A former Los Angeles Police Department officer whose indictment on a murder charge stemming from the 2015 shooting of an unarmed man in Venice was dismissed earlier this year pleaded not guilty Monday to the same charge included in a new indictment.
The new indictment of Clifford Proctor, 61, was handed down by a grand jury Aug. 18 and unsealed Monday, according to the District Attorney’s Office. The earlier indictment of Proctor was dismissed in June by a judge who said a special prosecutor had failed to present the grand jury with “exculpatory evidence” in the case.
The murder charge stems from the May 5, 2015, shooting of Brendon Glenn, 29, 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.
Proctor, who is free on bond, is due back in court Friday in downtown Los Angeles for a pretrial hearing. His attorney has insisted the shooting was justified.
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“While a judge earlier this summer granted a defense motion to dismiss a prior indictment, we strongly believe there is more than sufficient evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant maliciously shot and killed Brendon Glenn,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman said in a statement.
“This case was meticulously analyzed by two of my predecessors, and they came to different conclusions. I brought in Michael Gennaco, one of the nation’s leading experts in officer-involved shootings and police use of force, who examined all the evidence, presented the case to the grand jury and will represent the people in the proceedings after that grand jury returned its indictment charging former LAPD Officer Proctor with second-degree murder.
“Mr. Proctor’s ill-fated decision to shoot and kill Mr. Glenn without any justification is evidence that he acted with conscious disregard for human life, an element needed for a finding of implied malice second-degree murder.”
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The new indictment is the latest twist in a legal odyssey for Proctor.
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.
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.
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 Lawrence Middleton as a special prosecutor to reopen investigations into four police shootings in which Lacey declined to file charges, including the Proctor case.
Proctor was subsequently indicted and arrested in 2024.
In a court filing, new Special Prosecutor Michael Gennaco and Deputy District Attorney Daniel Baker maintained there was “evidence introduced that defendant killed Mr. Glenn out of anger, frustration and impatience, all unlawful reasons supporting a second-degree murder charge.”
“From the outset of the encounter with Mr. Glenn, defendant unnecessarily escalated the situation when he communicated a profanity-laced threat to shoot defendant’s dog, already demonstrating anger even as the encounter was just beginning,” Gennaco and Baker wrote in their opposition to the defense’s motion that sought dismissal of the indictment. “… The special prosecutor fulfilled his obligation to present potential exculpatory evidence to the grand jury by presenting a lengthy memorandum prepared during the initial criminal review which concluded that the officer-involved shooting was justified, as well as additional arguably exculpatory information such as Mr. Glenn’s criminal history and the complete DNA analysis.”
In June, however, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen granted the defense motion to dismiss the case, finding that Middleton had failed to present the grand jury with “exculpatory evidence.”
“That’s good enough to dismiss this matter,” the judge said, adding that he also concluded after multiple viewings of video footage that it couldn’t be shown that Proctor had “malice of any sort.”
The city of Los Angeles previously paid $4 million to settle wrongful-death lawsuits filed by Glenn’s relatives.
V. James DeSimone, an attorney for the Glenn family, said in a statement Monday the family is hopeful for a conviction in the case.
“This shooting will look as bad to a jury 11 years later as it did when LAPD Chief Beck called for a criminal prosecution in 2015,” DeSimone said. “It is way past time for Officer Proctor to be charged for the murder of Brendon Glenn.
“Our philosophy is that justice delayed is still justice,” he said.