Complaints Spark New Sheriff Policies

Sheriff Brad Gates pledged Friday to immediately embrace new policies to ensure fairness in the department’s promotion process, a move that comes after a group of female deputies complained to a national women’s group and their union that they were wrongly passed over for a plum job.

The county’s largest law enforcement agency will now have a female ombudsman to hear confidential employee complaints and to monitor promotion boards. Also, all board interviews with job applicants will be videotaped, Gates said Friday.

“This agency has always been against discrimination, harassment and unequal treatment,” Gates said. “We are doing this now to tighten these areas up and bring more accountability.”

Gates also said all employee evaluations will include specific questions about sexual harassment and equity within the ranks, and he will make a taped statement of the department’s stance against sexual harassment that will be shown to all employees and at the sheriff’s academy.

*

The flurry of changes was triggered after 15 women and 52 men applied to be an investigator, a highly coveted job with desirable hours and pay, and none of the women appeared on the list of 20 finalists. Sheriff’s officials said it was the first time in recent years that no women have made the list, which remains active for a year.

The changes are based on recommendations made by women in the department, from deputies to lieutenants, who were anonymously surveyed by a female lieutenant at Gates’ request. That survey, begun after the promotion list was completed but before it was posted, was a way to “quell any perception” of unfairness in the current sensitive climate, Gates said.

However, a group of women deputies angry about the list have taken their concerns to Los Angeles attorney Pat Thistle, to local union officials and to the National Center for Women and Policing in Los Angeles.

“They’re very upset,” said Penny Harrington, the director of the center. “Some of them feel they are clearly more qualified than some of the men who made the list. They are looking at their options. One of them is a lawsuit.”

But a union official said the issue has more or less been resolved.

The women showed “varying degrees of outrage” at a special union-organized meeting to discuss the issue and were “generally satisfied” with the promotion ranking after speaking later with the three male supervisors who conducted the oral board, according to Robert J. MacLeod, president of the Assn. of Orange County Sheriff’s Deputies.

“There’s no news here,” MacLeod said.

The Sheriff’s Department also has been struggling with an embarrassing sexual-harassment scandal that led to the firing of one of Gates’ top confidants, Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer. Four women who worked for the department have sued LaDucer, and he in turn has filed a suit against Gates and the county.

Attorney Thistle, who also is representing those four women, confirmed Friday that he had spoken with several of the deputies upset about the promotion list, but he declined to discuss specifics of their conversations or plans.

*

Gates said he doesn’t “sense a flare-up in this department over this.” He said he invited reporters to his office Friday to discuss the issue and new policies because his department has been buffeted by criticism since the lawsuits were filed and LaDucer was fired.

LaDucer submitted his retirement Friday, on the day he was to have defended himself against his announced termination in a personnel hearing. His attorney, Bruce Praet, said LaDucer decided that he would have been fired anyway at the end of the hearing. He has been on paid leave of absence since May.

Praet said the veteran officer will instead concentrate on his federal lawsuit alleging that Gates’ announcement of his firing violated his right to due process.

LaDucer, 52, would have been able to collect his full pension in three more years. By retiring Friday, he will receive about $72,000 a year, which is about 72% of his $100,817 annual salary.

“Now we’re left with defending the allegations of the women in the civil suits,” Praet said.

Gates himself announced this week that he will retire next year. He endorsed Assistant Sheriff Douglas D. Storm, who will face Marshal Michael S. Carona, a candidate who is expected to make the department’s sexual-harassment problems a campaign issue. Gates has conceded that he was personally hurt by the claims against LaDucer, but he says he never witnessed any improper behavior by his longtime associate and friend.

*

LaDucer’s office, a few feet from the sheriff’s door, was still cluttered Friday with citations and souvenirs and a large calendar showing May 19, the day his 32-year career ended.

The 58-year-old sheriff declined to discuss his retirement or LaDucer’s case Friday, but he did assemble his staff and a sheaf of statistics to rebuff criticism that his agency is an unwelcome or unfair place for women.

The agency has no women among its 13 captains, and only 15 among the 185 lieutenants and sergeants in the department’s vast patrol, jail and investigative units. Overall, though, women make up one third of the agency’s almost 2,800 employees, whose duties range from forensic scientists to dispatchers to secretaries.

Among the employees who are sworn officers, 11.7% are women. The national average is estimated at 12% to 14% by federal studies and women’s rights groups.

Harrington, a former police chief in Portland, Ore., said the numbers don’t add up to an agency committed to putting women in uniform.

“Either they are not recruiting aggressively, which I suspect, or they are not committed to getting women hired once they show interest,” Harrington said. “They really should be above the national average, considering how large and affluent the county is. There are a lot of qualified and educated women in the area.”

*

As for the dearth of women among the agency’s top posts, Harrington said the department “doesn’t have a glass ceiling; they have a concrete one.”

Gates and his staff argue that the county’s affluence and an upswing in the economy lure women into other jobs that might offer better hours and more peace of mind for less dangerous work.

“In today’s world, you read every day about police officers being killed,” Gates said. “This is a job where you go to work with a flak vest on. When you show the risks to gals, I think they stop and think about it more than a man.”

Sheriff’s officials also say the top ranks of the department are male-dominated because of a countywide merit system for hiring that eschews quotas and the department’s policy of bringing new employees in at entry levels and promoting from within.

The captains in the agency, for example, average nearly 30 years on the force, a total that most female sergeants in the agency will not reach for another decade or two, according to Karen Kiddy, the agency’s human resources director who will become the new ombudsman.

The agency has changed the way it looks for potential employees in recent years to reach more women, forgoing trips to military bases to visit fitness clubs and college campuses and buying advertisements in women’s publications such as Self, Kiddy said.

“One thing we have not done is lower our standards,” Kiddy said. “We’re not looking just for a female statistic. We want qualified people who can come to your door on a 911 call and do the things you need when you need help.”

Lt. Cathy Zurn, in command of the Orange County Transportation Authority transit police, described her 19 years in the Sheriff’s Department has having had “its ups and downs.”

“There have been some frustrations over the years, but it has improved since I started,” she said. “Then, a lot of times, you wouldn’t see women on certain assignments or on promotion lists. A lot of it is society in general. Women are fairly new to law enforcement in operational roles.”

Zurn said she’s one of the few female lieutenants in law enforcement in the county. There is one female lieutenant in the Marshal’s Department and one in the Anaheim Police Department. Working her way through the ranks has been “a lot of work,” she said.

“Sometimes, in my down days, I say, ‘I’m tired of fighting this,’ ” she said. “There has been no deliberate effort to keep women from moving up. . . . Obviously, it takes time to move up in any agency, though I’d always like things to go faster.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Women’s Roles

About one-fifth of higher compensated employees (annual salary, $33,000-$87,000) at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department are women. Females at various levels among 2,033 of the OCSD’s 2,800 employees:

Captain: 0%

Sergeant: 7.3

Investigator: 13.1

Deputy: 12.6

Other positions*: 39.4

Non-sworn managers**: 65.6

All positions: 21.3

* Wide range of 634 positions including special officers, forensic scientists, community service officers, radio dispatchers and others ** Salary and duties comparable to sergeant, lieutenant and captain

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice, Orange County Sheriff; Researched by GEOFF BOUCHER / Los Angeles Times