CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2022, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“SCOFFLAW SHERIFFS COULD FACE MORE
OVERSIGHT”
There is
no doubt that a local measure on the Los Angeles County ballot this fall would
make future sheriffs there fully answerable to county supervisors.
Sheriffs
would continue to be elected independently, but if the proposal passes, they
could be fired with four votes on the five-member county board. If this idea
succeeds in the first vote of its kind in California, it will very likely spawn
a series of similar measures in other counties, probably very soon.
That’s
because, while current Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva is the unquestioned
leader of scofflaw sheriffs in this state, he has plenty of company in that
category.
The most
obvious recent misconduct by multiple sheriffs came at the height of the
coronavirus pandemic, before vaccines were widely available and before powerful
anti-viral drugs like Pfizer’s Paxlovid were common.
At the
end of 2020, the list of California law enforcement agencies refusing to
enforce stay-at-home, crowd-size and masking orders from state and county health
officials numbered at least two dozen. Of the five counties with the highest
seven-day average COVID-19 cases in the week leading up to Christmas 2020, only
one had taken strong enforcement measures to protect public health.
Wherever
those measures were enforced, they proved extremely effective: Statistics show
that if California had followed the laissez faire, everything-stays-open
approach used in Florida and some other states, more than 40,000 additional
Californians would have died atop the already severe COVID death toll, which
now approaches 93,000.
None of
that moved Villanueva to enforce anything, even such a basic protective tactic
as indoor masking. The same for sheriffs in nearby Orange, San Bernardino and
Riverside counties.
But
nothing happened to Villanueva, Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes, then-San
Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner John McMahon or Riverside County Sheriff Chad
Bianco.
Other
sheriffs also defied their county boards on various issues, but Villanueva –
considered an underdog in his current reelection bid – did it most often, even
ignoring subpoenas to appear before the county’s Civilian Oversight Commission.
Said the
Los Angeles County supervisors in a statement that accompanied the motion to
place their new measure on the fall ballot, “The current sheriff has been openly
hostile to oversight and transparency and (resisted) oversight structures by
consistently obstructing those systems of checks and balances.”
Aside
from refusing to enforce public health orders, Villanueva also has been
criticized for failure to investigate alleged gangs among his deputies and for
threatening to arrest a reporter who leaked a video of a deputy kneeling (a la
George Floyd) for several minutes on the head of a handcuffed prisoner who had
just violently resisted that deputy.
If
Villanueva’s behavior subjects him or his successors to possible removal by
county officials who have never before bossed the sheriff’s department, expect
similar attempts at control over sometimes scofflaw sheriffs from Sacramento to
Riverside to Del Norte county.
Villanueva,
as expected, through a spokesperson calls the ballot proposal, which takes the
form of a charter amendment, an “illegal motion that would allow corrupt
supervisors to intimidate sheriffs from carrying out their official duties to
investigate crime. Creating a pathway for politicians to remove a duly elected
sheriff is a recipe for corruption (that) suits their political agenda.”
But the
proposal allows removal of a sheriff only for specified shortcomings, including
flagrant or repeated neglect of duties, misappropriation of public funds,
falsification of official statements or documents or obstruction of
investigations into the sheriff’s conduct by the inspector general or the
county Civilian Oversight Commission.
Several
current Los Angeles supervisors accuse Villanueva of most of those offenses,
including a midsummer refusal to testify before the oversight commission’s
public hearings on deputy gangs.
So far,
Villanueva’s main defense has been to call the supervisors pushing the ballot
measure “hacks” bent on turning the sheriff into a “hand-puppet.”
But
name-calling probably won’t resolve this issue, which could end up with voters
rejecting the “reform” proposal, while also ousting Villanueva. That, of
course, would send a thoroughly mixed signal to other parts of the state whose
sheriffs also defy laws and public health orders they don’t like.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
No comments:
Post a Comment