Hard Questions for the Sheriff

Until a jury of their peers decides otherwise, the 10 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies indicted this week on charges that they stole more than $1 million from accused drug dealers are entitled to the same absolute presumption of innocence that should be accorded any person accused of a crime.

Still, the mere delivery of the 27-count federal indictment and the fact that it involves all nine members of one of the department’s elite narcotics units is, as Sheriff Sherman Block himself said, a cause for “great, great sadness.” It also raises serious questions about Block’s own accountability, about the supervisors’ virtual abdication of any oversight of his department’s management and about the implications of the strategy being used to pursue the county’s so-called war on drugs.

Los Angeles County is far from the first place in America to be hit by one of these wrenching scandals nor, unfortunately, is it likely to be the last. But the facts of the case--like those already brought in Miami, New York and elsewhere--are becoming all too familiar. All involve bright, daring, accomplished officers allowed a wide latitude of conduct under very loose supervision, ostensibly because that is what is required to pull off the headline-grabbing drug busts that the public now seems to demand.

But police officers are only human; they enjoy our common capacity for self-sacrifice and heroism and suffer from our common vulnerability to temptation. In the drug trade, where staggering sums of cash are left about like so much litter, that temptation can become overwhelming. That is why most thoughtful law-enforcement authorities now agree that narcotics units require more, not less, supervision than other police operations.

That also is why the voters who elected Block deserve to be told whether or not he thinks his managerial policies contributed to this situation and, if so, what he plans to do about them. That is why the supervisors, whose interest in the Sheriff’s Department never seems to extend much beyond its budget, ought to assist voters by asking such questions of the sheriff in an open session.

Finally, the public needs to abandon its naive belief that the drug problem will be solved by throwing enough Dirty Harrys onto the streets. It won’t work. An unfair, unrealistic over-reliance on our police forces to solve a complex problem for which all of society bears some measure of responsibility is a prescription for disappointment, defeat and corruption.