Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department | Los Angeles County Sheriff Department

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD), sometimes referred to as the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office (LASO), is a local county law enforcement agency that serves Los Angeles County, California. It is the fourth largest local policing agency in the United States, with the New York City Police Department being the first, followed by Chicago Police Department and then the Los Angeles Police Department.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is the largest sheriff's department in the world, and provides general-service law enforcement to unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, serving as the equivalent of the county police for unincorporated areas of the county, as well as incorporated cities within the county who have contracted with the agency for law-enforcement services (known as "contract cities"). Forty-two of the county's 88 municipalities contract with the Sheriff’s Department to provide local police protection. These cities, range in population from 800 to 177,000, and in size from 1 to 100 square miles.

The Sheriff's Department also holds primary jurisdiction over facilities operated by Los Angeles County, such as local parks, marinas and government buildings; provides bailiff service for the Superior Court of Los Angeles County; operates the county jail system; and provides services, such as crime laboratories, homicide investigations, and academy training, to smaller law enforcement agencies within the county.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is also the second largest transit police force in the nation, aside from the NYPD, through policing contracts of the Metro trains and buses of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Metrolink. Furthermore, with policing contracts with nine campuses of the Los Angeles Community College and Lancaster Community College District, the LASD is the largest community policing agency in the United States. The department's headquarters are in Monterey Park.

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“In the great department store of life, baseball is the toy department.”
—Los Angeles Sportscaster. quoted in Independent Magazine (London, Sept. 28, 1991)

“... when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Women’s Wear Daily at least makes me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I haven’t read or learned or seen anything at all.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)

“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)

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Editor: Oh, county treasurer or something like that.
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Editor: They say he’s an honest man.”
—Robert Rossen (1908–1966)

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—Robert M. Fresco. Jack Arnold. Sheriff Jack Andrews (Nestor Paiva)

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—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)