Sex Harassment Hard to Root Out in Sheriff’s Dept.

She was a respected, happily married Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy assigned to the jail.

He was her boss. He made advances. She resisted. He tried to get physical, then got hostile. He said he could make her life hell. He licked his lips when she walked by. He called her a “dumb female” in front of the rapists and murderers she guarded and told inmates “us men have to stick together.” Prisoners began threatening to sexually assault her. “The brass is on our side,” they taunted. Department helicopters buzzed her house.

It was like some creepy Alfred Hitchcock flick. And according to the scenario she described in court records and retirement files, it derailed her career and life.

Her marriage to a fellow deputy crumbled. Her boss--who denies the allegations--was transferred to a station near her home. She left the state. In 1996, the county paid her $750,000 to avoid a jury award its lawyers feared would exceed $3 million.

While attempts to integrate overwhelmingly male police forces have produced examples of fine teamwork between men and women, agencies like the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have spawned stories of horrific discrimination, from sexual harassment to male deputies ignoring calls for backup from female deputies in danger. Women who complain say they are railroaded out of their jobs by co-workers while their alleged abusers remain--and sometimes harass other women.

Sheriff Lee Baca, who some lawsuits allege did not deal strongly enough with such behavior in the past, now says his department will have zero tolerance for harassment and respond promptly to resolve complaints. To combat the problem, Baca said he has issued a new set of departmental values that forbid such conduct.

“We want to make sure our supervisors are vigilant in detecting early signs of inappropriate behavior,” he said.

Los Angeles County taxpayers have paid more than $2.6 million since mid-1995 in gender-related claims and lawsuits. Last year, the Sheriff’s Department paid $661,000 to settle such suits, which amounted to 40% of the county’s $1.7 million sexual harassment bill in 1998.

That sum dwarfed the $51,000 the county Fire Department paid for such cases and far outstripped the $450,000 payout by its public works department, the next biggest spot for sexual harassment complaints.

Experts say the Sheriff’s Department has been so slow to comply with a federal order to correct the problem that it may be violating the federal Violence Against Women Act.

“The bottom line is they’ve done nothing,” said attorney Dennis Harley, who has been involved in litigation against the department on sexual harassment issues since 1974.

Harley documented one 1998 case in which a supervisor suspected of criminal sexual battery against a female student worker stayed unpunished on the job, while the department “lost contact” with the woman.

Another sergeant who reportedly put his hands down the front of a female officer’s pants in 1998 was allowed to stay on the job for a year, during which he dipped into pornographic files stored in the department’s computer system and used them to harass other officers, Harley wrote in a report filed in federal court.

But if the department has been tolerant of such behavior, the courts increasingly are not. Juries are more sympathetic to women whose careers were wrecked and personal lives strained by sexual harassment--forcing the county to make big cash payouts to stave off even more expensive jury awards.

The stakes for ending such behavior will only grow, experts say, because gender integration of police forces, like the military, is on the rise.

Women 14% of Force

About 14% of the Sheriff’s Department’s deputies are women, ranking it 39th nationwide in the percentage of female officers on law enforcement forces, according to the National Center for Women and Policing. About 10% of them are in supervisory positions. Nationwide, Pittsburgh is the police force with the most women--25%--with females comprising 37.5% of the top command.

The Los Angeles Police Department, too, grapples with gender-equality issues--one notorious former clandestine departmental group called itself Men Against Women--and sexual harassment lawsuits. The city attorney’s office says LAPD payout figures are not available.

Nationwide studies find that “discrimination and sexual harassment are pervasive in police departments and supervisors and commanders . . . are frequently perpetrators themselves,” according to a 1997 report by the National Center for Women and Policing. “A large number of women across the country have been driven from their jobs in law enforcement due to unpunished, unchecked and unrelenting abuse.”

In Los Angeles County, however, such abuse is drawing greater scrutiny.

Last week, Harley filed a statement in U.S. District Court charging that the Sheriff’s Department has failed to promptly investigate harassment complaints as promised under a 1988 decree imposed by a federal judge. Harley accused the department of perpetuating a hostile work environment, of allowing discriminatory intimidation, ridicule and insults against female deputies to flourish.

“The data demonstrates clear and repeated instances wherein female deputies are the subject of name-calling, disparate treatment and subjective application of rules, all in an effort to cause them to go elsewhere,” Harley wrote.

Baca said the department is now making significant strides in dealing with harassment cases. He said eight of the 21 pending cases have been completed and will be heard by a department disciplinary committee within the next few weeks.

In the past, investigators spent up to 18 months scrutinizing the claims. They now hope to complete investigations in two to three months.

Baca acknowledged that there is a “disincentive” for victims to complain because they know some of their co-workers will label them “a pariah.”

“The disincentive isn’t by department policy,” he said. “It’s by a culture that is underneath department policy.

“We punish the offender. Then the offender’s friends, through inappropriate remarks, attack the person who complained,” he said.

The Board of Supervisors, which approves the settlements, has demanded more information on the department’s handling of harassment cases. The board acted after The Times reported that Baca’s proposal to increase the number of female deputies on patrol unleashed a wave of high-profile hostility against women officers two weeks ago.

Supervisors Gloria Molina and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke have called for an investigation into sexism in the department. Molina said many people do not seem aware that slurs against women are as discriminatory as racist slurs.

“People don’t realize that this is something that’s very, very painful,” she said, as well as expensive. Molina said the board will be taking a much closer look to determine, among other things, if taxpayers are repeatedly paying for the same abusive officers over and over again.

“Looking at the settlements, things are getting worse,” she said. “The reason these women have won these lawsuits is because you had [department] supervisors who did nothing.”

On Monday, the County Claims Board is set to approve $275,000 to settle with former Deputy Jamila Bayati, who took disability retirement from the department in 1995.

Bayati claims her supervisor permitted the worst kind of workplace ambience, allowing deputies to watch a raunchy video at a colleague’s workstation. She also alleges that the supervisor’s office was decorated with a porn fold-out with his face pasted on it at crotch level. One deputy kept asking Bayati for dates, and when she declined, enlisted her colleagues against her. Male colleagues called sanitary napkins “manhole covers.”

Bayati also alleges that her harassment was triggered by her role as a whistle-blower, calling into question the use of force--and subsequent death--of an inmate in 1994.

Female deputies who, like Bayati, file complaints are often hounded out of the department on stress-related disability retirement--often after just a few years of service--because they are exposed to hostile reprisals, according to attorneys. That means the county must pay half their salaries--tax-free--for the rest of their lives.

The total bill for each deputy forced out is well over $1 million.

A few months ago a highly qualified female officer got a coveted assignment, and jealous male colleagues began to discuss her in such graphically sexual terms that a male deputy who sat in on the conversation was loath to repeat what they said.

More Complaints Detailed

With such cultural barriers, both male and female deputies say it is an illusion to think that even the most qualified female officers can move ahead as quickly as a similarly talented male. For many women deputies, the department is not a meritocracy, but an obstacle course, they say.

Kathy Tinker, a female deputy who won $350,000 in a hostile work environment settlement last year, said she was told she did not score high enough on a 1995 test to qualify for a transfer to the shooting range. She got another officer to show her the test scores, and found she had been passed over for a male officer who scored lower than her.

She took the test to try to transfer out of Field Operations, where for three years, another deputy made snide remarks about her bra size and her clothes in front of everyone else in the office, according to her disability evaluation report.

When she was a trainee at Walnut, she said, lace panties appeared in her mailbox. An officer patted her on the behind. Male deputies on her shift would go off to breakfast together--never inviting her--and ignore her calls for backup, even when she radioed that she had a suspect at gunpoint.

“When I hear about incompetent female officers, I just laugh,” she said. “There were plenty of male deputies I worked with who scared me to death.”

Carmen Higuchi reported finding a dildo on her patrol car once as her male colleagues stood around and watched for her reaction. While at Century station in 1995, she was treated with hostility on a daily basis, and one deputy told her, “I could do you right here and throw you down the stairs and leave you here,” according to her complaint to the department. The county settled her case for $200,000.

Charlotte Landolfi, the deputy who had been assigned to the jail, said her boss sided against her when the inmates--including accused killers and sex offenders at the Pitchess North facility--complained about her. She said he told her women had no place in law enforcement, according to the account in her retirement disability report.

Landolfi worked on the same shift in 1991 as her husband, also a deputy, but she said that did not stop her boss, Lt. Ron Moya, from making constant advances, once even brushing her breast, her account said. She claims that at one point he got hostile, saying, “Us men have to stick together” in front of the prisoners and shaking his finger in her face and yelling: “Just look what you have done! They are going to take care of you!” Later, inmates would tell her: “You’re dead, the brass is on our side, and we are going to drag you down and [sexually assault] you,” her account said.

Moya, a 30-year veteran, who denies Landolfi’s allegations, remained at the jail until he was promoted to watch commander at the Walnut station in March 1994. He has been out of the office since February 1995 on a medical disability leave, he said.

During the investigation, two other female deputies reported that Moya also made advances to them, Moya said--which he denies. Moya said the department let him listen to their tapes. He said both women were “discipline problems.”

Moya denied enlisting inmates against Landolfi, though he believes having women guard some male prisoners can fuel tensions.

“You have to understand the clientele we served in the jail are a lot of Latinos, not U.S. Latinos but South Americans,” he said. “In their culture, women don’t really have a place. It’s a macho lifestyle. Women don’t really make decisions.”

Baca concedes that the department harbors its own cultural problems: “I don’t think sexual harassment is rampant in the Sheriff’s Department, but I do believe we have a sexism problem.”