Sex Harassment Inquiries Faulted

A review of 11 claims and lawsuits against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has found that the agency has failed to adequately investigate allegations of sexual harassment and in some cases, expected complainants to “just take it,” according to a report issued Tuesday.

Attorney Merrick Bobb, a special counsel appointed by the Board of Supervisors to monitor the department, said his study of the 11 cases found that some sheriff’s supervisors “could not recognize, or did not choose to recognize, sexual harassment.”

He noted that the cases--some of which date back to 1995--have resulted in nearly $3 million in payouts by the county.

“Indifference to sexual harassment causes victims to be victimized over and over again,” Bobb wrote. “Although the department spoke of ‘zero tolerance,’ there was instead, in the eyes of many, substantial tolerance of sexual harassment.”

Although Bobb credited Sheriff Lee Baca with taking steps to address the issue, he said the sheriff must be willing to commit “substantial funds and redeploy personnel” to eliminate the problem.

“We do not doubt a sincere desire for change by the Baca administration,” Bobb wrote. “But sincere words must be backed by sincere action. The serious questions that remain are whether resources will be committed in promised quantity and whether the new program will succeed.

“If the [Sheriff’s Department] does not put its money, as well as its rhetoric, behind the effort to deal with gender equity issues in general and sexual harassment specifically, an uncomfortable status quo will likely persist.”

Sheriff’s officials, meanwhile, said they are committed to correcting the situation. In recent weeks, the department has established a special unit to address the problems and is working with the county affirmative action chief in jointly investigating harassment complaints.

Also in Bobb’s report was a section on the sheriff’s Century Station, which accounted for all but $20,000 of the $1.61 million the county paid out last year to settle cases stemming from officer-involved shootings. Bobb said he is concerned that the payouts were symptomatic of wider problems at the station.

Although he said sheriff’s officials assured him that changes were being made at Century, he will continue to monitor criminal and administrative investigations involving deputies there. He said he was encouraged that the station has had only one officer-involved shooting this year, compared with eight last year.

Bobb launched his sexual harassment investigation at the request of county supervisors, who expressed concern last spring after an Internet survey elicited dozens of misogynistic e-mail messages about female deputies. The survey was sponsored by Digital City LA, which asked Internet users to weigh in on Baca’s March 26 announcement that he intended to bypass male deputies in an effort to transfer more women to patrol duties.

Although there was never proof that deputies sent the messages--which derided women in crudely offensive terms--the supervisors were skeptical. They asked Bobb to prepare a report on sexual harassment in the department.

In his 96-page report, Bobb said he found that sheriff’s supervisors were not the only ones who failed to recognize the problem. Internal affairs investigators also displayed “little apparent motivation to eliminate sexual harassment,” he wrote.

Moving “sluggishly and unimaginatively,” the investigators failed to broaden their inquiries when additional allegations of sexual harassment came to light, the report said.

“There were several instances where the [department] charged perpetrators with lesser conduct than sexual harassment, even though a harassment charge was appropriate,” Bobb wrote. “Conversely, we found cases where apparently meritorious charges of harassment were somehow not sustained for reasons we could not figure out.”

Bobb wrote that he was also struck by the tacit assumption by Sheriff’s Department supervisors that “complainants betrayed weakness by raising issues of harassment and should have been able to ‘just take it.’ ”

“We speculate that the same culture that tests male rookies by hazing and calls for demonstration of macho behavior likewise expects female rookies, as well as openly gay rookies, to demonstrate their toughness by ‘just taking it’ as regards sexual harassment or homophobic commentary,” Bobb wrote.

He said he found an instance in which one supervisor apparently “fell into the trap” of seeing the harassment as “mere” hazing and minimized the conduct by explaining “that’s just the way [the harasser] is.”

In another instance, Bobb wrote, a male supervisor thanked a female employee for sharing her “concerns” and said she handled the sexual harassment well by not “blowing the complaint out of proportion.”

“The supervisor may have unwittingly trivialized the complaint or caused the complainant to feel somewhat patronized, at least it would seem so in light of the ultimate $350,000 paid to settle the case,” Bobb wrote.