Taking Shots at the Sheriff
Four challengers say Baca's budgeting may be exacerbating departmental shortfalls
By Perry Crowe
The news out of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has been bleak recently - a rolling series of bloody race riots at the county's Pitchess prison, serious budget struggles, and difficulty even finding deputies to hire - and that seems like an opportunity for the four challengers who have stepped up to oppose Sheriff Lee Baca in the upcoming June 6 election. Baca was reelected to his second term by a landslide in 2002, and has always enjoyed popular support, but the department is facing significant challenges, and those who would seek to surplant him say the department has drifted far off course.
One ex-deputy, who chose not to use his name, explains how budget choices have depressed department morale. At 21, he joined the LASD, chomping at the bit to bust the bad guys. His first assignment, like that of every new deputy, was in the prison system, where he expected to spend 18 months to two years. But custody duty has now been extended to five, six, even seven years.
"Those are perishable skills you learn at the academy," the former deputy says, "and then you come out and work custody forever and the skills are wasted."
The custody bottleneck is part of the department's current staffing crisis, which leaves new deputies languishing at the prisons while they await the next set of rookies to replace them. The replenishment machine shut down in 2003-04 when current sheriff, Lee Baca, shuttered the department's entire hiring process and gained absolutely no new deputies in order to prevent costs to a department facing $200 million in budget cuts. Beyond the hiring freeze, there was also reportedly an unwritten policy of "If you want to go, we won't stop you," for existing deputies. As a result, the department now has some 1,200 vacant sworn personnel positions.
Yet, as manpower dwindled, the department took on more work, either in the form of federal grants for Baca's Community Partnership Programs (commonly known as CPPs or "Cops") or taking state prisoners into the county jail system.
While such actions did bring money into the department, they only stretched the existing workforce over the vacancies, frequently "drafting" on-shift deputies into overtime. At Pitchess Detention Center, site of the riots in February, clusters of mobile homes sit in the parking lot where deputies crash between 16-hour shifts, spending days away from their families.
Ken Masse, a former captain of Court Services who retired in March 2005 to prepare his campaign for this June's sheriff's election, suggests so much overtime can deteriorate a deputy's "command presence." The exhausted deputies must be on alert at all times, while inmates get all the rest they want and can "riot on schedule," says Masse.
In addition to the fatality at Pitchess, there have been four other inmate murders in the past 18 months within the L.A. county prison system. Steve Whitmore, spokesman for Sheriff Baca, characterizes the unrest as an "extension of what's going on between a couple of rival gangs in South Los Angeles," and also refers to an investigation by the Office of Independent Review (a group partially created by Baca) which suggests "the vast majority of the inmates actually faked that they were fighting ... so they would not face retribution [from their own race/gang after the disturbance]."
Ray Leyva, a captain at Pitchess' North Facility and candidate for sheriff, admits there was some "pretty good shadow-boxing" going on, but says it was "not a substantial amount." Leyva, however, sees the trouble at Pitchess more as a result of the county's current prison set-up. Many prisons were created with the misdemeanor criminals of 20 years ago in mind, but today's criminals are increasingly violent. Pitchess uses "dorm-style" housing where 30-100 prisoners are bunked in a single room, sometimes creating a deputy-to-inmate ratio of 1-to-70.
Leyva says another problem is Baca's "early-release" (sometimes derisively known as "catch-and-release") program whereby some prisoners serve as little as three days on a 90-day sentence, supposedly due to a lack of money or staffing for proper incarceration. Beyond undermining the deterrence attributed to prison by lessening punishments, the early-release program also culls the prison population to its most violent, sending lesser criminals out to make room for more dangerous convictions, leaving the county's prison population comprised of approximately 91 percent felons.
Another reason for the manpower shortage in the department, candidates say, is the aforementioned CP programs. In order to staff CPP positions, sworn personnel are taken off patrol and assigned to a CPP (which include everything from community policing programs to Christmas tree giveaways, to programs for the homeless to "mature drivers' training courses"), thereby creating another vacancy.
"It's like a shell game we're playing," says Leyva, "Hiding the bodies just to keep the money coming."
Leyva agrees the community-oriented programs themselves are great, but suggests the department needs to realistically assess the department's financial situation and legal obligation. The law mandates the sheriff's department to cover three areas: court security, prison security, and law enforcement in the county's unincorporated areas and contract cities. With CPPs falling outside that mandate and a budgetary crisis, why, Leyva wonders, are they kept around while the department's core duties suffer?
"The Department of Public Social Services is eventually going to have an opening and maybe we should move [Baca] over there," he wryly suggests.
The frustrations with the current state of the sheriff's department have also created an additional staffing problem. Historically, 70 percent of the sheriff's department's employees, both sworn and civilian, come from recruitment within the department as deputies recommend their friends and relatives. Masse says that percentage has all but dried up in recent years, and some deputies even engage in "anti-recruiting." As a result, when the department began hiring again in 2004-05, it could only manage 300 new hires when a normal year would net at least 500-600.
That said, some improvements seem to be on the horizon. After two and a half years without a pay increase, which saw deputies leaving the department for greener law enforcement pastures, ALADS (the deputies' union) enacted a "re-opener" clause in its labor contract, which allowed for renegotiations to address recruitment or retainment issues. As a result, the union secured an 18.5 percent pay raise over the next 28 months.
In addition, the LASD announced the transfer of high-security prisoners to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, which offers two-, three-, or four-man cells and was originally designed for high-security prisoners, but has been used to house female prisoners and a mental health ward. On Monday, Baca called for $300 million to reopen the dilapidated original home of the female prisoners, the Sybil Brand facility in Monterey Park.
But while these changes may help the situation, they're a long time coming.
"Why is it eight years in office [Baca] comes up with a jail solution?" wonders sheriff candidate Don Meredith, a lieutenant with the Glendale Police Department, a county probations officer, and a graduate of the FBI National Academy. "Why wait until an election year?"
Another candidate and self-described underdog, Sergeant Paul L. Jernigan Jr., who joined the department at age 15 as an L.A. County Sheriff's Explorer, describes Sheriff Baca thusly: "He's in a valley surrounded by mountains and says he can see the other side, but doesn't know how to get there."
Whitmore responds to opponents' criticisms of Baca with the detachment that has come to be associated with the department's leadership: "Whenever people who are running for an office say things, it is just a way to get their names in the paper."
But better that way, these candidates say, than by responding to a remarkable season of unrest and death in the prison system happening on your watch. Look for this race to heat up between now and June.Published: 03/16/2006
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