley’s hiring comes amid a broader shakeup of local law enforcement leadership, with Jim McDonnell taking over as LAPD chief and Nathan Hochman as L.A. County district attorney. While McDonnell’s immigration record has faced scrutiny and Hochman has taken criticism for moving to fire his predecessor’s special police shootings prosecutor, Sibley’s hiring has largely flown under the radar. For years he kept a low public profile, mostly operating behind the scenes and earning a reputation as tough but fair investigator.
A lawsuit by former SWAT officer Timothy Colomey accused leaders of the LAPD tactical unit of working to conceal unlawful killings and retaliating against him when he spoke to internal investigators.
When he joined the inspector general’s office in 2004, it was a dramatically different moment for the department and policing in general. The LAPD was operating under a federal consent decree in the wake of the Rampart corruption scandal, but still years away from the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the series of controversial police shootings across the country that ignited a national conversation about officers’ use of force.
“LAPD back in those days, was quite, I think it’d be fair to say, resistant to the oversight of the inspector general,” Sibley said.
Despite continued resistance, the LAPD has a come some way since then, he said, in terms of “training, standards and policies.”
The year he joined the inspector general’s office, there were 144 serious uses of force citywide, which include police shootings.
“And we’re well below a 100 now and have been for many years,” he said, noting that in recent years the department has averaged between 60 to 70 such cases. “So essentially half of what we had 20 years ago.”
The list of chief candidates reveals who among the LAPD’s top brass angled for the position and sheds light on heavy politicking behind the scenes.
His years in the inspector general’s office showed him the importance of keeping a close eye on officers for “risk factors” and the need for supervisors or oversight officials to intervene before there are deadly consequences.
When he started out in Hull in the ’90s, Sibley said, police departments in the U.K. were already working to defer calls to social service agencies. “That was a concept that I was already familiar with, maybe that was underutilized here,” he said.
Policing the town’s public housing “taught me about the value of building good relationships of people living in the neighborhood,” Sibley said.
It also taught him patience, especially when “we would keep dealing with the same situations over and over again.”
Sibley got his undergraduate degree in Liverpool, where he wrote his thesis on British law enforcement efforts to regain public trust after a public uprising in the 1980s fueled by high unemployment and police discrimination under a stop-and-frisk type strategy that mainly targeted young Black men.
During his time in the U.S., Sibley has seen similar unrest. He said the protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 offered a reminder that “you can never take your eye off the ball with use of force.”
“One horrendous use of force incident” can wipe out years of gains in police-community relations, he said.
Sibley’s former boss, then-inspector general Mark Smith, left in April after being named as an independent monitor to oversee police reforms in Portland, Ore.
A new inspector general is expected to be named in the coming weeks.
The five-person commission has been down a member for months, since former commissioner William Briggs termed out.
Briggs, an entertainment lawyer, said he pushed for Sibley to become executive director of the commission, calling him “even keeled and even tempered.”
“I always found him to be thoroughly prepared and very knowledgeable of the issues particularly surrounding the use of force,” Briggs said.
Mayor Bass replaced Briggs on the commission with Teresa Sanchez-Gordon, a former Superior Court judge, after her first nominee for the post withdrew from consideration. A native of Jalisco, Mexico, Sanchez-Gordon grew up in East L.A. After stints as an elementary school teacher and a federal public defender. She was elected to the bench in 1997.
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
