LOS ANGELES – A former Los Angeles Police Department officer who fatally shot an unarmed homeless man in Venice in 2015 pleaded not guilty Friday to a murder charge.
Clifford Proctor, 60, was indicted last year on the charge, which includes allegations of causing great bodily injury and use of a deadly weapon. The case remained on hold, however, until Oct. 16, when Proctor — who had apparently been living abroad — was arrested when he disembarked a plane at Los Angeles International Airport.
Proctor appeared in a downtown courtroom Friday morning and pleaded not guilty to the charge. He remains jailed in lieu of $2 million bail.
Proctor fatally shot Brendon Glenn, 29, on May 5, 2015, following an apparent dispute that occurred between Glenn and a bar bouncer just steps away from Venice Beach boardwalk.
Proctor said at the time he thought Glenn was reaching for his partner’s gun. LAPD investigators concluded that Glenn was on his stomach when Proctor stepped back and fired twice, hitting Glenn in the back. Glenn’s death sparked a series of community protests and demands that the officer be charged with a crime.
In March 2018, then-District Attorney Jackie Lacey announced that her office would not pursue any charges against Proctor, citing “insufficient evidence,” even though then-LAPD Chief Charlie Beck had recommended that the officer be prosecuted.
In April 2016, the Los Angeles Police Commission ruled the shooting was unjustified. Beck wrote in a report to the commission that there was no evidence to independently show there was a “perception that a deadly threat was present.” Beck had recommended that Lacey file charges against Proctor, calling the shooting a “criminal act.”
Shortly after George Gascón became district attorney in 2020, he hired a special prosecutor to reopen investigations into four police shootings in which Lacey declined to file charges, including the Proctor case.
According to court records, Proctor was indicted in September of 2024.
NBC4 reported that Proctor fled the country following his indictment, possibly spending the last year in Trinidad.
Following Proctor’s arraignment Friday morning, his attorney, Anthony Garcia, told the Los Angeles Times he did not want to comment on the case, but he questioned the timing of the charge — coming nearly a decade after the shooting.
The original investigation into the shooting during Lacey’s administration included officer body-camera footage, surveillance videos, statements from 10 civilian eyewitnesses, DNA analysis and the “opinion of a nationally recognized use-of-force expert,” Lacey said at the time.
The use-of-force expert concluded that “Proctor’s actions as seen on the surveillance video were consistent with his having observed a threat posed by Glenn,” according to an 83-page memorandum released at the time by the District Attorney’s Office on the investigation into the shooting.
Glenn — who was “given multiple opportunities to leave the location” and “chose to be confrontational and aggressive with civilians and the officers” — had 18 arrests, 12 convictions and seven pending cases, along with multiple bench warrants for failure to appear in court, and toxicological testing determined that his blood contained both alcohol and marijuana at the time of the death, according to the memorandum.
“A thorough review of the law and the evidence in this matter leads to the conclusion that there is insufficient evidence to prove that Proctor’s use of deadly force in the altercation with Glenn on May 5, 2015, was not justified,” according to the memorandum. The report noted that while Proctor’s actions were found to violate LAPD policy, the “standard of proof used in administrative proceedings is not the standard of proof used in criminal trials.”
Lacey noted that portions of the surveillance video played an important role in the decision not to file charges, and that snippets from the video were embedded into the 83-page decision to allow a “window into the evidence that we considered in this case.”
She said her office also considered DNA evidence that showed Glenn could not be excluded as a possible contributor to a mixed DNA sample from the holster of Proctor’s partner.
The city of Los Angeles paid $4 million to settle wrongful-death lawsuits filed by Glenn’s relatives.
