Sheriff’s Department Wins Praise in Report

Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates should freeze the salaries of his deputies, establish guidelines to prevent overtime abuses and aggressively seek funding to build jails, according to a citizens advisory panel’s report released Friday.

The draft report by the Government Practices Oversight Committee makes a series of restructuring recommendations for the Sheriff’s Department as well as the county district attorney’s office, Probation Department and court system. It was the committee’s second such report on county government in as many days.

The committee’s 15-month study of the county’s law enforcement agencies and the courts included recommendations to:

* Seek legislation or a waiver to relieve the Sheriff’s Department from providing school crossing guards at a cost to the county of roughly $250,000 a year.

* Establish courts dedicated to handling only drug cases, which have clogged dockets and hampered the courts’ ability to handle more serious criminal cases.

* Reinstate programs, cut by the district attorney for cost-saving reasons during the bankruptcy, that allowed small, specialized groups of prosecutors to follow arson, narcotics, child and elder abuse cases from start to finish.

* Expand the use of video arraignments in jail to reduce inmate transportation costs, and improve communication and criminal information sharing among all the law enforcement agencies.

The committee was much more complimentary of the operations of the law enforcement agencies than it was on the county’s other bureaucracies, which it described as dysfunctional and operating on obsolete methods.

“The citizens of this county are fortunate to have law enforcement departments that effectively utilize public resources to deliver valuable public services,” said attorney William Mitchell, co-chairman of the panel. “That’s not to say that there aren’t things that can be done better.”

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Mitchell said all the law enforcement agencies in the county have been under tremendous strain from budgetary cutbacks because of the bankruptcy, and from an ever-increasing workload due, in part, to the state’s “three strikes” law.

“These departments are very overburdened,” he said.

The committee’s reports on county government and law enforcement agencies will be presented to the department heads and the Board of Supervisors in final form within the next few weeks.

Some of the recommendations the panel made for the law enforcement agencies, such as building jails and finding more office space for the district attorney, requires that additional funding be found. Such revenues will be difficult to come by, panel members acknowledge.

Other recommendations, however, suggested that the departments make better use of the money they have. For example, the committee recommended that the Sheriff’s Department contract out jail food services, maintenance of inmate transportation vehicles, operations of the jail commissary and law enforcement to unincorporated areas.

The panel also was critical of the way the Sheriff’s Department allocates the so-called Proposition 172 money it receives from state sales tax revenue. According to the report, the sheriff has no distribution formula for allocating the money to his various programs.

By holding back on those funds for one program and giving to another, the sheriff can “create a false sense of crisis in certain programs as opposed to others,” Mitchell said.

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Lt. Ron Wilkerson, the Sheriff’s Department spokesman, said that voters approved the sales tax increase to boost law enforcement efforts, and that it’s only logical that top Sheriff’s Department executives should have the discretion on how best to use the funds.

He also said the suggestion of a salary cap for some deputies doesn’t seem to mesh with the findings of a county compensation study, which said deputy salaries are in line with those of other police agencies.

“It appears, based on the [compensation] report, that we are well within line,” he said.

As for the panel’s concerns about overtime, Wilkerson said the department carefully scrutinized its overtime budget to determine whether money is being properly spent.

“It’s evaluated and reviewed regularly,” he said. “A deputy just doesn’t work overtime at his own discretion. It’s something a manager or supervisor has to evaluate as being necessary.”

But, he said, the department cannot control overtime for deputies who must work beyond their usual shifts on stake-outs, crime investigations and emergency situations.

“With the work we are required to do, we can’t work 8-to-5 hours,” Wilkerson said.

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Robert MacLeod, general manager of the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, agreed.

“If you are investigating a murder, do you stop looking for suspect or a witness because of overtime?” he asked. “That’s ludicrous.”

MacLeod added that freezing the salaries of some deputies could worsen an already significant retention problem at the department:

“It doesn’t reflect well on the quality of advice for the report when it recommends a salary freeze, even though we already have a problem retaining and [are] losing deputy sheriffs to other departments.”

Also contributing to this report was correspondent Shelby Grad.