Editorial: What does Tuesday’s election mean for L.A. County?

The election season that culminated in Tuesday’s vote for three new Los Angeles County leaders and in an overhaul of county government may have begun on the day in 2012 when Sheriff Lee Baca testified before the citizens commission that was examining abuse of inmates in county jails.

How do we hold you accountable, the sheriff was asked, for lackadaisical oversight and brutal conduct by jail deputies? His answer: “Don’t elect me.”

The comment was taken by many as an expression of defiance or arrogance, and perhaps in part it was, but it was also Baca’s statement about the relationship between himself and Los Angeles County voters, at least as he understood it. The sheriff, in his view, with no formal oversight except the kind that comes every four years at the ballot box, answers to no one but the voters and his own conscience.

The experience of the last several years reminds the 10 million Los Angeles County residents and their handful of elected officials that it is not that simple. Politicians can stay in office for years, one term after another, and repeated reelection does not by itself certify that they are pursuing the best interests of the public. Accountability from voters may come eventually, but it can take a long time.

With indictments pending against some of his deputies and facing increasing public scrutiny and criticism, Baca decided in January not only not to run again but to resign even before his term was set to expire. Since then, accountability has been relentless, arriving in the form of lawsuits, indictments, warnings of a federal consent decree, ridicule and embarrassment.

That’s something that the county’s new leaders — and its holdovers — should keep in mind. Sheriff-elect Jim McDonnell, Supervisors-elect Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl, and the new assessor-elect (Jeffrey Prang currently holds a razor-thin lead over John Morris) most certainly know that the voters of this sprawling county have plenty on their minds that has nothing to do with how well the Board of Supervisors spends their money, how humanely their mentally ill neighbors are treated, how well the homeless are housed or how badly their jail inmates are beaten. They certainly must know that they can perform poorly for a long time before they are called to account by voters. In this odd county system, with little in the way of checks and balances, little oversight and far too many constituents represented by far too few elected leaders, they can coast, focus on accumulating power, abuse the public trust and poorly serve the people long before they are noticed.

To put it another way, in a less than ideal governmental structure they must be their own taskmasters and their own most severe critics if they are to fulfill their obligation to the public — and they must do so in the face of enormous challenges.

McDonnell takes on a Sheriff’s Department still reeling from the inmate abuse scandal and still grappling with an existential question: Is this a department that has rid itself of a few bad apples in leadership and is now ready to resume business as usual — or does it require a more sweeping reinvention to better honor the good service that a majority of deputies provide and to better respect the people they serve and protect on patrol? The departing sheriff asserts it is the former; overwhelming evidence points to the latter.

McDonnell also has to address an issue outside his experience as a top leader in the Los Angeles Police Department and as chief of the Long Beach police: His deputies, in addition to being public safety officers, must in effect be mental health experts. And he must help decide whether the county needs jail beds for every person arrested, or whether it should instead seek to safely and productively divert those mentally ill and addicted defendants to non-jail treatment.

He must decide whether to use a looming consent decree from the U.S. Justice Department to help implement reform or treat it as something to be resisted. We hope he will use it to encourage reform.

The reconstituted Board of Supervisors must help by taking action that the current board could not or would not. It must, for example, finally grant the sheriff authority to release low-risk inmates who are awaiting trial in jail only because they don’t have money for bail. Some experts have said such a move could free up 1,000 beds, but the board must at least act — even if it is for a heartbreakingly tiny pilot project, currently proposed, for a mere 25 inmates.

Meanwhile, the board must dust off the report submitted this year by the Blue Ribbon Commission on Child Protection and recognize that the recommendations were not geared merely toward preventing needless child deaths from abuse and neglect, but also toward shaking up the board’s entrenched bureaucratic thinking and breaking down its jurisdictional silos, not just in the Department of Children and Family Services but in everything the county does.

It must recognize and reject an insular county culture that sees the public as an adversary. It must embrace transparency and dialogue by relying less on closed-door meetings and privileged documents.

Solis and Kuehl, critiqued during their campaigns for their ties to public sector labor unions, must reassure the public that that they can make decisions independent of the public sector unions that helped put them in office and that they know responsible fiscal stewardship goes hand in hand with providing aid to the poor, the young, the elderly and others in need.

The agendas of the supervisors will be long, covering human services such as healthcare, general assistance to the poorest and housing for the homeless; basic municipal services such as fire protection; and life-affirming cultural amenities and health-enhancing recreation programs.

There is no bigger or perhaps more difficult job in public service than being an elected official in Los Angeles County government. Much is demanded. The new leaders must perform — at those times when the public is watching, but also those times when it is not.

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