Cerise Castle

Career

Castle started out as an associate producer for Vice News Tonight before moving to KCRW as a producer in 2020. While reporting on a George Floyd protest in Los Angeles that May, she was hit by a rubber bullet fired by the LAPD. During her recovery, she spent half a year looking into deputy gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. She took a buyout from KCRW in February 2021, saying on Twitter and in an LA Podcast interview that she had faced racist microaggressions while working there.

The following month, Knock LA published her series “A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.” Her reporting claimed that several gangs are active in the department and that gang members had killed 19 men of color in the Los Angeles area. A month after the series came out, she was detained at an LACSD press conference while covering it. A year later, the city’s civilian oversight board launched an investigation into the deputy gangs.

The Sheriff’s Department targeted her for surveillance, and she said she received death threats because of her reporting. In 2022, she won the American Journalism Online Award for Best Use of Public Records and the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award for the series. In 2023, she received the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, an award for freelance journalists. She has freelanced for the Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Times, LA Magazine, and several podcasts.

Her freelance work broke the story of the Citizen app misidentifying an arson suspect. Her reporting has been cited by Newsweek, LA Weekly, and The Ringer. In late February 2023, it was announced that she had signed with CAA. In March 2024, she became a staff writer for Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication based in California.