The Tide Goes Out for L.A. Sheriff’s Dept.

Given enough weight and momentum, just about anything will topple, even the pedestal upon which the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors maintained Sheriff Sherman Block and his closed-door department for so long.

The proof of this came Tuesday when a unanimous board ordered sheriff’s officials to move immediately to rid the department of waste, fiscal abuse and other undesirable practices. The department officials were also ordered to complete the cleanup within nine months, not the years that they earlier had said would be necessary.

Even nine months is too long, but it should be noted that the supervisors themselves had not shown any sign of collective backbone on behalf of taxpayers throughout Block’s long stewardship of the county Sheriff’s Department. The sheriff and his subordinates had routinely maintained that the department was too poor to open new jails (and even had to close some) when it came time to consider the county’s tight budgets.

Many sheriff’s departments, such as Orange County’s, can rightly claim a certain amount of fiscal suffocation. That county has the most crowded adult jail system in the country, and still county residents complain about early release of inmates and, paradoxically, reject plans for new or expanded jails.

But the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department provided few tangible numbers to back up its claims of poverty, and the supervisors were just too meek, or too awed by Block’s political popularity, to raise strong objection. It became a shameful situation, an outright abdication of the electoral oversight powers that voters bestow on the supervisors.

The atmosphere started to change about 10 months ago when The Times began to publish a series of articles exposing how the department squandered millions of dollars, failed to keep track of its prisoners and allowed inmates to serve less of their sentences than prisoners anywhere else in the nation.

Four audit reports provided the rest of the critical mass that led to the supervisors’ demands. State Auditor Kurt Sjoberg said last November that the department could save $44 million a year. Later, the county’s auditor-controller said that the sheriff’s budget should offer more of the information needed to monitor and control spending. Next, KMPG Peat Marwick said the department could trim management, close unneeded operations and use competitive bidding to save $22 million a year. Finally, the auditor-controller said last week that the Sheriff’s Department routinely ignores personnel cost controls, lacks basic fiscal standards and misleads the supervisors and other county officials.

Now, perhaps, the department will be treated as it should be: as a spottily administered agency that has for years failed to fully serve the county and its taxpayers.