Who Should Police the Police?

In 1994, Lisa Simpson -- daughter of Homer, sister of Bart -- posed the question that continues to plague law enforcement: "If you're the police, who will police the police?"

Homer answered, "I dunno; Coast Guard?"

Amidst allegations of deputy-on-inmate abuse at LA County jails, LA County Sheriff Lee Baca's answer was inexplicably worse than Homer's: "We police ourselves."

There's a basic structural problem here that Baca doesn't see. Without an external and independent body overseeing the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, how can people be sure that it handles deputy misconduct properly? They can't. They simply have to trust the sheriff.

Of course, Baca can and does point to the Office of Independent Review (OIR), the civilian oversight group that reviews the investigations into the use of force that the Sheriff's Department is supposed to conduct. But despite its name, the OIR doesn't conduct an independent review. The quality of its investigation is dependent on the original Sheriff's Department investigations into use of force.

Those original investigations are flawed at best. A recent OIR report too often found that the Sheriff's Department investigations are "lackluster, sometimes slanted, and insufficiently thorough." It also noted that when deputies misrepresent their own actions or those of inmates, they can "get away" with abuse of inmates. Its preliminary review of our jails report suggested that more deputies are abusing inmates and getting away with it.

Because the OIR just reviews the Sheriff's Department's investigations, it can't improve on the original. Garbage in, garbage out.

The OIR didn't talk to Gordon Grbavac, who was brutally assaulted by deputies and forced to say on camera that he caused his own injuries.

And the OIR never interviewed volunteer jails tutor Scott Budnick, who saw so many disturbing incidents of deputy-on-inmate abuse that he stopped volunteering at Men's Central Jail. He reported the abuse, but the Sheriff's Department never interviewed him. Because the Sheriff's Department never interviewed Mr. Budnick, the OIR likely never even knew he was a witness to abuse.

Mr. Budnick's case isn't special -- to our knowledge the OIR has never questioned anyone the Sheriff's Department had omitted from its investigation.

Rather than reassure the public, Baca actually highlighted the lack of accountability. In light of our report and extensive media coverage of the jails abuses, it's clear that the jails need drastically improved oversight. Angelenos deserve far better than "We police ourselves." We deserve to know that someone is assessing Sheriff's Department policy, training, leadership, supervision. We deserve to have someone police the police.

 

Comments

[cityprole]

11:41 AM on 10/23/2011

When I lived in LA (Hollywood, actually) in the 60's and early 70's, the corruption of the force was an open joke..not that funny to victims, and there were many, including me.
I once was arrested and held for hours because these rocket scientists thought i was a 5'7" fifteen-year old runaway (I was 19 and almost 6 feet tall). The parents who thought I was their long-lost daughter flew in from Arizona..I felt so sorry for them!
Constant harassment on the street, shakedowns wherever you went, etc etc. meanwhile lots of real criminal activity and violence going on..
Cops always seem to prefer the easy target..why take a chance of getting into some sort of altercation, when a young woman walking down a street can be targeted for whatever you dream up and does not present the possibility of violence or hassle?
Abuse of the unprotected hasn't changed much, I see..
The more things change in LA, the more they stay the same..

[CannabisRex]

03:23 PM on 10/20/2011

When we pick up a paper and read that abusive jailers and cops are disappearing from the face of the earth, then we may see some changes. Nothing short of " direct action" events will ever make these mad dog cops treat people like human beings and stop the abuse. I guarantee you that if the chat around the donut box was about how strange it is that so many brutal pals of theirs are simply GONE, never to be seen again, they can assume that they moved away without notice, or that perhaps someone was insuring that the worst offenders were being eliminated from their positions of authority in the only way that insures no further abuses, and then they would think twice about harming the inmates they are sworn to protect.

I for one will applaud the news.

[Clamdip LobsterClaws]

12:15 AM on 10/19/2011

Corruption with a capital "C". Thumbs up the LAPD.

[dbrett480]

11:01 PM on 10/18/2011

Most of the problems dealing with corruption and deputies engaging in illegal activity stems not from poor oversight, but from a poor backgrounds screening process. Examine the backgrounds process and fix that.

[enanito5]

12:36 AM on 10/20/2011

Come on Mr. Cop, you are not willing to put the blame where it justly belongs, with Mr. Baca. He's been in charge for way too long and apparently confortably and intentionally oblivious to all the criminal shenanigans that are by now part of the LA County Sheriff's culture. Yes, a better backgrounds screening process is likely to filter out some really bad apples, but when a criminal culture permiates any department then only a comple shake down from the top down is a MUST. And the "3000 Boys" gang is not the first group of identifiable Sheriff personnel that have been uncovered and sadly it won't be the last. I believe that the undersheriff himself, Tanaka, has a gang tattoo from his days on patrol. So can anybody excuse this type of criminal behaviour? Did not think so.

[Craig Bovia]

12:18 PM on 10/20/2011

Hey dbrett, which branch of government is paying your salary? Your answer is: Leadership isn't the problems, it's those dang screeners.
The abusive behavior going on today has been happening for decades. Every now and then, someone shines a light on it, which gives us the mis-guided impression that it just started.
Time for competent and responsible leadership.

[dbrett480]

06:03 PM on 10/20/2011

I'm not saying leadership isn't the problem. I am saying the heart of the issue rests in the backgrounds process. Law enforcement agencies that are given very high recruiting goals will often sacrifice quality for quantity. This happens because law enforcement agencies are so understaffed, that they need to hire tons more personnel to provide a minimum level of public service. So instead of continuously hiring a smaller amount of deputies to make up for attrition, the department goes years without hiring anyone and then hires a ton of people (some of whom should never wear a badge).

My comment was intended not to defend the leadership; as the elected officials are the ones that set the budget for the Sheriff's department, but to say that the other "reforms" are meaningless if the department hires from the bottom of the barrel.

[bad spelling grammar]

07:51 PM on 10/18/2011

Internal Affairs!!!!!

[Carmen Slade]

06:21 PM on 10/18/2011

You gotta figure, when a sheriff supports fraudulent drug rehabs and bogus literacy programs from the blatantly abusive and psychotic "church" of Scientology, something's wrong.

Baca likes being invited to parties at B-list Scientologist actors' homes, and riding on the cult float in the Hollywood Christmas Parade.

You can tell a person's character by the company he keeps.

[cityprole]

11:43 AM on 10/23/2011

fanned and faved! Reminds me of Darrel Gates, another sheriff who enjoyed the crumbs of the rich, while abusing the poor..

[Buakaw Por Pramuk]

01:10 PM on 10/18/2011

"Without an external and independent body overseeing the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, how can people be sure that it handles deputy misconduct properly? They can't. They simply have to trust the sheriff."

Great point. Fact is police in America are largely unaccountable. You might be interested in Huffpo writer Radey Balko's blog: http://www.theagitator.com/

It's probably the best most well documented examples of our completely out of control domestic police online.