San Diego County Cops Count on Complacent Citizens to Continue Cruelty
What’s it going to take to bust up the criminal cabal otherwise known as the San Diego Sheriff's Office? These “public servants” flaunt the law and are daring any authority to intervene.
We have a newly elected Sheriff promising reforms, when in reality she’s cut from the same cloth as her predecessor. The crimin’ continues; It seems like every time somebody shines a light on these guys, more dirt gets revealed.
The latest scandal, splashed on the front page of the Sunday paper, concerns the refusal of the Sheriff’s department to take further steps to reduce the number of drug overdoses of persons in custody.
It’s bad. Really bad. Kelly Davis and Jeff MacDonald report:
According to county data, at least six of the 20 people who died in custody last year were due to suspected overdoses. While sheriff’s officials have yet to release specific causes of deaths in those cases, the opioid-overdose treatment naloxone, better known as Narcan, was administered before they died.
Department records also show that naloxone doses were deployed more than 600 times in 2021. In 2022, the number of doses administered jumped by 38 percent — to 845, records show.
Over each of the past two years, more than 200 people have overdosed in San Diego County jails, the department reported.
Back in August, the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board recommended that “all persons” be screened for illegal drugs every time they enter a county jail — employees, detainees, defense lawyers, contractors and others.
Four months later… the Department responded with a firm “no.” Why, you might ask, would they not want to clean up the national reputation of their jail as the place where prisoners go to die?
They had to draw on the fringes of the internet for their main excuse, namely that they were concerned about the potential health effects of repeated exposure to low-level radiation from body scanners.
Who’s their science advisor, Homer Simpson? Howdy Doody?
That concern would be news for 46,000+ airport screeners employed by the TSA. The 370 million smartphone users whose devices emit thousands of times more low-energy non-ionizing radiation than scanners might wonder what the sheriffs are talking about.
Maybe the Sheriffs were confused by all the stories about the 5G computer chips supposedly flowing through fine gauge needles along with COVID vaccinations. The 43% of the force (as of December 2021) who didn’t bother to get vaccinated must be in charge here.
Excuse #2 for not getting scanned was that the process would negatively impact morale. Really? You wanna tell me all those macho men/women types gonna get their fee-fees hurt? Bullshit.
The flimsiness of these excuses and the slowness of a response to a public oversight group amounts to waving a middle finger at the taxpayers who fund the department.
And, oh yeah, our former temporary sheriff told the Board of Supes last summer there was no evidence that drugs were being smuggled into jails by department employees.
Last week Cory Richey, a 15-year veteran of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department was arrested for stealing drugs turned in by the public for disposal.
Y’all got any guesses where the Deputy charged with 11 alleged instances of burglary between Nov. 25 and Jan. 3 was employed?
Via the Union-Tribune:
According to Transparent California, a public pay and pension database, Richey was paid about $150,000, not including benefits, in 2021 as a deputy in the detentions and court services division.
Maybe Richey was peddling hydrocodone, tramadol and alprazolam* on the cell block floor; maybe he wasn’t. (*drugs he was charged with possessing) Maybe “detentions” doesn’t mean what I think it means.
The number of people dying in San Diego County jails, plus weak sauce excuses for not wanting more security tells me there is a problem.
In case you don’t get my inference, let me state it clearly: the San Diego County Sheriff's department is either involved in drug distribution or abetting overdose deaths at the county jails.
They’re either profiting off people’s misery or taking sadistic pleasure in ridding society of humans they’ve decided are lesser beings, many of whom haven’t been convicted of anything.
Today’s UT has yet another story that makes my point about the agency. Newly elected sheriff Kelly Martinez campaigned on a promise that internal reviews from the department’s Critical Incident Review Board, or CIRB, of jail deaths would be made public.
Now, the promise has been broken; instead only one summary of such a report was released, and not until there were media inquiries.
Here’s an example, cited by UT reporters Davis and MacDonald, of why such information might be in the public interest:
A U.S. Army veteran who suffered from a seizure disorder, Greer was booked into jail Jan. 31, 2018, after a dispute with a neighbor.
According to his lawsuit, he told an intake nurse that the medication he relied on to control his seizures was in his pocket. But jail officials refused to allow him to keep his medication and failed to provide an alternative, the complaint alleges.
Greer also requested a lower bunk, fearing that he would suffer a seizure while in custody and fall from an elevated bed, the suit adds. Even so, he was assigned to the top level in a three-bunk cell and was told no other beds were available.
The next day, Greer was overcome by a seizure and tumbled from his bunk, hitting his head on the concrete floor.
His cellmates tried to alert the jail staff via intercom, the lawsuit says, but deputies had silenced it. It took 45 minutes for help to arrive after cellmates and others repeatedly yelled “man down” to guards, the suit said.
Greer suffered facial fractures, a brain bleed and respiratory failure. He was in a coma for weeks.
In a normal world, the County District Attorney would be all over this, but she’s not inclined to take on the agency whose staff union is willing to do dirty work for her come election time.
What’s it going to take for the State Attorney General, the US Attorney for San Diego, or even the County Board of Supervisors to make a stink about this?
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com