Department’s next step is regaining trust

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department has run head-on into a problem that can plague any large organization that deals with the public: how to regain trust after it’s been damaged.

Major League Baseball.

Wayward politicians.

A major university.

A charitable organization.

Oh, I almost forgot: a newspaper.

If there’s any commonality among those enterprises, it’s that in times of crisis their leaders want to get on with business but find that they first must restore public confidence.

You could argue that the problem is particularly acute when it involves law enforcement. After all, these are the people responsible for public safety but who also carry the immense power to arrest and, uh, subdue. They also show up in court and testify. Sometimes, they’re the only witnesses to an alleged crime.

When they testify or make other public statements, they must be beyond reproach. Mistakes we can live with. But when they lie or mislead us, it sends a shiver up our spines.

A lot of us shivered this week after the Orange County district attorney detailed either lies or deceptions by several Sheriff’s Department personnel when they testified before a grand jury investigating the October 2006 death of Theo Lacy jail inmate John Chamberlain.

It was scary stuff because they seemed to do it so effortlessly. In one instance, a higher-up deleted relevant material that was to be presented to the jurors. In another, a second high-ranking official flat-out denied that he’d read a crucial bit of information in a file regarding the investigations of inmate deaths.

In a third case, an investigator denied under oath that he’d talked at length to a deputy about her testimony to the jury. “I’m sitting before you as a sworn witness . . . to provide you with accurate information,” he said to the grand jurors. “And that’s what I’m giving you.”

Two days later, he admitted to the jury that he’d lied. Three deputies also gave either false testimony or improperly discussed their appearances before the grand jury with others involved in the case.

In yet another troubling moment, the department couldn’t produce under subpoena the personnel file of the deputy “who was a strong focus in the jury’s investigation,” according to the D.A.’s report. The jury never found out why but did learn that the deputy’s file “was the only one that was ever known to be missing” among the thousands that were secured, the D.A.’s report stated.

The deputies union and upper management reminded us this week that most people in the department weren’t involved in the scandal and are upstanding members of the force. I’ll accept that, but when you have people at the top of a law enforcement organization willing to deceive a grand jury, you’ve got a huge problem.

Not to mention that Mike Carona, the man at the very top for the last 10 years, resigned in January and faces corruption charges in an unrelated matter.

Nobody understands all this better than acting Sheriff Jack Anderson. I’ve argued in previous columns that the department’s next sheriff needs to be someone from outside Carona’s command staff. Nothing personal, just my sense that new blood is needed.

Anderson and I had a pleasant conversation Friday, in which he was neither defensive nor grousing. He knows that the Chamberlain investigation has sullied the department but insists that the internal investigation won’t protect anyone -- another perception that dogs law enforcement.

“When you’re talking about breaches of ethics and values and morals, that’s unacceptable,” Anderson says. “You don’t protect anybody engaged in that. I never have and never will.”

I erroneously wrote earlier this week that Chamberlain was killed two days after his arrest. Actually, he was killed two days after being transferred to Lacy, but he’d been in custody for just under three weeks. He was killed by inmates who mistakenly believed he’d been arrested for child molestation. He had been arrested on suspicion of possessing child pornography.

Anderson knows he may be behind the eight ball because of his position inside the Carona administration. He told me, however, that he secured the acting sheriff’s job after the unanimous suggestion of several other top officials Carona had summoned in January to tell them of his imminent resignation. Carona said at the time that he wanted to give Anderson a leg up on the 2010 sheriff’s race.

In a departmentwide memo Friday, Anderson wrote: “We cannot fix our shortcomings and move forward until the root cause of these problems are identified.”

It’s not Anderson’s fault that those words have been uttered before by new execs in troubled times. Sounds like something baseball Commissioner Bud Selig might have said after the steroids report came out.

Anderson can’t blame us for being skeptical. I don’t know if it’s possible for him to explain why other high-ranking members of the department had no qualms about misleading a grand jury and whether that’s part of a culture inside the department.

But for a guy who wants to be Carona’s full-time successor, wouldn’t you like him to try?

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons