Sheriff Vows to Resolve Jail Problems

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block acknowledged Tuesday that his department suffers significant problems in collecting and analyzing information about its jails, and he pledged to make improvements called for in a new report on the status of reform efforts at that agency.

At the same time, Block expressed gratitude that the latest reform update by Los Angeles lawyer Merrick A. Bobb strongly endorsed the work that his department has done in lowering police abuse and reducing excessive force lawsuits even as arrests rise each year. According to Bobb’s analysis, the Sheriff’s Department also has made great strides in installing a computer system to identify and track potential problem deputies.

“Overall, I think it was a favorable report,” Block said of the study, which was released Tuesday. “It’s something that we can be pleased with.”

Block acknowledged, however, that some findings about the department’s management of its jails highlighted problems that need quick attention. Among other things, Bobb, who monitors reform for the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department, concluded that sheriff’s officials haphazardly gathered statistical information and then analyzed it in such a way that limited its usefulness.

Statistics regarding riots and other disturbances, assaults, and use of force by deputies inside the jails were not standardized and often were flawed, Bobb found. In one instance, sheriff’s officials told Bobb and his staff that their data showed no disturbances at the women’s jail from 1991 to 1995. After reinvestigating, officials told Bobb that 64 disturbances had occurred.

“The unreliability of the data,” Bobb said in his report, “has profound implications for the ability of department executives to manage the jails.” Among other things, Bobb said, the failure to keep reliable statistics makes it difficult for sheriff’s officials to know whether techniques to combat violence behind bars are working.

Block agreed and pledged to take immediate steps.

“That part of the report is somewhat embarrassing,” Block said. “We need accurate statistics as managers . . . to do our jobs. These are internal things that we need to correct.”

Block said he would immediately adopt recommendations by Bobb to standardize the reporting of violence inside the jails. Other recommendations, Block said, would require money, and he promised to discuss them with the County Board of Supervisors, which controls the department’s funding.

While the report released Tuesday focused on the reform efforts at the Sheriff’s Department, its findings have potentially significant implications for the region’s largest law enforcement agency, the LAPD. The Police Department embarked on its reform drive before the Sheriff’s Department did. But when Bobb was hired by the Police Commission last year to analyze the status of LAPD reform, his conclusions emphasized several areas of disappointingly slow progress. That report was released in May.

Tuesday, police commissioners, LAPD officials and others said Bobb’s two recent reports persuaded them that the LAPD needs to move more aggressively toward adopting reforms first proposed by the Christopher Commission after the Rodney G. King beating.

“We have pushed, pulled, prodded, done everything possible,” said Art Mattox, a member of the city’s Police Commission and a long-standing champion of police reform. “So it’s startling to see that other agencies can move ahead with reforms faster than we can with no more resources than we have.”

Commissioner Edith Perez echoed Mattox’s concerns, ones that she said were all the more bothersome in light of the LAPD’s increased resources in recent years.

“It’s extremely troubling because the Sheriff’s Department actually started after the Police Department, and yet they’re ahead,” she said. “We are doing a woefully inadequate job of maximizing our resources.”

Not all observers were so critical of the LAPD’s performance. Katherine Mader, the newly appointed inspector general to the Police Commission, said she has been pleased by the openness of LAPD officials she has met during her months on the job.

“I’m actually very encouraged by the reception that I have received and the promptness that the Police Department has displayed in responding to my requests,” Mader said, calling those actions evidence of positive, progressive actions by the LAPD.