Is it time for the feds to investigate wrongdoing in the LA County’s jails—again?

On December 9, 2013, slightly more than a decade from today, the The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, filed five criminal cases for a total of 18 indictments against members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The indictments were brought by U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte Jr., who is now a federal judge.  They were the result of a vigorous FBI investigation that would eventually go on for six years. The charges were allegations of civil rights violations and other forms of corruption infecting the nation’s largest jail system, run by the nation’s largest sheriff’s department.

The 2013 allegations, and those that followed, included “unjustified beatings of jail inmates and visitors” at downtown Los Angeles jail facilities, “unjustified detentions and a conspiracy to obstruct the federal investigation into misconduct at the system’s Men’s Central Jail.”

This investigation resulted in prison convictions for 21 department members, including longtime Sheriff Lee Baca, and his notorious undersheriff Paul Tanaka.

It would be wonderful to think that the high-profile convictions would have a transformative effect on the culture of the world’s fourth largest jail system. 

Yet, while some changes were made, a recent letter sent to Martin Estrada, the present U. S. Attorney of the Central District of California, suggests that the county has a painfully long way to go.

The ACLU asks for help

The letter is signed by Peter J. Eliasberg, who is the chief counsel for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, and Corene T. Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project. It urges Estrada to launch an in-depth criminal investigation into the array of still un-rectified pattern of wrongdoings taking place in the Los Angeles County jails.

And, just in case anybody missed what Eliasberg and Kendrick believe is the seriousness of the situation, they also emailed the letter to two people near the top of the food chain of U.S. Department of Justice, namely  Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Kristen Clarke, and James Felte, the Chief of the Criminal Section, of the USDOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

Class action

Eliasberg is particularly involved in the issue of conditions in the county’s jails, as he is also the counsel for the plaintiffs in Rosas v. Luna, a class action lawsuit filed in 2012, challenging the improper uses of force and physical abuse of jail detainees by the staff members of Los Angeles Sheriffs’ Department.

Some examples of the allegations made in the original 2012 Rosas complaint include the following:

In July 2011, two deputies beat a handcuffed inmate about the head and neck. The beating was so severe that he required hospitalization outside the jail, and has permanent hearing loss in one ear. 

On March 16, 2011, three deputies beat an African American inmate until he was unconscious, then carved the letters M – Y into his scalp, the first two letters of “MYATE,” (or more commonly “MAYATE,”) a racial street slur meaning “Black.” 

Also in March 2011, deputies slammed a handcuffed inmate’s head into a cement wall, leaving him with a concussion and a gash that took 35 stitches to close, then beat him around the head and face when he came to, resulting in 2 days of hospitalization and four additional days in the jail’s medical unit. (The ACLU reports that there were several witnesses to this incident.)

Rosas, however, is only one of several long-standing class action filings pertaining to conditions in the county’s jails.

Yet, according to Eliasberg, high on the list of the triggering issues that precipitated the new request to the feds is a video depicting a “grotesque use of force incident,”  in which two deputies threw a detainee head-first into a concrete wall in Men’s Central Jail, resulting in head lacerations and other injuries.

It wasn’t the video alone that caused the outreach by Eliasberg and the ACLU. There was also the fact that the LA County District Attorney’s office declined to file on the case.

Here’s the deal.

Head shots & the need for oversight

Most WitnessLA readers have seen the now infamous video.  It is one of the cluster of six surveillance videos that WLA and the Los Angeles Times—with the help of two teams of talented civil rights attorneys—successfully filed to have unsealed, so that the videos could be seen by other journalists and, most importantly,  by members of LA County’s communities who are served by the LASD.

The six videos — which you can find here — depict incidents that took place on dates ranging from October 24, 2019, to July 4, 2022, meaning they occurred during the period that former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva ran the department—before Sheriff Robert Luna took office on December 3, 2022.

The head-striking episode pictured in the first and best known of the six videos is dated July 4, 2022, meaning the incident depicted occurred six months before Luna was sworn in on December 3, 2022.  Yet, while the incident is only a few seconds long, it is disturbing to watch.

The importance of unsealing the six tapes was further illustrated in an op-ed by Miriam Krinsky, founder and executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution and Alex Busansky,  the president and founder of Impact Justice, who wrote of the effect of the videos, particularly the July 4, 2022, head slamming video.

In their op-ed, the twosome wrote about the effect of the videos on their perspectives, even though both Krinsky and Busansky are each very familiar with conditions in the LA County jail system and other problem-plagued custody systems, because, among other things, they were both part of the Los Angeles County Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence (CCJV), which as readers may remember, was charged with investigating — and crafting recommendations to address — the decades-long pattern by certain sheriff’s deputies of using excessive force in LA County’s jails.

Yet, despite their range of experience, and despite the detailed testimony Krinsky and Busansky heard for weeks from department members, former jail detainees, and others during the 2012 CCJV hearings, the twosome wrote that seeing the six unsealed videos shook them in a manner they didn’t expect.

“It’s one thing to hear about excessive force incidents inflicted upon LA County jail residents at the hands of Sheriff’s Department personnel,” they wrote. 

“It’s another thing to see them. Either way it’s troubling, but recently released videos of blatant assaults on individuals in the county’s care struck a more urgent chord.”

Yet holding someone accountable for such actions turns out to be challenging.

The DA’s Office and Accountability

During her eight-year tenure, former Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey was repeatedly criticized for her failure to file charges against members of law enforcement.

This was true even in instances when Lacey’s office appeared to simply have no choice to bring charges against a member of the LASD, such as in the case of former LA County Sheriff’s Deputy Giancarlo Scotti, who was accused of sexually assaulting six different women in the county’s main women’s jail, Century Regional Detention Center.

As WitnessLA reported at the time, Lacey’s office dialed the charges back to sweetheart deal status, claiming incredibly that that prosecutors wouldn’t be able to prove any of the more serious charges in front of a jury.  (Instead, Los Angeles County paid out $5,175,000 in civil claims to women Scotti assaulted.)

DA George Gascón, in contrast, has brought a list of charges against law enforcement officers, but has had trouble getting convictions.

“As most prosecutors know,” wrote Scott Schwebke in the LA Daily News two years ago, “absent some compelling evidence of wrongdoing or extreme negligence, it is difficult to win criminal cases against police officers…”   Even when it comes to fatal shootings.

In the case of the head slamming incident depicted in the notorious video, the prosecutors at the DA’s office who reviewed the case, elected not to file. 

Here, in part, is their conclusion.

“It cannot be determined from the video footage whether [Deputy] Guiterrez deliberately slammed [name redacted] into the wall, or whether the contact was accidental as result of [name redacted] swinging and lunging his own body toward the wall (and Guiterrez) combined with Guiterrez’s efforts to control [name redacted] and overcome his resistance.

Based on the foregoing,’ they wrote, there is “insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that [name redacted’s] injuries [on the victim’s head and face] were caused by the willful and unlawful actions of Deputies Guiterrez and Peralta.  Accordingly, we decline to initiate criminal proceedings.”

The ACLU was unhappy at the failure to file, but also described the declination memo to be “full of misstatements and misinterpretations.”

WitnessLA can’t say for sure whether or not the LA County DA’s office could have successfully pursued a criminal conviction, but we too found a number of weird statements and inexplicable misinterpretations of facts in the declination memo.

“It was as if they were watching a different video,” Eliasberg said.

Exactly.

Ongoing failures

Other experts in the world of jails and prisons also found the July 4, 2022 video disturbing.

Last fall, for example, a panel of three justice experts who act as monitors for the Rosas lawsuit, submitted their most recent twice-yearly report describing how the LA County Sheriff’s Department was and wasn’t hitting the agreed upon marks to develop “a corrective action plan,” designed to ensure that those residing in the jails “were not subject to excessive force and other potential forms of abuse.”

WitnessLA obtained the panel’s 51-page report, and it did not make for cheering reading.

In one instance, the panel described how the then LASD’s assistant sheriff in charge of custody,  produced a video for deputies and supervisors, which highlighted “the three criteria that must be present prior to utilizing a head strike.”

Yet, despite the fact that the assistant sheriff had attempted to make clear the only conditions in which a head strike could be used, according to the oversight panel, when it came to the actual use of head strikes, the supervisors with the task of investigating and reviewing head strike incidents nearly always “concluded the force was reasonable and within departmental policy.”

However, when three Rosas panel members themselves reviewed the same incidents that LASD supervisors deemed reasonable, the threesome disagreed with the department’s conclusions “in over 85% of these cases.”

The Rosas panel members are joined by other experts who expressed deep concern about the use of head strikes.

In the spring of last year, for example, the ACLU retained a law enforcement and corrections expert named Stephen Sinclair, to further review the LASD’s use of force inside the jails.  The result was a 35-page report, which you can find here.

Among the problems Sinclair described was what he called the “ongoing failures” of the LASD to control “unnecessary and excessive uses of force,” inside the jails.

Based on what he reviewed, Sinclair said, the nation’s largest sheriff’s department needs to “elevate the use of head strikes” to the category of  “deadly force,” which greatly changes how and when such techniques may be used, and what the consequences could be for using head strikes outside those boundaries.

To illustrate his point Sinclair included the photo (which you can find at the top of this story) depicting the injuries resulting from the notorious head slamming in the July 4, 2022, video.

Sinclair wrote in his analysis of the incident shown in the video, how deputies failed to use de-escalation but “allowed the inmate to exit the cell.” And when the inmate attempted to pull away, “one deputy grabs the inmate by the head and aggressively slams his head into a concrete wall, causing significant head trauma with lacerations to the inmate’s head.”

Certainly, many of those working inside the county’s jail system, do so without crossing ethical lines.

Yet, for those who do cross lines, Eliasberg and other experienced sources say, there appears to be little or no consequences for the deputies’ actions—either from the LA County Sheriff’s Department or the DA’s office.

And so the ACLU would like the feds to step in.

WitnessLA agrees.

Although Sheriff Luna ran as a reformist sheriff, over and over again he has failed to produce reform.

He did all he could to prevent the release of the six videos, including the July 4, 2022 video. He still has no deputy gang policy. Our sources inside men’s central jail still call us with horror story after horror story.

And rather than protect whistleblower deputies, Sheriff Luna has allowed a stunning series of retaliations.

(WLA has a new series coming up about ongoing retaliations against a whistleblower.)

It certainly seems that someone needs to do something.

More soon, so watch this space.

*****

Editor’s Note:  We are aware that former Sheriff Lee Baca, 82,  is suffering from a form of Alzheimer’s, and got lost during a walk last Sunday.  He was not found until early Monday morning.  At WitnessLA, we are very grateful for the fact that the former sheriff was located and was safe “and in good health.”