There are three candidates running for the L.A. County Sheriff position.

In the coming month ahead of the June 5 primary, we’ll do interviews with all of them.

Today, Larry Mantle sits down with candidate Bob Lindsey, a retired Commander of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where he served for 32 years. He worked as the Department’s Director of Personnel for five of those years. Now, he wants to return to the department and says he wants to make it more transparent.

We’ll discuss how Lindsey plans to achieve this, as well as his other goals for the L.A. County Sheriff’s department, should he win the seat, as well as his critiques of the current leadership and the other candidates.

Ready for Election Day? Get up to speed on what you need to know with KPCC’s Voter Game Plan. Read up on the candidates and ballot measures, find out about registration deadlines and ask us your questions.

GUEST:

Bob Lindsey, one of the candidates for the L.A. County Sheriff’s race; he is a retired Commander of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where he served for 32 years

The Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, which represents approximately 7,900 non-supervisory deputies in the nation’s largest sheriff’s department, held off on endorsing Sheriff Jim McDonnell, or one of his challengers, based on the number of respondents the union had to the survey, which was a little less than 18 percent of membership, said Detective Ron Hernandez, a 34-year member of the Sheriff’s Department and president of ALADS.

The union was hoping for at least about 33 percent of participation for an endorsement; however, for Hernandez, the results were indicative of department concerns.

“In response to the question: ‘Who would you like to see ALADS endorse for Los Angeles County Sheriff?’ The votes were cast as follows,” according to the news release:

“I believe in talking to the members that there was a low participation in this poll due to the fact that deputy sheriffs know that we’re in contract negotiations — it’s not a good time to point out the failures of the sheriff,” Hernandez said. “It was enough to catch our attention as to the confidence in our current sheriff.”

For their part, sheriff’s officials said they’ve been working on a number of measures to increase their recruitment, marketing and hiring procedures, according to Capt. Darren Harris of the Sheriff’s Information Bureau, speaking on behalf of the Sheriff’s Department.

Both the county and the department are aware of the problem, Harris said, which is reflected in law enforcement agencies big and small throughout the country.

“The first thing we’ve done in response (to the problem) is, we’ve doubled our recruitment staff; second, the sheriff created a task force to assist us in our recruiting and hiring efforts,” Harris said, “recruiting and working to get people through the entire hiring process.”

The Task Force is made up of members of the Sheriff’s Department, the county CEO’s Office and deputies union representatives, he said.

The department is also gathering information for the potential hiring of a marketing firm to look at how the department can enhance best practices, which is in addition to a recent county motion that authorized consultants to assist LASD in its hiring and recruitment practices, Harris said.

While the poll represents a completely unofficial result, it indicates the inroads that sheriff candidate Bob Lindsey has made in gaining support of the rank-and-file in his bid to unseat Sheriff Jim McDonnell.

Lindsey touted a measure of vindication in the results in a statement to The Signal on Tuesday.

“While the result of the poll is not binding and does not represent an endorsement per se, ALADS represents a significant portion of Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriffs as their official negotiator and union,” Lindsey said. “The ALADS poll represents a strong expression of confidence in my candidacy regardless of the sample size.”

A representative for McDonnell, who is seeking re-election, was not immediately available Tuesday.

Hernandez and Derek Hsieh, a nondeputy, former law enforcement officer who’s the executive director for ALADS, both noted the staffing crisis was a much bigger concern than a potential raise, due to the large amount of mandatory overtime deputies have had to work. Missed training opportunities for continuing professional development, such as when the department implements new technology or tools, are also a concern, Hernandez said.

The current shortage is at about 1,500 positions, Hernandez said, adding that’s not an estimate or wish list, but the number of funded positions that are currently unstaffed. The current contract expired in January, and deputies have been operating under the expired agreement since.

Deputies union declines to endorse candidate in sheriff’s race

Radio inteview from Americaoutloud.com

original link: http://americaoutloud.com/need-reframe-conversation-la-county-sheriff-candidate-bob-lindsey/

As the president and others demanded, among other things, that local police work closely with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to hand over jail inmates suspected of being in the country illegally, the Sheriff’s Department took a defiant stand, saying ICE officers had to collect inmate information from a public website.

Behind the scenes, however, things were playing out differently.

Instead of keeping immigration officers at an arm’s length, Sheriff’s Department jail officials granted them access to the department’s inmate processing facility, allowing them to set up an office with computers that provided “a constant flow of information regarding prisoners who were soon to be released,” according to a report released Monday by the independent watchdog that oversees the Sheriff’s Department.

In the report, Inspector General Max Huntsman also noted multiple incidents in which his inspectors observed sheriff’s staff providing detailed information directly to ICE officers about inmates who were about to be released.

Sheriff Jim McDonnell acknowledged the discrepancies between his department’s public assurances and the reality in the department’s Inmate Reception Center in a letter to Huntsman.

“We prioritize maintaining and increasing public trust and always endeavor to provide the public with accurate information. With respect to our statements that we were either no longer providing ICE with lists of individuals being released, or that we did not provide release information to ICE, those statements were not accurate,” McDonnell wrote.

Huntsman’s inquiry stemmed from a letter McDonnell wrote to county supervisors in January, in which he responded to a request for a detailed explanation of how the department shared information about inmates with ICE and how it handled requests from immigration officials to hand over people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Elected officials around the country had been asking such questions of police chiefs and sheriffs since Trump and Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions had begun to threaten to withhold funds and other consequences for municipalities that did not honor ICE’s requests for help. The cooperation was an important part of Trump’s sweeping deportation plan that made nearly all of the estimated 12 million people in the country illegally eligible to be removed.

In particular, ICE wanted local police to hold on to flagged inmates for up to two days past their scheduled release date to allow immigration officers to take custody of them. ICE also wanted advanced notice before inmates suspected of immigration violations were released from custody.

McDonnell and other sheriff’s officials emphasized repeatedly in public statements that the department adhered to state laws setting out ground rules for local police cooperating with ICE. The Sheriff’s Department refused to hold inmates in custody for ICE, and inmate release information had to be obtained through its website, they said.

In one particularly pointed claim, the department took to Twitter in July in response to a Times article. “LASD does NOT provide release info to #ICE. Our public website has ALL inmate release dates. It’s up to #ICE to vet the data,” officials wrote.

In reality, Huntsman found ICE officers had been allowed to set up five desktop computers in an office in the Inmate Reception Center that was nominally reserved for officers from any outside agency to use. The computers were removed when Huntsman shared his findings with sheriff’s officials, according to the report.

Huntsman also cited “multiple occasions” in which jail personnel gave ICE officers in the reception center printouts from an internal Sheriff’s Department computer program that contained the birthdates and other identifying information about inmates who were set to be released from custody. The information, which was not publicly available online, made it easier for ICE officers to determine whether to take custody of the inmates.

That information sharing has since ceased, McDonnell said in his letter to Huntsman.

Through a spokeswoman, the Sheriff’s Department did not make anyone available to comment on the report.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/topic/crime-law-justice/law-enforcement/l.a.-county-sheriffs-department-ORGOV000937-topic.html

Inspector General Max Huntsman said his 17-page report, released Tuesday, calls into question whether the department “is in control of itself” as it continues to implement reforms a few years after an abuse scandal rocked the nation’s largest jail system.

“They themselves said that they didn’t believe their own data,” Huntsman said. “If they can’t assess themselves, and if they can’t tell us what’s going on in their own department, then we can’t assess them.”

Huntsman said his review was prompted by questions earlier this year from the Los Angeles Times about why the department was reporting inconsistent numbers of inmate-on-inmate assaults.

The department told the newspaper this past spring it could not stand by the inmate assault statistics it had previously issued to the paper and to the inspector general’s office — which had already published the numbers in a few of its reports — and that it would review its data systems.

Read a report by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Inspector General on flawed data collection by the Sheriff’s Department
Huntsman’s office found the department tracks jail incidents using various types of software that are incompatible with one another and sometimes allow for duplicate entries and other times enable multiple events to be listed as one, among other errors.

As a result, the numbers that the department collects for its internal records versus the statistics it reports to outside agencies can diverge significantly.

In one example cited by Huntsman, the department recorded in an internal report that there were 382 inmate-on-staff assaults in 2015, but the department told the office of inspector general there were 464 of those assaults that year. The inspector general described this as a 17.7% variance.

In 2012, the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence voiced similar concerns, saying that the department relies on antiquated, incompatible systems to track uses of force and that it should replace those methods with a uniform, comprehensive data tracking system.

Sheriff Jim McDonnell, then chief of the Long Beach Police Department, was one of seven members of that citizen’s commission.

Assistant Sheriff Kelly Harrington said he agreed with many of the inspector general’s findings and that the department would be better served by an integrated jail data system with one repository for information.

But Harrington, who oversees the department’s jails and previously served as a director in the state correctional system, said creating a streamlined jail management system “has not been a top priority” in the year and a half he’s been with the Sheriff’s Department.

He emphasized, however, that the trend line on severe or inappropriate uses of force by guards — arguably the most important metric to examine in the wake of the jail abuse controversy — is indeed down.

“Those issues aren’t happening in the jails, and if they are, those individuals responsible are being held accountable,” Harrington said.

Peter Eliasberg, chief counsel at the ACLU of Southern California, which monitors the jails, agreed that “brutal, heavy-handed assaults” by guards in which inmates’ teeth are kicked in or jaws shattered appear to no longer be a common feature in the county’s jails.

But Eliasberg said it’s still critical for the department to collect precise data about all types of jail incidents, including minor uses of force by guards, inmate-on-inmate assaults and inmate-on-staff assaults. Even relatively small fluctuations in those statistics, such as a 5% rise or drop, can signal the need for officials to examine problems more closely.

Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who served as the executive director of the 2012 commission, said the inspector general’s report underscores the continued need for oversight of the Sheriff’s Department.

“Any law enforcement agency can only improve what it knows and what it tracks,” she said.

Huntsman’s report recommends that there be a single unit in the department responsible for compiling and verifying all jail violence data in order to generate more accurate information.

ABC News contributed to this report.