Once again, the County of San Diego’s law enforcement organization, otherwise known as the County Sheriffs, is getting some really bad publicity.
Over the past week, the Union-Tribune wrote about a jail remodeling project that might end up being five years late and $10 million over-budget and covered a judicial ruling ordering the release of internal records on deaths inside county jails.
These accounts are just icing on the cake for a slow-rolling scandal that, if its components were revealed as part of another agency’s failures, would cause heads to roll and/or budgetary consequences.
The real news behind those reports is that the Sheriff’s Department really doesn’t care how bad things are. Their response to every bad news revelation is akin to the “hopes and prayers” offered by NRA apologists after every mass shooting. There are reasons for this attitude explained further on in this post.
Long-time Sheriff Bill Gore retired just before release of what has been called a scathing State Audit in February 2022. The investigation found deficiencies in the sheriff’s department’s policies and practices regarding inmate safety checks, mental health treatment and staff responses to emergencies.
His overly-endorsed elected successor, Kelly Martinez, made lots of statements about what she would do differently. The reality is that purchase of a full body scanner is the best documented change that has occurred.
And, get this, the County Sheriff says it would be too much work to screen jail employees or contractors, even though jail inmates have the highest death rates via overdoses in California.
A 2022 analysis from Analytica Consulting says a person incarcerated in a San Diego jail is twice as likely as someone incarcerated in another California jail to die from a drug overdose.
Investigators with the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board were unable to pinpoint how the drugs make it into the jails, finding that “The evidence indicated that either sworn SDSD personnel and/or non-sworn SDSD personnel failed to prevent illicit drugs from entering the detention facility.”
I don’t know, it does seem possible those numbers are an indication of staff corruption.
FYI- The Sheriff’s Department has installed dispensers for a medication used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
It’s not as if there’s some sort of lid on reporting on jail operations. Among others, Kelly Davis and Jeff MacDonald have consistently reported on county jails. And their coverage often merits front page placement. The paper has based editorials calling for change based on their reporting.
In 2022, a record 20 people died in our County jails. This year the casualty count is already at 6.
And, a 2019 investigation by the Union-Tribune revealed local jails (run by the Sheriff's Department) have the highest overall mortality rate among California’s largest counties.
There is a lawsuit in the federal court system alleging that the County of San Diego, San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, and San Diego County Probation Department have collectively failed to provide adequate living conditions, and medical and mental health care for people incarcerated in county jails. It also seeks to address over-incarceration in county jails and, in particular, the over-incarceration of people with disabilities and people of color.
Some day, maybe the Department of Justice may find itself mandated to enforce reforms that up until now have mostly been granted lip service. Or maybe the Board of Supervisors will decide the millions of dollars being paid out via lawsuits is too much.
As to Sacramento, legislation seeking to address the underlying issues in the jail was vetoed last year. The governor gave procedural reasons, but the move was widely seen as an effort to deflect attacks that he’s “soft on crime.”
Okay now for the “fun part,” namely the big “why” behind all stonewalling and subterfuge when it comes to our Sheriff's office. It’s a national problem with stories on important issues, an institutional blind spot covering a lot more than law enforcement.
The once-upon-a-time-in-dead-tree-media need for brevity serves as funnel, winnowing out larger contexts, encouraging “two-sides” coverage, and uncritically boosting the intentions/thoughts/rationales of important persons.
Alec Karakatsanis studies and writes about “copaganda” for a living. When he reaches out to the New York Times to point out factual or contextual errors in their reporting, they actually take his call. (His extremely worthwhile Substack is here.)
Recently he’s published a must-read three part series called The Big Deception about how and why what we hear about law enforcement through the media fails to tell the whole story. It also gives insight into why politicians lose their backbones when it comes to oversight of the police/industrial complex.
He uses the example of a decision by an imaginary mayor to authorize a new undercover squad for local cops to work in a newly gentrifying area. Local media coverage in his example says the decision was made transparently, based on the quality of the arguments and the evidence supporting them, by a local official acting intelligently in the best interests of the entire public.
Think about all the assumptions, both historical and contemporary, baked into that sort of reporting.
This is closest to how daily news usually discusses such matters, with a few quotes about the decision from whichever proponents or opponents have the access to get the news media to quote them. Usually, the quotes will be about the costs or benefits of the decision, agreeing or disagreeing with how the mayor weighed them. If opponents are quoted at all, they may say something about how the mayor’s pursuit of safety and order may hurt people of color or about how the undercover unit won’t actually result in more safety under the facts as they see them. The issue, if any debate is presented at all, is performed as only having two sides, and genuine policy goals are portrayed as why one side won out over the other.
Virtually everyone quoted in these standard news stories will accept the premise that officials are trying to make a decision consistent with overall well-being, safety, and shared community values. And only extremely rarely will there be a source in a news article voicing a more critical perspective, such as that the mayor’s intentions are corrupt, that politicians and police are not primarily concerned with public safety but social control to preserve wealth, or that whatever their private motivations, the intentions of politicians are a poor way of understanding what kinds of policy options a mayor like Badams in a society like ours will eventually adopt.
Changes in public safety policy are complex, and they often reflect power operating at various levels. At a minimum, reporting on political issues should point to additional resources for fuller coverage than is possible in the newsroom environment.
So, in San Diego, there’s a lot unsaid when it comes to stories about the County Sheriffs and the jails they operate. The elephant in the room is the politics of the frontline workforce. In this case, that would be the Deputy Sheriffs Association, whose core beliefs are defined by an ‘us vs them’ mentality and punishment as a primary tool.
Then there are the blue lines drawn around law enforcement agencies. Prosecutors need police witnesses. Qualified immunity enables officers to escape punishment for cruel, illegal, or even criminal behavior. Bad cops have little trouble finding new places of employment thanks to omerta in the profession.
Wanna know why people die in jail? Because they’re not considered as “real” humans. Actions speak louder than words, and the evidence seen in all the various local lawsuits is overwhelming.
But-But-But…there are also actions by elected officials higher in the food chain that come into play, even if those officials haven’t completely “otherized” people who end up being arrested.
Jails are the number one stash point for people with serious mental health issues and homeless humans. There are not enough resources available for even an empathetic law enforcement agency.
Mental health care for inmates? Sorry, your caseworker’s got more than a hundred people to track. They’ve barely got time to keep up with the paperwork.
These politicians know that, and part of the compact they’ve made with cops includes not talking about how they’re all-too-often tasked to “cleanup on aisle nine.”
Back to Copaganda:
Politicians can keep discussing their fervent desire for reforms, but everyone understands that many of the things being discussed are not possible without changing something none of them are talking about changing. Although news stories usually don’t discuss this when talking about reforms, it is one of the main reasons we are stuck in endless cycles of calls for reform. (To take just one example from recent news, calls for reforming the grotesque Los Angeles County jail and the wealth-based detention practices have been taking place for over 100 years.)
Are politicians chicken when it comes to cops? You betcha!
The police and various police allies, private investigators, and corporate operatives constantly threaten progressive politicians. As I’ve gotten to know many of them, I’ve been surprised at how pervasive this is: nearly every progressive local politician I know has been threatened, targeted, investigated, and surveilled. Some of them have been physically brutalized by police and are too afraid to speak out about it because they know how easy it is for “law enforcement” to target them or a loved one with some violation of some law at some point, or just to make their lives otherwise miserable.
This is why, for example, it was such an effective political strategy for the Democratic District Attorney in Houston in recent years to raid the offices and indict her political opponents and their staffs, and also why the Los Angeles Sheriff raided the homes of his own oversight commission members. These actions are not isolated—they send powerful messages to progressive public officials about the kind of courage they will need if they want to do anything that meaningfully reduces the power of the punishment bureaucracy. This is such a widespread problem that it affects at a core level what nearly every progressive politician I’ve ever spoken with feels comfortable to say in public and feels comfortable to pursue in private.
Think about all the inside info some law enforcers would have if they were tasked with providing security for an elected official with a drinking and womanizing problem. It’s not like this could happen in San Diego, of course.
What I’m writing about today isn’t just a County problem; it’s a problem to some degree in –I would guess– every jurisdiction in the country. How can we fix our jail problem if we can’t fix the ecosystem surrounding the people we pay to run them? How can we stop jails from being the destination of choice for mentally ill and homeless humans?
I’d say broadening our perspective and the expectations we have for the media is a good place to start. Sooner or later I hope people can recognize the social issues we have are all interconnected. That hill is going to be a steep one to climb.
Friday’s Fresh Factoids
These Vampires Can Have Everything Except Our Love Via Hamilton Nolan. Booing powerful people is not the same as “cancel culture.” It denies them the one thing they can’t buy.
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Abortion Bans Are Unpopular. Republicans Know It. Via Joyce Filipovic.
Of course plenty of conservatives don’t care, some out of ignorance, some out of hubris, some out of religious orthodoxy, some of out misogynist vindictiveness. Elections, though, are often decided on the margins. Who turns out? Who is motivated? Who is turned off? The wrong answer on abortion, an issue that has skyrocketed in importance to voters since the Dobbs decision, could indeed decide who wins and who loses the general election, and is already shaping the GOP primary.
But don’t lose sight of the truth, even if Republican candidates won’t say it out loud: Every single one of them is more beholden to a far-right anti-abortion movement than they are to their more moderate voters, and not a single one of them would risk the ire of that movement by refusing to sign a national ban if it came across their desks.
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Can we call it fascism yet? Via Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse
"Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers," George Orwell wrote in 1944, "almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come." Although political scientists have crafted more precise definitions in the ensuing years, the enduring image of fascism is that of the hate-fueled bully.
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Thank you, Doug. While I am certain there must be some decent cops, back in my salad days we referred to them as "pigs." Obviously too many of them still deserve to be called "pigs." What I wonder about is how many of them consider themselves "good Christians?" If they do, they are flagrantly ignoring what Jesus says about how to treat other people.