Editorial: High hopes, and caution, for sheriff oversight panel

Nearly two years after voting to create a civilian commission to oversee the Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is due Tuesday to present its appointees and finally get the panel underway. It’s a baby step rather than the great leap in sheriff accountability it might have been, but it’s a step nonetheless and warrants some applause.

The sheriff is elected by the voters of Los Angeles County, so in a vastly oversimplified and naïve analysis, he would appear to have all the oversight he needs, directly from the people who can return him to office, or turn him out, at the end of any four-year term. If his deputies abuse jail inmates and incur huge lawsuit costs that have to be paid out by taxpayers, or if they exceed their authority in their use of deadly force in the field, or if the department is too sluggish in posting video cameras in the jails or on deputy uniforms, voters, in theory, will notice and apply enough pressure to correct the sheriff or punish him politically.

But that nice idea simply doesn’t hold up in a county of 10 million people. The experience of the last five years has been that a sheriff and his top staff can mismanage the department, abuse inmates and mislead investigators for a long time before voters learn of their misdeeds and focus attention on them. There must be a public forum in which civilians can exercise oversight, seek answers, demand action, air grievances, critique policy, examine trends and tactics. The county in recent years dismantled an array of oversight mechanisms that had failed, and hired an inspector general in their place, and that has been a good step. But until now it has left out the public component.

The commission that will soon begin its work is imperfect. Rather than an independent panel, free of politics and answerable to no elected official, the commission will be in a real sense under the thumb of the Board of Supervisors, which appointed and can remove each member. The supervisors even hired the commission’s top staffers, who as a consequence will be answerable to them rather than to the commission members. The inspector general, too, reports to the supervisors rather than to the commission. Instead of acting independently, the panel could too easily become merely a proxy of the board, allowing the supervisors to pull the oversight strings while hiding from direct accountability.

At nine members, the size of the panel allowed for representation that might better reflect the county’s diversity than does the Board of Supervisors itself. Instead, there is just a single Latino appointee — in a county with a Latino population approaching 50% and historically complicated relations with the Sheriff’s Department. The panel will start its work with no Asian American members. The commissioners-to-be [See item 1, page 8] are impressive and capable, but taken together the panel perpetuates the county’s continuing failure to give adequate voice to crucial portions of the population directly affected by law enforcement, crime, incarceration and lack of mental health and reentry services.

Still, creation of the commission establishes a public forum at which people will be able to speak directly to, if not Sheriff Jim McDonnell himself, at least his representative.

What exactly does civilian oversight mean? The ordinance that attempts to enumerate the commission’s functions comes up with many ways to say the same thing. “Make Recommendations,” “Review” and “Advise” mean the same thing; “Serve as Liaison” is the same as “Obtain Community Input” and “Function as a Bridge.”

The commission itself — in collaboration or counterpoint to the Board of Supervisors and the public — will have to figure out for itself what it can and should do. The panel could all too easily become something akin to the Inglewood’s Citizen Police Oversight Commission, a powerless group that provides the form but not the substance of oversight. Or it can be something entirely new and different, at least for the sheriff — an oversight board that compels law enforcement to explain itself and to listen to the public’s critique of its work.

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