The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has settled a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice alleging the agency was deliberately delaying law-abiding Californians from exercising their constitutional right to carry concealed handguns in public for self-defense.
The DOJ sued the department last year, claiming eligible citizens were having extreme difficulty obtaining Concealed Carry Weapons permits from the sheriff’s department, not through outright refusal, “but through a deliberate pattern of unconscionable delay.”
Quoting data provided by the sheriff’s department about more than 8,000 concealed carry permit applications and renewal applications received between January 2024 and March 2025, the DOJ claimed in the lawsuit that it took an average of nearly a year for the LASD to schedule interviews to approve or advance the applications.
As a result, the department issued only two CCW permits during the period, according to the DOJ.
“The Justice Department supports our law enforcement partners,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement Thursday announcing the settlement. “The sheriff acknowledged the problem and devoted substantial additional resources, including new processing software and additional personnel, to cutting waiting times dramatically. We applaud their efforts and are happy to be able to bring this litigation to a successful conclusion.”
The DOJ said in its statement that “the Second Amendment requires law enforcement to have objective standards for issuing carry permits and to issue those permits without imposing lengthy delays on applicants.”
The sheriff’s department last year disputed the severity of delays in permit processing.
“Despite significant staffing shortages, we have successfully approved more than 19,000 CCW applications since 2020,” the department contended last year. “Year to date in 2025, we have issued more than 5,000 CCW permits, including 2,722 new applications.”
At the start of the DOJ probe, according to the LASD, federal investigators requested data from various stages of the CCW application process, and at the time the sheriff’s department was in the early stages of transitioning from a manual, paper-based CCW tracking system to a new online platform that streamlines application processing.
The upgrade, implemented in May 2023, was part of broader efforts to improve efficiency, LASD officials said.