Rosa Gonzalez, the Whistleblower – Part 1

LASD Sergeant Rosa Gonzalez wanted to be a cop ever since she was a kid.

“I grew up in a bad environment,” she said when we talked about her childhood ambitions.

 “My dad was a heroin addict.  My mom had to work two jobs to make ends meet. She worked in the strawberry fields and cleaned houses for a living,” said Gonzalez.

“Growing up in that environment I grew up with a lot of shame—like I was a second class citizen,” she said.

“So for me law enforcement represented the good in society. They represented justice.”

She resolved that she would become one of these badge-wearing icons.

Gonzalez graduated from high school in 1996, then got an associates degree from Cerritos college, got married, and had the first of her two kids, a daughter. 

Then in 1999, three years later, she took the first concrete steps toward following her childhood dreams.. She applied for the entry level job of custody assistant in the LA County jail system, which meant she was an employee of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, but was not a sworn officer.

Still Gonzalez saw it as a meaningful step. At the jail, she worked the “morning shift,” which was basically an overnight shift in which she came on duty at 10 p.m. and finished at six in the morning.

After coming home from work, Gonzalez juggled caring for her kids, and attending classes at Long Beach State. By 2004, she had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.

Two years later, in 2006, Gonzalez finally got her dream job when she was sworn in as a deputy sheriff in the nation’s largest sheriff’s department. 

She was initially assigned to the Century Regional Detention Center or CRDF, which is LA County’s women’s jail.

Then in 2011, Gonzalez realized an additional childhood dream when she joined the department’s East LA Station, which meant she would be working in the communities she knew from her childhood, and still loved.  She also felt she had a depth of understanding of the area’s joys, and its challenges.

Initially, everything was “great” at the ELA station, she told us. But then Gonzalez began to notice that the station’s captain was not actually running the place.

Instead the station was being run by a group of deputies who had matching tattoos and called themselves the Banditos.  It was a group that frightened community members and would soon become infamous.

“I’d worked with criminal street gangs,” Gonzalez told WitnessLA. And that’s how this particular group among her East LA colleagues carried themselves. Plus they were calling the shots at the station.

Gangsters with badges

For the first three years at the East LA station, Gonzalez adopted the philosophy that if she left them alone, they would leave her alone. For a while that worked.

But in 2014, things changed after she got an assignment that Bandito members felt should have gone to one of their number. They began withholding back-up when she was on patrol. 

In August of 2014, then Chief Bobby Denham decided her life was in danger. With this concern in mind, Denham force-transferred Gonzalez overnight to the department’s Cerritos Station. This meant she was removed against her will from continuing to serve the Eastside communities she loved and understood.

In subsequent chapters of this series we’ll have more on Gonzalez’s Bandito encounters in her East LA years. For now, suffice it to say that, in 2015, she filed a whistleblower lawsuit with the aid of attorney Greg Smith, and won a large settlement.

But the LA County Sheriff’s Department notoriously dislikes whistleblowers. In Gonzalez’s case, her whistleblower actions would bring her a series of very high costs.

In any case, for the next six years, Gonzalez worked in various stations and units of the department, including a position as field training officer at Norwalk Station, a job that she treasured. In each position she received the highest of ratings.  But promotions were slow to come. 

Personnel affairs

Finally, in the summer of 2021, Gonzalez, who was by then Sgt. Gonzalez, was assigned as Operations Sergeant at the LA Sheriff’s Department’s Personnel Administration Bureau—or PAB.  It seemed like an ideal transfer.

Many of her upbeat feelings were based on the fact that, among the reasons she was requested to transfer to the PAB was the fact she was known as a skilled writer.  And so it was that, during the early weeks of Gonzalez’s time at personnel, in addition to her other jobs, she was frequently asked to write, or rewrite the work of acting captain, Yvonne O’Brien. She also wrote the or rewrote work of another woman named Carmen Arballo, who, like Gonzalez, was a sergeant, hoping to promote to lieutenant. Gonzalez loves writing and is good at it, so she found helping the other women to be enjoyable.

The PAB is responsible for all hiring, promotions, and personnel movement at the LASD. So, it is understandably considered extremely important that those who work within the bureau are capable and scrupulously honest—especially since, in the LASD’s bad old days, during the reign of former Sheriff Lee Baca and his notorious undersheriff Paul Tanaka, that had demonstrably not been the case. (In the past WitnessLA wrote a great deal about how Tanaka had a pay-to-play promotional system.)

Things started to get strange at the PAB during the months of July, and early August, 2021, when, seemingly out of nowhere Sgt. Arballo confided in Gonzalez that she had been getting paid for long hours working in the bureau.  But to get the pay, the sergeant had been falsifying her time cards.  

(Later when Gonzalez checked Arballo’s timecard it indicated that the woman had worked on a string of days when she was not at work at all.) 

The truth was, Arballo told Gonzalez, on the days for which she got wrongly paid for working, she was in Arizona, preparing for the upcoming lieutenant’s exam.  After the time card confession, the woman had another confession. She had cheated on the lieutenant’s test, she said.  According to Arballo, her cheating had been made possible by  acting captain, O’Brien, who had slipped all the test questions and the answers to Arballo, so that she and a few others could memorize everything well before the test.

Gonzalez learned later that Captain O’Brien had knowingly approved of the timecard fraud.  And obviously she knew about the cheating-on-the-lieutenant’s-exam issue

“Just so we’re clear,” said Civil Rights Attorney Vincent Miller, of the exam cheating  problem, “such cheating is not just a violation of LASD policies, it is also a criminal act of fraud.”

As further weeks passed, Gonzalez learned that the test cheating and time-card scamming was not the only unethical and illegal activity going on in the department’s PAB during the summer of 2021.

Most particularly,  Gonzalez repeatedly witnessed cases of illegal discrimination against people applying for jobs or promotions.  Some of the alleged discrimination was based on age, some on disabilities, and other issues.  Some people were passed over, said Gonzalez,  because then-Captain O-Brian preferred someone who was male, or whom she thought was better looking, or was a friend of a friend, or ideally all three.

After months of witnessing this sort of discrimination, finally, in October 2021, Rosa Gonzalez again became a department whistleblower.  In this case, she blew the whistle in the form of 46-page “Grievance,” detailing the string of illegal actions she had witnessed and documented.  (Along with the grievance, Gonzalez included a pile of attachments to back up her allegations.) 

Sgt. Gonzalez  filed the pile of documents with the Office of the Undersheriff, and assumed she would be interviewed about the contents of the grievance.  But an interview, and/or any other kind of request for further information, never came.

Instead, on December 6, 2021, LASD Captain Dana Chemnitzer called Gonzalez on the phone to notify her that she was now subject in an “administrative Investigation.”  This IAB investigation, Gonzalez was told, was related to the grievance she’d filed.  But Chemnitzer had no further information.

Later Gonzalez would learn that she was being investigated for “gossip,” because she had provided a copy of her grievance to those who had been harmed by the illegal discrimination. She did so after consulting with union representative, Kevin Thomson, who informed Gonzalez that there was no policy against sharing her grievance with the victims.

Later still, she would find herself inexplicably charged by Internal Affairs with the same allegations of discrimination that she’d described in her grievance.

Now, two years and nine months later there appears to have been no effort to investigate Gonzalez’s grievance, or the “administrative investigation,” of which she has been the subject since December 2021.

Instead, on Thursday, June 20, 2024, Captain Bryan Aguilera and Lt. Anna Carillo came to Gonzalez’s office and informed her they were relieving her of duty.  After this announcement, they took her badge and her gun, and escorted her out of what is known as the S.T.A.R.S Center, in Whittier, CA, which is where Gonzalez was supervising a team of background investigators, who examined the backgrounds of potential LA County Sheriff’s Department employees.

Four days later, on Monday, June 24, 2024, the same twosome came to her home and served her with a letter of intent to demote her to the rank of deputy.

There’s much more to the story, which we’ll explore in later chapters of this series, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, tomorrow, Thursday, August 15, Rosa Gonzalez will attend what is known as a Skelly hearing, where she will present stacks of evidence showing why she should have her rank reinstated. 

Assistant Sheriff Holly Francisco will preside over the Skelly hearing for Rosa Gonzalez.

We’ll let you know what happens.