Deputies Use Dogs in Indiscriminate Attacks, Panel Told : Law enforcement: Nearly two dozen people testify in East L.A. on the Sheriff’s Department use of force.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department uses dogs “to indiscriminately attack suspects,” a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California on Thursday told a panel investigating complaints of excessive force by deputies.

Dogs should be used for searches, not for attacks on suspects, said Robin Toma of the ACLU, adding that the overwhelming majority of victims of K-9 attacks are African-Americans or Latino.

“We need to focus on strong civilian oversight” of the Sheriff’s Department, Toma said. “We need an effective citizen-input process.”

Toma was one of nearly two dozen speakers who testified in East Los Angeles at the second of three public hearings on the Sheriff’s Department’s use of force. The panel hearing the testimony is headed by retired Superior Court Judge James Kolts, hired by the Board of Supervisors to investigate why the county’s payments for claims against deputies have increased dramatically in recent years.

The settlement of excessive-force lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Department has cost taxpayers $32 million over the last four years. Public attention was focused on the department’s use of force after four questionable fatal shootings within a month last summer. The county grand jury did not indict any deputy involved.

Thursday’s meeting was held in the gymnasium at Belevedere Park at 4914 East Brooklyn Ave., where about 125 people turned out. Along with 14 scheduled speakers from a cross-section of organizations, another 13 members of the audience signed up to testify.

Gloria Romero, representing an organization called the Coalition for Sheriff’s Accountability, recommended a “full, sweeping independent investigation” of the department.

Another speaker, Mike Salcido of the Community Services Organization of East Los Angeles, was applauded when he said: “I beat someone, I go to jail. If a cop excessively beats someone, he goes to jail.”

Don Justin Jones of the Rainbow Coalition for Justice recommended that members of the grand jury be selected from Department of Motor Vehicle records, rather than from a pool recommended by judges as they are now.

Noting that very few minorities are on the grand jury, Jones said drawing from DMV records would result in a panel representing a broader cross-section of the community.

He also recommended that grand jurors by paid $75 a day, three times the current rate, “so working-class people can participate.”

Guillermo Suarez of the Chicano Moratorium Committee reflected on the death of Times reporter Ruben Salazar to illustrate what he sees as a historical pattern of brutality by deputies in East Los Angeles.

Salazar was killed when a deputy fired a tear gas grenade into a bar, striking him in the head during demonstrations in East Los Angeles in the late 1960s.

Salazar’s death and the “whitewash” of the investigation shows that “we cannot expect justice from this system,” Suarez said.