A Black El Segundo resident is asking a judge to order the city to produce 12 complaints of racial profiling filed against El Segundo police officers that occurred both before and after he alleges he was himself a victim of the practice in 2021.
Keith Puckett alleges in his Torrance Superior Court lawsuit that the ESPD has custom, pattern, and/or practice of racially profiling Black people. Puckett contends the ESPD racially profiled him twice.
The city has denied Puckett’s allegations and cited multiple defenses, stating in earlier court papers that ESPD officers acted objectively reasonable under the circumstances and that probable cause existed for the investigation of Puckett “throughout the incidents and events.”
But on April 9, Judge Gary Y. Tanaka denied a motion by the South Bay community to dismiss the case, finding that the plaintiff had provided enough facts for the case to proceed. According to the judge’s ruling, six armed police officers confronted plaintiff in the middle of the night at his home in January 2021 after observing a friend of Puckett, who also is Black.
Puckett and the friend were “detained for a period of time while the officers attempted to sort out the situation,” the judge wrote, adding, “Neither the plaintiff nor his friend had done anything wrong.”
Two months later, Puckett was pulled over while driving for “purportedly not having illumination around his rear license plate when the illumination was working perfectly,” the judge wrote, adding that Puckett subsequently tried to get a proper explanation for the stop from the city “with no success.”
“Plaintiff has alleged plausible facts to, at a minimum, create an inference that similarly situated white individuals would not have been subject to the same conduct as plaintiff,” according to Tanaka.
Puckett filed his lawsuit in June 2024. His court papers state that Racial and Identity Profiling Act data shows that although Black people make up less than 5% of El Segundo*s population, more than 20% of all stops in El Segundo are of Black people.
The complaints he seeks, which are directly relevant to Puckett’s allegations that the city has a pattern and practice of discriminating against Black people, according to his lawyers’ court papers.
“All the city will have to do to respond to Mr. Puckett’s request is pull the investigation files for these 12 complaints,” according to the plaintiff’s attorneys’ court papers. “It would not have to search the files of every officer that ever worked for the ESPD.”
In a separate motion, Puckett’s attorneys are asking that two former ESPD police chiefs, Mitchell Tavera and Jaime Bermudez, be allowed to answer questions posed to them during depositions of whether they were relying on anything the city’s lawyer told them as the basis for their testimony. In each case, the city’s attorney instructed the ex-chiefs to not answer, citing attorney-client privilege, according to Puckett’s lawyers’ pleadings.
“The questions did not ask for the substance of any privileged communication; they merely sought to determine whether the witnesses’ testimony was based on communications with counsel,” the Puckett attorneys further state in their court papers.