But Hiring Record Resembles Police Department’s : Sheriff’s Officials Field Fewer Complaints of Bias

With little exception, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s record of hiring and promoting minority and female officers appears no better than that of the Los Angeles Police Department, sheriff’s statistics show.

Interviews with minority and female sheriff’s deputies indicate, however, that complaints of racial discrimination and sexual harassment are not as widespread in the county’s second-largest law enforcement agency as they are in the Los Angeles Police Department.

Few deputies could recall instances of racially or sexually based ill-treatment; none was willing discuss them publicly.

Sheriff’s Department officials are not under court-imposed hiring quotas such as those affecting the Police Department. Nonetheless, they do have an affirmative action policy, and they do all they can to promote qualified nonwhites and non-males, said Administrative Division Chief Richard L. Foreman, who heads the department’s hiring programs. The department’s overriding concern, according to Foreman, is to be “equitable and fair for everyone.”

“One of the sheriff’s priorities is (minority and female) recruitment, because we don’t want to be under a consent decree like the police have,” said Lt. Richard Walls, a department spokesman. “If the next batch of people in the academy were 90% black and 90% Hispanic, we would love it.”

Of 208 deputy trainees in the sheriff’s academy as of June, 77.4% were white, 8.7% were black and 12.5% were Latino. Female trainees made up 19.7% of the total.

A comparison of personnel statistics from 1980 shows that although the Police Department’s consent decree has led to greater proportional representation of women and minority officers, ratios in the Sheriff’s Department are close to what they were more than five years ago.

Fewer Minority Officers

At that time, 12.6% of sworn sheriff’s personnel were women; 9.6% were Latino and 9% were black. Of the sheriff’s 6,363 sworn members today, 11% are women, 12% are Latino and 9% are black.

In contrast, 8% of the 7,000-member Police Department is female, 15% is Latino and 11% is black.

Although the Sheriff’s Department has fewer minority officers than the Police Department, there are considerably more minorities working for the sheriff in vice and narcotics assignments, two particularly desirable detective assignments, records show.

One of every four of the Sheriff’s Department 113 narcotics investigators is black or Latino, contrasted with about 11% of the 229 officers assigned to the Police Department’s Narcotics Division.

Among the 63 sheriff’s deputies assigned to vice, the ratio of whites to minorities is roughly 3 to 1. In the Police Department’s 54-member administrative vice unit, the ratio of whites to minorities is roughly 9 to 1.

Still, the Sheriff’s Department has several areas of assignment in which minorities and women are under-represented.

In the sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, for example, one of 88 investigators is black. At the sheriff’s Avalon substation on Catalina Island, all 12 deputies are white men. All of Sheriff Sherman Block’s eight division chiefs are white men, as are Block’s two assistant sheriffs.

Of the department’s 54 captains, one is Latino, two are women and three are black. Of the sheriff’s 20 commanders, 17 are white. None is a woman.

Minority and female deputies have fared little better in attaining middle-management positions, Sheriff’s Department personnel records show. Of the sheriff’s 256 lieutenants, 5% are Latino, 4% are women and 2% are black.