The WhistleBlower, LASD Sergeant Rosa Gonzalez, Part 2

It’s been almost exactly a month since, on August 15, 2024, LASD Sergeant Rosa Gonzalez, challenged the demotion she received after becoming a whistleblower for the second time during her 25-years with the nation’s largest sheriff’s department.

Last month, Gonzalez challenged the punitive demotion in what is known as a Skelly hearing. 

For weeks after the hearing, she heard nothing.  Then finally, on Thursday, September 12, Gonzalez received a five-page reply to the highly detailed presentation that her union attorney, Mitch Kander, had given at the hearing.

The letter, which was delivered by a department captain and a lieutenant, which was signed by Sheriff Robert Luna, and Assistant Sheriff, Holly Francisco, began as follows:

“On June 24, 2024, you were served with a Letter of Intention indicating your right to respond to the Sheriff’s Department’s pending disciplinary action against you….

You were also advised of your right to review the material on which the discipline was based.

You did exercise your right to respond. However, after review and consideration of the response submitted to support your position, Department executives determined that the recommended discipline is appropriate.

You are hereby notified that you are reduced in rank from Sergeant… to Deputy Sheriff…effective at the close of business on September 12, 2024.”

The department’s leaders then followed up with a great deal more, including the allegation that former Captain Yvonne O’Brien, whose actions had much to do with Gonzalez’s whistleblowing grievance, “felt hurt and/or disgusted by your grievance which contained private and disparaging information….that had no relevance to the equity-related allegations.….”

(Note:  WLA has removed file numbers and similar information that were detailed in the letter, but have no pertinence to this story.)

Gonzalez has fifteen business days from the receipt of the letter to appeal the charges it details.  The appeal, the letter notes, should be made to the Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission.  

In the meantime, Rosa Gonzalez who, prior to her demotion was up for a promotion to lieutenant, told WLA she was given 3.5 hours to choose whether she wanted to work as a deputy in custody—meaning inside the county jail system— or in patrol, both positions that normally would go to a brand new recruit.

As of now, Gonzalez  is scheduled to work in the Cerritos station, from midnight to eight am.

 “The change is taking a toll on my body, mind, and spirit,” Gonzalez told us. 

Grievance and “gossip”

To better understand Thursday’s actions by the Los Angeles County Sheriff and Assistant Sheriff Francisco, it helps to take a look at some of the events that preceded this decision outlined in the letter.

As WitnessLA reported in Part 1 of this series,  in the summer of 2021, Gonzalez, who was then Sgt. Gonzalez, was assigned as Operations Sergeant at the LA County Sheriff’s Personnel Administration Bureau—or PAB.  

At the time, Gonzalez thought it was an ideal transfer.  She would be working under another woman–acting captain, Yvonne O’Brien—and she was very interested in being part of the PAB, which is responsible for all hiring, promotions, and personnel movement at the LASD. 

It is 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, fairness and honesty were not the rules of the day. Instead,  Tanaka and company had a pay-to-play promotional system, which was terrible for department morale.

All went well for Gonzalez, however, until July and early August of 2021.  It was then that, according to Gonzalez, she became aware of some legal irregularities at the PAB, including incidents of cheating on an upcoming lieutenant’s exam, actions that Captain O’Brien had allegedly made possible by slipping all the test questions and the answers to a sergeant working at the PAB, and a few others.  

The idea was that those who received the contraband test material, could memorize everything well before the exam.    (See Part 1 for additional details.)

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

In particular,  Gonzalez described how she 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, weight, 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 a couple of weeks of witnessing this sort of discrimination, in October 2021, Rosa Gonzalez once again became a department whistleblower.

(In 2015, she filed a whistleblower lawsuit, which resulted in a significant settlement, having to do with her observations and experiences with a group of deputies at the LASD’s East LA Station, who had matching tattoos and called themselves the Banditos.  It was a group that frightened community members, threatened other department members,  and would soon become infamous.) 

 In this case, Gonzelez 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 itself, Gonzalez included a pile of attachments to back up her allegations.)  

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, the day after she filed her grievance, she was transferred out of the PAB, then 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 what was labeled  “gossip,” because she had provided a copy of her grievance to those who had been harmed by the illegal discrimination. To make sure that her action in providing a copy of the grievance to those department members affected by the allegedly illegal actions that Gonzalez described in her grievance, she consulted with union representative, Kevin Thomson, who informed Gonzalez that there was no department 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.

“In my twenty-seven (27) years of representing all ranks within the Sheriff ’s Department,” wrote Mitchell Kander, Sgt. Gonzalez’s union attorney, in an email to Internal Affairs, “I have never seen an individual ever classified as a complainant, witness and subject.”

Two years and ten months after the charges against her were filed, there appeared 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. The twosome then 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. It was a job she enjoyed.  

“I loved it,” she told WLA.

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

On August 15, Gonzalez challenged the demotion at her Skelly hearing, during which attorney Mitch Kander, made a lengthy presentation explaining why Gonzalez  should have her rank reinstated.

The department “was doing an end run” around the rights of Sgt. Gonzalez, Kander reportedly told LASD officials at the Skelly hearing.

All charges against Gonzalez, said her attorney, were based on a single event, which was her sharing of the grievance that she filed in October 2021, with the people who were the subjects of the illegal discrimination by those at the PAB.

What now?

Now, Deputy Rosa Gonzalez, who is 47-years-old, and has worked for the LASD for 25 years, is being told she must start over from the bottom.

When we spoke to Gonzales on Thursday, she described feeling shattered.

“My actions in 2021 were made in good faith,” she told us later. “They were based on my convictions and my drive to live up to what I represent. Thei nvestigation against me was a complete fraud based on reporting LASD management of illegal employment practices and corruption. 

“I gave a copy of my grievance to the people who were wronged. LASD called it gossip. The law calls my actions whistleblowing. Now they are punishing me 3 years past the statute of limitations,  in violation of my Peace Officer Bill of Rights. 

“They are doing this because there is no accountability. No one taking illegal action against me—including the sheriff—will be held accountable.”

Postscript

Along with this newest development, there is much more to Gonzalez’s whistleblower story, including the actions by LASD officials over the last few years that, as Gonzalez suggests, appear to be in gross violation of California’s Peace Officers Bill of Rights or POBR.

So stay tuned.  

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