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LAPD detective to be fired over training session rant, his lawyer says

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A veteran Los Angeles police detective who admitted making inappropriate comments in an expletive-laden rant at a training session will be fired by police Chief Charlie Beck, the detective’s attorney said Wednesday.

Attorney Ira Salzman said he was notified by the department that Beck had signed paperwork to fire his client, Frank Lyga.

A disciplinary panel recommended that Lyga be fired for his controversial remarks. Salzman said a department official told him that the chief signed the termination notice Tuesday, the same day that Salzman said he participated in a conference call with the three-member Board of Rights panel.

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The lawyer said he has not had a chance yet to file a letter in Lyga’s defense.

“This is terribly unfair,” he said.

LAPD officials said no decision is official until the police commission receives it.

During a training lecture last November, Lyga claimed that he drove his Jeep in the carpool lane at 100 mph, called a prominent black civil rights attorney an “ewok,” quipped that a female LAPD captain had been “swapped around a bunch of times” and described a lieutenant as a “moron.”

Then he recalled his fatal 1997 shooting of a fellow officer, an incident that sparked racial tensions within the department because Lyga is white and the slain officer was black.

“I could have killed a whole truckload of them, and I would have been happy doing it,” Lyga recounted telling an attorney representing the officer’s family.

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Salzman has said that Lyga later explained that he should have said he would have shot anybody who was trying to kill him.

The detective has admitted that his comments were inappropriate but denied they were racist.

The handling of Lyga’s case is seen as a test for Beck, who earlier this year was criticized after he decided to suspend but not fire Officer Shaun Hillmann, who was caught on tape uttering a racial slur outside a Norco bar and later denied it to his supervisors. Critics said Hillmann got preferential treatment because his father and uncle worked for the LAPD.

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The Board of Rights panel had recommended that Hillmann be fired.

For more crime news, follow @jackfleonard and @lacrimes.

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