City asks judge to uphold suspension and misconduct findings against sergeant

The city of Los Angeles is asking a judge to uphold a Los Angeles police sergeant’s three-day suspension for alleged misconduct, which included kissing a female department employee during an off-duty fundraiser for a San Diego County casino in 2019.

In his petition in Los Angeles Superior Court, Sergeant Darcy French is asking a judge to overturn the Board of Rights’ June 2023 decision that supported the allegation against the sergeant, which was later signed by then-Police Chief Michel Moore, who is also named in the lawsuit.

According to court documents filed by French’s attorneys, the Board of Rights panel found French guilty in June 2023 of the kissing charge as well as a second count alleging she made “multiple inappropriate comments toward department employees.”

But in court documents filed Friday, prosecutors said French’s sentence recognized the illegality of the sergeant’s actions and imposed an appropriate punishment.

“(French) was a supervisor at the time of the incident and should have known better and behaved better,” prosecutors noted in their court filings, pointing out that the sergeant was an assistant guard commander who was responsible for arrests and operations in the Southeast Division.

French said she did not kiss the subordinate gang enforcement officer on the lips, but may have kissed him on the cheek, as she said was common with many officers, prosecutors said.

But despite French’s denial, the evidence suggests that she did indeed kiss the officer on the lips. This is what the prosecution says. The court documents go on to say that another sergeant intervened and separated the two, “because he instinctively knew that such an expression of sexual interest was inappropriate and would be viewed as improper conduct by a police officer and superior.”

The second sergeant also believed French was drunk and said she made inappropriate hostile comments to him on the bus ride back to Los Angeles, prosecutors said. Although the officers were off-duty, superiors are expected to conduct themselves professionally, prosecutors further argue in their briefs.

But according to French’s motion, French’s suspension and findings of misconduct were not actually supported by evidence. The Board of Rights also failed to recognize that the statute of limitations had been violated, the motion states.

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