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A Los Angeles Police Department sergeant died on Sunday following a battle with COVID-19, the LAPD reported. 22-year veteran Sgt. Fred Cueto worked at LAPD’s Foothill station, the Police Department reported. Cueto is the second sworn officer and the third LAPD employee to die from the coronavirus since March. “As we mourn the loss of one of our own, please keep his family in your thoughts and prayers tonight,” said LAPD Chief Michel Moore on Twitter. According to statistics released Thursday, 929 LAPD employees have tested positive for the coronavirus. As of Thursday, 258 LAPD employees were self-isolating at home and recovering due to exposure, while 665 employees had returned to work.

Officers were searching a Pacoima neighborhood Saturday night after someone fired shots that shattered the windshield of a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car. The shooting occurred at 7:10 p.m. near Osborne Street and Osborne Place, said a desk officer at the LAPD Operations Center. Neither of the two officers inside the patrol car were injured, he said. At 10:45 p.m. Saturday, the search remained ongoing.

A new budget proposal suggests cutting 1,800 city jobs, including 951 sworn police officers from LAPD. LAPD Officer Robert Harris, a director on the Board of the Los Angeles Police Protective League shared his thoughts about the proposal. "I think it's appalling and disappointing to see that what city council has done to propose such mass layoffs, simply to pad their political slush funds and I think it puts the communities that we serve in jeopardy, especially in light of the surge of violent crime that has been happening throughout the city," said Harris. Harris talked about the cuts the Los Angeles Police Department is already facing. "We lost $150 million that had some very real impacts to the department, some tangible things that you can point to, of which we're losing 250 officers. Chief [Michel Moore] has already looked throughout the department and has been reassigning officers from critical assignments and specialized units back to patrol because we simply don't have the manpower to do that," said Harris. Harris said cutting more than 900 officers would lead to increased response times for emergency calls, longer delays to investigate cases and fewer officers to patrol the streets.

Saturday marked the eighth year of the gun buyback program held by Mayor Garcetti’s office and run by the LAPD. The LAPD uses the annual ”Gun Buy Back” program to help reduce gun violence in the city and rally the community around the drive to take more guns off the streets and improve security in communities. “Reducing the number of shooting victims in Los Angeles has never been more important to the safety of all Angelenos,” Chief Michel Moore said. “Every gun recovered in this ‘Buy Back’ program means one less weapon that can be used to inflict harm.” At the buyback drive-thru on Saturday, Moore said that the program was needed this year more than ever. “We’ve seen an increase in gun violence this year,” he said. “We’ve seen an increase in guns being stolen from homes…” In Los Angeles, gun violence has increased by 29% compared to last year, with 311 lives lost. More than 1,100 have been shot as a result of gun violence. Moore also said that the alarming rise in recent crime is part of why he believes that the city’s budget cuts cannot solely come from his department. “Those types of cuts are beyond devastation,” he said. “It would destroy public safety in this city. Those are numbers we’ve had in staffing that go back more than 25 years when homicides were 600 in a year.”

Two men were shot, one fatally, while attending a party at a parking lot on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, a police officer said Sunday. With details still sketchy, authorities said the shooting occurred at a parking lot in the area of 10th Street and Central Avenue at 11:58 p.m. Saturday, where an unknown suspect fired multiple rounds, striking a 27-year- old man and a 36-year-old man, said Officer Melissa Podany of the LAPD's Media Relations Section. Paramedics rushed both victims to area hospitals, where the 27-year- old man later died from his gunshot wounds, Podany said. The condition of the 36-year-old man was not known.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is seeking the public’s help in identifying two men who allegedly fired, unprovoked, at a deputy on patrol in Altadena on Friday. The men, described as being in their 20s, fired multiple times at the deputy while she sat in her marked patrol vehicle near Fair Oaks Avenue and Calaveras Street, sheriff’s officials said Friday afternoon. She was not struck. Anyone with information about the shooting can contact the Altadena sheriff’s station at (626) 798-1131.

One person was arrested Sunday during the 13th consecutive day of demonstrations outside Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's official residence in an attempt to persuade President-elect Joe Biden to not appoint Garcetti to his cabinet. At about 10:30 a.m., while officers were in “crowd management mode,” a person began using a bullhorn, which is a violation, and the sound exceeded more than 200 feet, which is another violation, said Officer Melissa Podany of the Los Angeles Police Department's Media Relations Section. A neighbor complained of the noise, which was yet another violation, Podany said. “Four officers attempted to make an arrest for the above violations, when the crowd moved in on the officers, punching and kicking them, which resulted in an ‘officer needs help’ call,” she said. “At that time, an unlawful assembly was declared.” The person with the bullhorn ran away and another person was arrested on suspicion of lynching, she said. California law defines “lynching” as the crime of removing someone from the lawful custody of a peace officer by means of a riot, according to California Penal Code 405a.

One person was shot and killed near a bike path in North Hollywood on Friday night. The incident happened on the corner of Biloxi Avenue and Margate Street just before 8 p.m. Witnesses said they heard five or six shots in the area. The victim was declared dead at the scene. No suspect information was immediately available, and the circumstances surrounding the shooting remain under investigation.

Police have released surveillance video in hopes of finding the driver who they say struck and severely injured an 82-year-old man in a hit-and-run collision in Boyle Heights Friday. The victim was riding his travel scooter, crossing on Mott Street in a marked crosswalk around 10:35 a.m., when a car hit him, according to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Traffic Division. The vehicle, which investigators believe to be a silver or gray Mazda CX-7, had turned left onto east Whittier Boulevard from south Mott Street when it struck him, knocking him off his travel scooter onto the asphalt, police said. The male driver of the Mazda kept going east on Whittier Boulevard, dragging the travel scooter behind him. The Mazda then stopped on Orme Avenue, where someone approached and helped dislodge the scooter from underneath the car, “unaware of the collision,” LAPD said. The surveillance footage released Saturday night shows the driver then left the area, having not rendered aid to the injured 82-year-old man, according to police.

LAPD was in pursuit of a stolen vehicle near the neighborhood of Highland Park Saturday night around 7:53 p.m. The stolen vehicle stayed within the neighborhood of Highland Park throughout the chase. He drove to Eagle Rock, but then immediately turned back around to the streets of York and Figueroa. The vehicle that appeared to be a white sedan, ran multiple red lights and even came close to hitting a pedestrian crossing an intersection. After driving at fast speeds and over speed bumps, the vehicle lost its tires one by one, until he was left with only the right front tire. With sparks igniting on the pavement due to the exposed rims, the vehicle was forced to slow down. LAPD then took the opportunity to close in on the car and end the pursuit with a pit maneuver. The chase concluded with the vehicle spinning to a halt and the driver and passenger taken into custody.

A Long Beach man was sentenced to death Friday for the 2010 murder of 17-year-old Norma Lopez as she walked from school to a friend’s house in Moreno Valley. Jesse Perez Torres, 44, was found guilty on March 13, 2019, of one count of first-degree murder and jurors found the special circumstance of murder during the commission of a felony, in this case kidnapping, to be true. A week later, the same jurors determined that Torres should be sentenced to death. On Friday, Judge Bernard Schwartz affirmed the jury’s decision and sentenced Torres to death. Norma was kidnapped on July 15, 2010, as she walked from summer school at Valley View High School in Moreno Valley to a friend’s house. Five days later, her body was found in a dirt field about three miles away. Torres was later identified as the suspect and was charged in October 2011 by the Riverside District Attorney's Office with Norma’s murder. At the time of the crime, Torres lived in the Moreno Valley neighborhood where the murder and kidnapping happened.

The growing popularity of facial recognition among local law enforcement in Minnesota has renewed public debate about how, when and why the powerful technology is deployed. Since 2018, police have run nearly 1,000 searches through the Hennepin County Sheriff’s office’s facial recognition system, with more than half of those searches coming this year alone, according to new county figures. And while the Twin Cities still lags behind other jurisdictions in using the technology, its increasing use here has caught the attention of civil liberties advocates, who say it’s a threat to privacy and discriminatory. The county records also reveal that the Minneapolis Police Department was using the technology in 2018, when a spokeswoman denied that was happening. The county figures offer a glimpse into the scope of police use of the technology, which employs machine learning algorithms to automatically detect human faces from surveillance cameras, social media and other sources against a countywide mug shot database.

Authorities Sunday said Los Angeles County has shattered its previous record, reporting its highest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in a single day. The number of confirmed cases for the county rose to 10,528, according to the Los Angeles Department of Public Health. Of those, the county reported 23 new deaths. Additionally, there was an all-time high of 2,855 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, of which 23 percent were in the ICU, officials said. The staggering numbers came with the entire Southern California region now under sweeping new health restrictions intended to stem the rapidly increasing number of hospitalizations and prevent intensive care units from being stretched to the breaking point. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “regional stay-at-home” order took effect at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, triggered when intensive-care unit bed availability remained below 15% in the 11-county Southern California region after Saturday’s daily update, according to the California Department of Public Health.

With much of California beginning a stay-at-home order Sunday night, it’s becoming clear that the COVID-19 surge is likely to get worse before it gets better. Average daily coronavirus cases have jumped sixfold since early October; hospitalizations have quadrupled since late October; and average daily deaths have nearly tripled in just the last month. Hospitalizations and daily deaths are expected to rise. It can take two weeks after someone is diagnosed with the coronavirus to get sick enough to require hospitalization, and seven to 10 more days for them to be admitted into the intensive care unit. Officials have feared that the Thanksgiving holiday weekend caused more spread, and those infections will likely continue to be seen in the next week. Los Angeles County hit more than 9,000 new cases Saturday, a sign the holiday made things worse.

The pandemic that has killed nearly 20,000 Californians and brought a once-booming economy to its knees entered a treacherous phase Sunday as much of the state began a new stay-at-home order and coronavirus cases soared to unprecedented highs that show no signs of slowing down. The Department of Public Health in Los Angeles County, a hot spot of the coronavirus in California, reported more than 10,500 new cases on Sunday, a staggering number for a single day that underscores fears that the virus spread rapidly during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 neared 3,000 — and L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that number could rise dramatically in the next few weeks as the full toll of the holiday comes into view. This was the seventh consecutive day of record-breaking COVID-19 hospitalizations in L.A. County, and more than quadruple the number from early October, when there were about 700 hospitalized people with the disease.