INTERVIEW—Shaking UP the Sheriffs

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Lee Baca has initiated a multimillion-dollar, top-to-bottom overhaul of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency

L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca took office two years ago promising to shake up a department that many had seen as stagnating under his longtime predecessor Sherman Block. After a low-key start, Baca made some waves early last year by announcing he was setting up a civilian oversight board to monitor internal investigations of alleged misconduct of deputies.

But Baca saved the real overhaul for a massive restructuring he unveiled right after Christmas. Under the plan, dubbed LASD2, Baca calls for beefing up the command structure, spending tens of millions of dollars each year to build new sheriff’s stations and upgrading existing ones, refurbishing the earthquake-damaged Hall of Justice downtown and expanding educational and other programs in the county jail system.

The total cost of the plan: an estimated $1 billion over 30 years. The Board of Supervisors has already authorized about $300 million for a variety of projects, including the building of three new sheriff’s stations. The refurbishing of the Hall of Justice is now before the Board. But in a county that is chronically strapped for funds, it’s far from certain the rest of the plan will be funded.

With a $1.5 billion budget and 16,000 personnel 8,600 of them deputies the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department is the largest law enforcement agency in the nation. Not only does it serve the unincorporated portions of L.A. County, it also provides law enforcement services under contract to 41 of L.A. County’s 88 cities.

Baca, who grew up in the barrio in East L.A. and rose through the ranks in his 34 years with the Sheriff’s Department, is currently the highest-paid elected official in the nation, with a salary of $207,000. That’s slightly more than the $200,000 salary that President Clinton pulls down. But he will lose that distinction on Jan. 20, when George W. Bush takes office as the 43rd President. Under a recent act of Congress, Bush’s annual salary will be $400,000.

Question: Why did you propose this sweeping restructuring plan with such a huge price tag?

Answer: When I took office, I wanted to know just what condition the Sheriff’s Department was in. So during the first two and a half months in office, I audited each of the 70 command units, all the jails, courthouses and other administrative facilities. It was truly a massive undertaking, but I knew I had to get a handle on all the bureaucratic problems, identify all the inefficiencies and take stock of all the needs of the department.

Because I’ve been with the department for so long, I knew there were going to be problems, but I really was surprised by the extent of the problems I found. At the end of the audit, I had 700 pages of unmet needs everything from stations literally falling apart to squad cars without radios and a bureaucracy that was woefully inefficient. Rather than look at each of these issues separately, I decided to put them in a single comprehensive blueprint for the department.

Q: Before we get to the fixes, how did things get so bad in the first place?

A: The recession really took a toll on our department. Ten years ago, before the recession began, we were barely keeping up with all of our infrastructure needs. One big reason: Proposition 13 meant fewer funds for local government.

Then from 1993 through 1996, the county’s finances really suffered as the health department problems pushed the whole county to the edge of bankruptcy. The state also diverted billions of dollars from local government coffers to balance its own books. As a result, we had to cut our budget $190 million during those four years. We downsized our deputy sheriffs and put on hold any plans for station upgrades. Even today, three years after the county’s finances stabilized, we’re still 600 deputies short of where we were back in 1992.

Q: You also mentioned that the bureaucracy was inefficient. How so?

A: In many ways. Just take purchasing practices. People would request to purchase things and then they would wait for indeterminate periods of time before those purchases were made. Service contracts weren’t being properly kept up on our copiers, so when they broke down, no one would come for days to fix them. Those things create inefficiencies in the workplace and people slowed down their efforts because of them.

Given these types of conditions, any good manager would say this bureaucracy needs to be shaken up. And that’s what I did.

Q: You also shook up the way your internal affairs department conducts business, setting up a civil oversight panel. What prompted that?

A: I looked at the methods we used in our internal affairs investigations and I determined that we needed another set of eyes and minds to look at what we are doing. Law enforcement cannot always audit itself. It doesn’t bring enough public confidence to the issues that law enforcement finds itself in, be it a shooting, use of force or other action. So I called for a six-member panel of attorneys with civil rights backgrounds who have the ability to decipher policy and law to see if we are fulfilling our constitutional role. We need to know if we are obeying constitutional law and if we are following our own policies. If we’re not doing these things, how are we self-correcting? This is a credibility challenge here that law enforcement bodies across the country face.

Q: Was this motivated in part by the LAPD Rampart scandal?

A: Yes it was. As you know, that matter surfaced just before I took office. The problem with that investigation was that no one else gets to see the investigation except the police. If you want the public to trust that you are doing the right thing, you need checks and balances. That’s why we need that set of outside eyes.

Q: You have proposed a lot of changes over the last year. Has there been any resistance to your efforts? Has it affected morale in the department?

A: There was some resistance during the first four to six months. Some people wondered whether trying to do all this at once was too much. They talked about “prioritizing” our needs. But if we have 100 needs and only deal with 10 at any one time, then the others fester and only get bigger.

Others gave the typical response of any bureaucracy when confronted with change. They said, “But we’ve always done it this way.”

As for morale, I make it my point to visit each and every command at least once every six months. I look to see if there are any problems with personnel, with equipment. That’s part of what I’m addressing in the resource and restructuring plan.

Q: A while back, the Twin Towers jail was opened, after the county spent more than $200 million to build it. For a long time, it sat empty because there were no funds to operate it. It’s now occupied, but what are your plans for it?

A: Right now, we have about 2,000 women in one tower and 2,000 mentally ill inmates in the other tower. It’s still an operation that’s costly. When it opened up, we shut down the Sybil Brand Institute for Women entirely to find the finances to bring one of the towers into operation. To me, it’s a misplacement of dollars because women are not prone to escapes and are not as difficult to manage in jail. Therefore, they do not need to be put in the one facility that is our highest-security prison. That’s why I’m working to refurbish the old Sybil Brand Institute and to look at putting women prisoners there and at the Pitchess Honor Rancho out in Saugus.

Q: Nearly half of the county’s 88 cities contract with your department to provide law enforcement. Why is your department so popular with cities, and are you running any risk of being over-committed?

A: Each entity we contract with has different reasons for opting to go with us. When you look at Compton, for example, their general fund revenue averaged $32 million a year; the existing police department was costing them $20 million a year, plus some $2 million a year in workers’ compensation expenses. When two-thirds of your budget is spent on law enforcement, something has to give. The city’s contract with the Sheriff’s Department is a little under $12 million. That’s a substantial savings that comes with an actual increase in the level of service, since we are able to put more squad cars on the street than they had. As a business decision, it’s a proposition that few cities can afford to ignore.

And no, there really is no limit to the number of cities that can contract with us. We are the largest county in the U.S. and we are regionalizing more and more of what we do. We will continue to have a blend of serving cities and unincorporated areas. And you must remember, the funding is not entirely on the back of the county; each city pays for the share of services it receives.

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