Harassment in Sheriff’s Department Decried

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has an entrenched culture that tolerates racial and sexual harassment of its employees, and a civilian commission should be created to review all complaints, an independent assessment of the department has concluded.

The report by Management Practices Group of San Francisco, commissioned jointly by the sheriff’s department and lawyers representing female deputies, found that the department does not value diversity and resists change. A “wall of silence . . . certainly exists with respect to gender and racial equity,” said the report, which was released at an ACLU press conference Tuesday.

The report proposes that Sheriff Lee Baca establish a five-member civilian Equity Oversight Commission, which would be empowered to issue findings not subject to review or change, except by the County Civil Service Commission or the courts.

The commission would have the final say on discipline for sexual harassment and would decide whether complaints had been properly investigated, said Janet Herold, a lawyer representing the department’s 1,180 sworn female officers in a class-action suit.

The report follows six months of focus groups and interviews with Sheriff’s Department personnel, a review of the department’s documents on harassment complaints and observations at work stations.

It noted that even among top-ranking officials, there is denial “that the department has a serious problem related to workplace equity.”

Employees who report being harassed because of race or gender are tagged as disloyal “for complaining about the conduct of fellow officers, rather than commended for attempting to set the department on the right track,” the report said.

It said complaints have been followed by retaliation “ranging from the merely annoying to the extremely serious, such as being ‘accidentally’ left without backup in dangerous situations.”

But when complaints are investigated, officers profess to know nothing about them, the report said.

“The department’s files are full of statements from sworn personnel who saw or heard ‘absolutely nothing,’ ” it said.

Paula Perlman, an attorney with the California Women’s Law Center, praised the report and asked: “What is it going to take until we address these issues in law enforcement? It’s a travesty that we allow this level of sex discrimination to exist with impunity.”

The report’s author, D. Jan Duffy, president of Management Practices Group, said she hadn’t expected the American Civil Liberties Union to release the report Tuesday.

“I’m concerned because I want to be sure that this constructive work continues,” she said, referring to Sheriff’s Department efforts to come to grips with sexual and racial harassment.

“That the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has had problems with gender equity in the past is not news,” Duffy said in a statement. “The news is that the [department] is working so proactively to do something about it.”

Race and sex discrimination in the department has long been a contentious issue. A study by retired Superior Court Judge James Kolts in 1992 found that the department was not addressing racial problems, and female deputies complained of retaliation when they filed harassment complaints.

A 1993 consent decree resulting from the class-action suit by female deputies mandates that the department develop and implement a lawful sexual-harassment policy.

But the assessment released Tuesday found that the department has failed to live up to its own commitments to achieve equity.