Report Hails Sheriff’s Reforms but Faults Jails

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has made faster progress on some important reforms than the Los Angeles Police Department, but it shares a troubling problem with its local counterpart--a failure to compile and analyze some statistics accurately--according to a pair of recently completed reports with implications for the region’s two most important law enforcement agencies.

“The [Sheriff’s Department] lacked a solid basis for important statistics about jail riots and other disturbances, assaults and use of [pepper] spray in the L.A. County jails,” states one of the reports, written by Los Angeles lawyer Merrick A. Bobb and scheduled for release Tuesday afternoon. “Many of the numbers were haphazardly gathered and thus not useful for either historical or current analysis. The unreliability of the data has profound implications for the ability of department executives to manage the jails.”

That conclusion is one of the central findings in Bobb’s sixth semiannual update on the progress of reform at the Sheriff’s Department, a report that commends the department for steps it has taken in its patrol operations but that finds fault with the management and monitoring of its jails. The county jails, Bobb concludes bluntly, “are seriously troubled.”

In his latest report, Bobb, who monitors reform for both the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department, does not specifically address the status of reform measures at the LAPD, which launched its efforts a year before the Sheriff’s Department.

But Bobb completed a similar study of the LAPD in May, and that document--combined with the new report--offers a rare chance to compare comprehensively the strides taken by the two agencies over a five-year period dominated by public and political demands for local law enforcement reform.

Bobb’s studies have found fault with both agencies’ efforts. But in general they portray the Sheriff’s Department, at least in its patrol operations, as doing a better job of embracing reforms. The sheriff’s reform blueprint was drafted by the Kolts Commission in 1992.

The Christopher Commission performed a similar mission for the LAPD in 1991. In his May report, Bobb said the LAPD was moving in the right direction, but he criticized the pace of reform and wrote that “the LAPD could benefit from more focused, deft and efficient internal management.”

According to Bobb’s reports, sheriff’s officials have done more to track potential problem officers and have successfully pushed down the exposure of county taxpayers in cases growing out of excessive-force complaints. Those reductions came even as the Sheriff’s Department recorded a modest increase in arrests. Arrests at the LAPD, meanwhile, are down dramatically in recent years, though department figures for the past year are conflicting and may indicate a small recent uptick.

Diversity Issues

As the reports make clear, the LAPD is a more diverse department than the Sheriff’s Department, but both agencies are struggling to move women and minorities into command positions and other coveted jobs.

Together, the Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD oversee the vast area of Los Angeles County, with the Police Department’s 9,000-plus officers handling law enforcement within the city’s limits. More than 8,000 sheriff’s deputies handle patrol duties in unincorporated parts of the county and in 39 incorporated cities. They also staff eight facilities that handle the county’s huge inmate population.

In the area of collecting and analyzing data, both departments have shown significant weaknesses. At the Sheriff’s Department, Bobb’s report makes clear that information about life inside the jails is sometimes contradictory or incomplete. At the LAPD, officials are months behind in fulfilling a request by Mayor Richard Riordan for a report explaining why the department is arresting far fewer people than it did a few years ago.

Bobb’s criticism of the Sheriff’s Department, however, is mixed with praise for the response so far to the problem.

“The department has responded quickly, openly and in good faith to the data problems we have raised and has made substantial progress during August and early September in curing them,” according to Bobb’s report. “Serious problems remain, but we have every reason to believe that the department will continue to work on them.”

Data Problems

Although Bobb’s report does not specifically compare the sheriff’s data issues to the similar problems facing LAPD, he elaborated in an interview and follow-up statement.

“Each agency has difficulty assembling basic data, the LAPD in a general way, due in part to it still being largely paper-driven and due in part to it not being more demanding of itself,” Bobb said. “The [Sheriff’s Department] has the problem in a more limited way, in its custody operations but not in patrol.”

In part, Bobb’s analysis of the data problems in the jails grows out of a Times series earlier this year analyzing the county jail system. Responding to those reports, Bobb and his staff sought to learn more about the number of altercations in the county’s eight custodial facilities, a huge jail system that houses nearly 20,000 inmates in space rated by the state as sufficient for about 12,000.

To conduct the inquiry, Bobb and his associates asked county officials for the number of jail disturbances, the number of inmate assaults, the number of times that jail staffers used force on inmates and the number of times that staffers used pepper spray on inmates. What came back, the report says, were conflicting numbers that provided evidence that sheriff’s officials have not carefully monitored those issues inside the jail system.

At the county jail for women, officials at first told Bobb’s staff that there had been no disturbances between 1991 and 1995. Pressed to reinvestigate, the Sheriff’s Department concluded that there had been 64 such incidents.

In some cases, the discrepancies arose from the fact that the county’s facilities, which include one intake center and seven jails, keep track of violent acts in different ways.

Five of the eight facilities log assaults by the number of crime reports filed; the others keep track of them by the number of victims. Under the “crime report” approach, the statistics can dramatically understate the extent of problems, Bobb concluded.

“Even if there are a series of assaults occurring at one time involving 10 assailants and 10 victims, it will be counted as a single assault under this method,” his report states.

Reinforcing that notion, Bobb’s report notes that one county jail used the “crime report” method in 1995 and then switched over to keeping track of each victim starting this year. The result: That jail now is on pace to log more than 2,000 inmate-on-inmate assaults this year--10 times the number of assaults that it recorded a year ago.

Such sloppy practices make it difficult to assess the full extent of problems inside the county jails, Bobb said, though his report does offer anecdotal information to suggest that violence is on the rise and that jailers are sometimes callous about the conditions affecting inmates.

In one incident cited by Bobb, an inmate allegedly was kept in a holding cell for more than 24 hours without receiving food; when he began banging on the walls and demanding food, the incident escalated into a physical confrontation with deputies. In another case, an inmate tried to switch jail pants with another inmate because the pants given to him did not fit; that too erupted in a fight with deputies.

“Both incidents seemed to be ones where callousness, fatigue or burnout seems to preclude a common-sense resolution of a simple problem,” Bobb says in his report.

Interviews with deputies echoed the concern about callousness. In a system where deputies refer to inmates as ‘fish’ because they are so abundant and indistinguishable, one deputy conceded to Bobb’s team that it was possible for men and women behind bars to go for a day or two without being fed.

“Sometimes they do [get fed], sometimes they don’t,” the deputy said, according to the report. “It depends on how the deputies working the area are feeling.”

Impressive Steps

In contrast to Bobb’s sometimes discouraging conclusions about the management and monitoring of the county jails, his report credits the Sheriff’s Department with impressive steps to reduce lawsuits and to track officers. And he commends the department for making reforms even as it continues to boost arrests.

“Without reducing service . . . the [Sheriff’s Department] is reshaping for the better the practice of policing in Southern California, even as other police agencies continue to struggle,” the report concludes.

The LAPD’s recent history has been marked by a sharp decline in arrests despite growth in the department’s size, an issue that has created public controversy and has complicated the task of measuring the progress of some reforms.

Within the Police Department, officials frequently cite a drop in the number of instances in which officers use force as evidence of improvement. But arrests have dropped just as quickly as the use of force. As a result, the percentage of cases in which police use force on suspects has remained constant in recent years.

About one of every 100 people arrested by the LAPD in 1990 was subjected to force by a police officer; five years later, that percentage remains unchanged.

The Sheriff’s Department, on the other hand, has seen a modest drop in altercations between officers and suspects at the same time that arrests have increased. Bobb’s new report faults some aspects of the use and investigation of force by the Sheriff’s Department, but it credits deputies with using force more carefully and assessing dangerous situations more intelligently than in the past.

Even more glowing is Bobb’s praise for the efforts made by the Sheriff’s Department to identify and track potentially problem deputies, as well as its steps to cut down on complaints and lawsuits growing out of excessive force allegations.

“The Sheriff’s Department has become a national leader among police agencies for the sophistication and comprehensiveness of its risk management efforts in its patrol operations,” Bobb says of the Sheriff’s Department tracking systems. “It is a remarkable achievement.”

At the LAPD, efforts to install a computer tracking system ran into obstacle after obstacle. Five years after the idea was first proposed, officials now are in the process of making a computer tracking system available to supervising officers.

And that system contains far less valuable information than the one used by the Sheriff’s Department in terms of identifying possible trends or troubled officers.

Bobb’s analysis of the LAPD concluded in May that the Police Department’s tracking system was “weak and inadequate,” short on detail about police officers and subject to misuse by supervisors.

The Sheriff’s Department, Bobb said Tuesday in response to a question about his latest report, “is years ahead of the LAPD in terms of tight management of litigation exposure, at-risk employees, potential problem officers and high-risk incidents.”

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Key Points

From studies of two Los Angeles law enforcement agencies:

* Problem officers: Sheriff’s department is far ahead of the LAPD in handling at-risk employees, potential problem officers and high-risk incidents.

* Use of force: At the LAPD, fewer officers are using force, but also making fewer arrests. Sheriff’s Department is making more arrests and “reshaping policing.”

* Compiling statistics: Both agencies are struggling.

Source: Reports and analysis by Merrick A. Bobb