13 people vanish from Probation’s leadership. So will it help?

Late on Friday afternoon, June 28, Los Angeles County Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa caused a great many heads to spin with his announcement that 13 people were no longer going to be working at the top tier of probation’s management.

Yet, together with the head spinning, there also appears to be a great deal of cautious optimism about what this news will mean for the future of the agency, in particular the youth side of probation.

“As you might be aware,” wrote Viera Rosa in a message to the agency’s rank and file, “today we announced an unprecedented restructuring of Probation that eliminates thirteen people from the Bureau Chief position.”

According to the chief, he thanked all of those affected and wished them the best “as they transition to other County positions or endeavors.”

(Note:  Those who were moved out of probation’s upper management were not terminated, which would have been all but impossible, but were moved laterally to another county agency. Yet, at least one of the 13 reportedly chose instead to retire.)

“Because staff restructurings may raise questions,” Viera Rosa wrote, “I also wanted to write [to] you directly to explain why I decided this major step was necessary and what it means for the rest of us, especially those working long hours every week in the field and juvenile operations.”

The changes, according to the chief, “will make us more accountable to each other while increasing transparency to the public.”

There was more to the message, but this was the heart of the statement from the chief.

Some familiar with the reasons for moving so many high-level people out of the department had other things to say.

“After decades of this bunch ruining” [probation’s] “culture, and forcing every chief out,” they are all “being sent out of the probation department,”  said one longtime youth justice expert in reference to several of the names on the list.

As for how the rank-and-file is taking the news, a source inside the department had this to say.

“They are stunned,” the source said. “But, also happy.”

Some of those working in the youth facilities specifically,” added the source, were “upset Eric Strong is still at probation.” 

The source was referring to a member of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department who is presently on loan to probation as that agency’s Chief Safety and Security Officer, a loan that has been controversial.

An earlier house cleaning

The exit of the 13 is not the first time this year that Chief Viera Rosa has done a major house cleaning when it comes to probation personnel.

On May 13, in a dramatic but very different move, the chief put 66 sworn officers on administrative leave, pending internal affairs investigations into allegations of official misconduct, including at the county’s youth facilities.

Back in May, Viera Rosa released an email explaining why so many department members had been put on leave. His reason for the dramatic move, he wrote, was “to regain public trust” in the nation’s largest probation agency, “as it roots out employees who cultivate or contribute to a culture of violence, drug use, neglect and sexual misconduct,” wrote the chief.

“We are releasing this information in the spirit of greater transparency and to assure our stakeholders — especially the families of youths in our juvenile facilities — that we will not tolerate anything that impedes our mission to provide a safe, nurturing and structured environment for those entrusted to our care.”

According to Viera Rosa, May’s long list of IA investigations were being conducted by California Attorney General, Rob Bonta, who is handling the investigation while LA County Probation restructures its own Internal Affairs Unit (IAU), which has been operating under cloud for a series of reasons.

In 2021, WitnessLA reported on an earlier example of IAU’s dysfunction, which was demonstrated by its failure in 2019 to move on allegations of repeated sexual abuse of a teenage girl, with very painful consequences

When we investigated the story in 2021, WLA learned that, in addition to those who spoke to the victim, there was a cluster of probation bureau chiefs and deputy directors who were also made aware of the repeated and very disturbing allegations by the teenage girl.

Interestingly, some of those same people are prominent among the list of thirteen who on Friday were made to vanish from Los Angeles County Probation leadership, and from the department itself.

Cracking the code

So how and why did Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa remove the list of thirteen?

“Guillermo cracked the code,” said one probation veteran of the thirteen transfers. “He cracked the code!”

When asked to explain, the source said that much of the reason a string of previous chiefs had been thwarted in their efforts to reform the department, is that they had no way of putting together their own teams, but “had to work with the upper management that was there.”

At some point in cycling through chief after chief, said the source, the members of the LA County Board of Supervisors realized “that no one’s going to succeed,” if a chief has no way do deal with this issue.

“Then Guillermo figured out that if he defunded certain positions, he could get rid of a lot of people who were obstructionist.”

And that’s what he did.

“He cracked the code.”

And so it was that Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa asked the county’s Chief Executive Officer to ask the board of supervisors to expedite the restructuring of the department he leads by eliminating funding for the 13 bureau chief positions, a change that became part of the county’s revised budget approved last week.

So what does this change at the top suggest for the future?

The chief works to answer that question in a brief public statement recently posted on the agency’s web site:

“This management restructuring represents a major step towards resizing and reorienting the Department under the County’s ‘Care First, Jails Last’ initiative to enact criminal justice reform,” Viera Rosa wrote.

“A streamlined organization will not only allow us to enact internal reforms more effectively, but it will also align us better with the new County Departments of Youth Development, and Justice Care and Opportunities,” he added in closing.

May it be so.

More as we know it.