Mark Lillienfeld, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide investigator, has been deemed ineligible for rehire after a police officer who attended one of his training lectures last year accused him of making racist comments and repeatedly giving a Nazi-like salute during the class, according to an internal affairs report.
The officer, who is Black, also alleged Lillienfeld joked that she and another Black officer in the class would be the most likely suspects if anyone jumped him in the parking lot after the May 2023 lecture.
Following a probe, this year the Sheriff’s Department decided to put a “Do Not Rehire” designation in Lillienfeld’s personnel file, according to a department statement this week and the 40-page report released this month. Though the report contains little information about the investigators’ reasoning, it includes summaries of nearly three dozen witness interviews followed by three pages outlining the policy violations alleged and discipline recommended.
Tom Yu, the attorney representing Lillienfeld, said the allegations against his client were “completely baseless” and questioned why the woman who complained — a Los Angeles Police Department traffic investigator — took the class in the first place.
“The city of Los Angeles would be a safer place if she spent that kind of energy and time on her own caseload,” Yu told The Times. “The investigation was purportedly about a race or gender-based discrimination — when my client has already retired and has no standing to appeal or grieve the one-sided investigation.”
The California Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training — which oversees law enforcement training standards statewide — said in a statement Tuesday that it found out about the incident only recently. The commission currently approves instructors based on information submitted by local agencies, the statement said, and it doesn’t have a way to get rid of instructors whom it deems inappropriate.
“The Commission met last week and discussed this regulatory matter and are planning to make changes so that in the future we do have the ability to remove instructors such as this,” the statement said.
In the meantime, the commission said, the Sheriff’s Department and other agencies “should be doing their due diligence on checking who their instructors are and if there are prior incidents.”
This is not the first time Lillienfeld has run afoul of department policies. In 2008, internal affairs records show he was given a written reprimand for referring to a woman as a “broad” and repeatedly using profanity during a different training lecture. After retiring in 2016, he began working as an investigator for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, where he was later caught on camera posing as a deputy in order to sneak contraband fast food to an inmate at Men’s Central Jail.
Afterward, the Sheriff’s Department temporarily banned him from the jails. After Alex Villanueva became sheriff in late 2018, he rehired Lillienfeld to join his public corruption squad, which, among other things, criminally investigated a Times reporter who was leaked a list of problem deputies.
Lillienfeld left the department again in January 2023 after Villanueva lost reelection. This year, during an inquiry into the public corruption squad, Lillienfeld testified that the incident at Men’s Central Jail was part of a plan to overturn a wrongful conviction by winning the trust of the real killer and coaxing out a confession.
By the May 2023 training incident, Lillienfeld was working as an outside vendor. The Sheriff’s Department said this week it will not hire him as an instructor for future classes.
The complaint that spurred the investigation and “Do Not Rehire” designation stemmed from a two-week homicide investigator course held at a Holiday Inn in La Mirada. Though the state covered payments to guest lecturers, the Sheriff’s Department designed the curriculum and planned the speakers.
On the first day of class, May 8, Lillienfeld delivered a morning lecture on the mind-set of homicide investigators followed by an afternoon lecture on case management and interacting with witnesses. About 30 officers and deputies from across Southern California attended the training. The Sheriff’s Department redacted all of their names in the report, as well as that of the Los Angeles police officer at the center of the complaint.
At the beginning of the course, according to what the LAPD officer later told investigators, the sergeant who oversaw the training warned the class that some of the instructors were “old school” and were “a little rough around the collar.” (When investigators later interviewed the sergeant, he said he did not recall saying anything to that effect, according to the report.)
“Throughout the entire lecture, Subject Lillienfeld was rude, condescending, unprofessional, and made inappropriate comments to several students in the class,” investigators wrote in their summary of the officer’s interview.
They said the officer told them she believed Lillienfeld targeted Asian and Black students with off-color jokes, once calling the only two Asian students “Chinamen” and repeatedly making fun of a woman’s name. The officer also told investigators Lillienfeld talked a lot of “crap” about the Los Angeles Police Department and how its investigations were “messed up.”
During the lecture, the report says, “Lillienfeld also clicked his heels together and extended one of his arms out like Hitler,” while saying something that sounded like “hike” or “height.”
The woman told investigators she wasn’t sure whether it was intended to be a Nazi salute because she’d seen Nazi salutes only on television. She said that she thought Lillienfeld might have been doing it as a joke or because of a “nervous condition” but that it felt inappropriate because it “looked like something white supremacist groups do,” according to the report.
At the end of the class, she alleged, Lillienfeld apologized to her and the other Black woman — a Menifee Police Department officer — and thanked them for letting him make fun of them. Then, she told investigators, Lillienfeld allegedly told class participants that if they saw him outside in the parking lot with two bullets in the back of his head, they should look to the two Black women as the suspects.
The Los Angeles police officer later detailed her concerns to a Sheriff’s Department detective who was monitoring the class, and the detective alerted the sergeant who had coordinated the class.
When the sergeant pulled the officer aside to talk, she didn’t give him many details because she wasn’t sure if she could trust him. Still, the report says, she told the sergeant she was offended by Lillienfeld’s presentation, especially the comments he’d allegedly made singling out the two Black women as hypothetical suspects.
The Menifee police officer told investigators that she remembered Lillienfeld was funny, but that she didn’t find the humor offensive or feel singled out by his jokes. She recalled hearing him say something about one of the Asian students, but couldn’t remember what. She said she didn’t remember seeing him give a Nazi salute.
And though she told investigators she remembered hearing Lillienfeld’s comments about the Black women “jumping him,” she said she thought it was just a joke and wasn’t offended.
Several months later, when internal affairs investigators interviewed more than two dozen other officers and deputies who attended or monitored the class, almost all said they didn’t recall seeing anything inappropriate. Some said Lillienfeld was funny, and several spoke highly of his lecture. One said Lillienfeld kept “putting his foot in his mouth” when talking to the two Black women.
Another — a La Verne police officer whose name was also redacted — said Lillienfeld repeatedly did a “weird thing” during class in which he would click his heels together and throw up his arm in a way the officer described as a “Nazi salute.” Lillienfeld did the salute two or three times during his lecture and at one point said “Sieg Heil” as he did, according to what the officer told investigators.
The officer said he thought Lillienfeld did the Nazi salute while trying to make a point regarding one of the investigations he taught, but he couldn’t remember the specifics.
After the class ended, the Los Angeles police officer detailed her concerns in her class evaluation, which sparked the internal investigation.
When investigators tried to interview Lillienfeld in April, the file says, he immediately started recording them, then asked several questions about the case before refusing to do the interview. That same month, according to state commission records, Lillienfeld began working as a detective for the South Pasadena Police Department. It’s unclear whether he still works there.
Lillienfeld’s case marks at least the second time in recent months that a high-profile former department member has been hit with a “Do Not Rehire” designation. In January, The Times reported that Villanueva had also been deemed ineligible for rehire after officials found he discriminated against L.A. County Inspector General Max Huntsman. Villanueva later sued the county over that decision. In September, a federal judge tossed out the case, though Villanueva has since refiled and the case is pending.
