Vaxxers in Sheriff's Department Point to Need for Overhaul
The Board of Supervisors is meeting Tuesday to consider the questions surrounding vaccine mandates for county employees. Expect fireworks. Of the worst kind.
KUSI’s I’m-not-a-vaxxer star Amy Reichert, Co-founder of Reopen San Diego said as many as 500 officers will quit as she urged people to attend the Supes meeting. She doesn’t say which law enforcement agency. And we need to remember that most of these threats about quitting nationally have proven to be bluster.
One indication of just how out of touch Reichert and her gang was her reference to a previous event for vaxxers at the Board of Supes, as she gleefully described the worldwide coverage they received. Apparently being the butt of jokes on late night television is a good thing for these folks.
As we watch (a minority of) local law enforcement officers choose to endanger others, I’ll remind readers that San Diegans will have the opportunity to vote in a new County Sheriff next year. While there are already candidates who’ve said they’re seeking the job, I’ll save my evaluations of them for a later date, since the deadline for filing hasn’t passed.
What I can say at this point is that the election represents just about the only way the public can weigh in on the department’s performance. And the way things are structured at present, it’s time for an overhaul. While I doubt the designated successor for retiring Sheriff Bill Gore will be defeated, the election should provide the public with opportunities to question what we’re actually getting for our tax dollars.
The race for Sheriff won’t be represented in the media as an opportunity for change. Instead, we’ll get the usual serving of copaganda about law ‘n order laced with fear bombs about the forces of darkness threatening civilization. It’s up to citizens to speak up with hard questions about what’s really going on.
UPDATE: This seems relevant...
https://twitter.com/TheActivatedPod/status/1455290381268971520?s=20
A recent survey of sheriffs by the Deputy Sheriff’s Association, the quasi-union representing the department, points to the challenges ahead. La Prensa, San Diego’s bilingual Latino newspaper, got their hands on the results, and, while most officers didn’t respond, those that did painted a scary picture.
The survey also asked members to rank the importance of certain topics in influencing which candidate they would support for Sheriff, ranging from 5 for “extremely important” to 1 for “not important at all”.
For a candidate “Preventing a vaccination mandate”, 59% said it was extremely important, while only 15% said it was not important at all on their voting decision.
For a candidate “Increasing diversity within the Department’, only 7% rated it extremely important and 38% rated it not important at all.
I’d say that the most common observations had to do with staffing levels. Generously sprinkled throughout the results were far right talking points (Wait! Bill Gore is a liberal? Somebody should call his friend Darrell Issa and let him know!).
Samples:
Opposition to vaccine and mask mandates. We will not comply
Political indoctrination from the left. Every year the department becomes further entangled with the policies and ideologies from the left.
Marxist ideology influencing command decisions
Morale and numbers losses from command bowing down to the social media, progressive and ultra liberal mobs.
Sixty eight percent of responders thought preventing a vaccine mandate was very or extremely important in influencing who they’d vote for sheriff in the upcoming election.
The Deputy Sheriff’s Association has already made it one-click-and-it’s-done easy to get a “religious” exemption via an email to its members, according to 10 News:
“After submitting the religious exemption, deputies will receive an automated response informing them their religious exemption is approved,” reads the email from the union to its members.
With an automated response granting an exemption from COVID immunization at their fingertips, one has to wonder why such a fuss is being made. The answer, of course, has nothing to do with religion, vaccine safety issues, or any of the plethora of other weak sauce explanations given for not taking a jab.
It’s political, and not in a “vote for my guy” kinda way. I’ll bet you dimes to doughnuts this is about being a) sore losers, b) fed up with democracy, and/or c) willing to worship a false idol. None of these things are qualities we should want in people hired to protect and serve our communities.
Since the county Sheriff’s Department won’t disclose information on the number of its personnel who are vaccinated, we can only assume the worst.
Another Update on the "brave" NYPD:
https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1455263244357181441?s=20
It should surprise nobody to hear that my position on people who put their personal freedom over their responsibility to the people who pay them is “screw ‘em. Let ‘em quit.” We have a National Guard for a reason, let’s use them if things really get bad (They won’t.)
Let’s examine a few things we know about the Sheriff’s Department.
More than 150 people have died in the custody of the county’s jails since Bill Gore was appointed sheriff in 2009.
County taxpayers have paid more than $20 million in recent years to families of those deceased.
In 2019, Sheriff Capt. Marco Garmo and four collaborators were arrested for selling “off roster” guns available only to law enforcement via a 23 count indictment unsealed in federal court. One motive ascribed in the indictment for the criminal acts was “to build good will with future potential donors or benefactors would advance his career or support anticipated political campaigns, including Garmo’s expressed intention to run for San Diego County sheriff.
Internal department emails prove the administration was aware Garmo was involved in more than 150 firearms transactions as early as August of 2016. They were tipped off by the California Department of Justice and chose to hand the information off to human resources.
Prosecutors in that case said there also was an illegal scheme to help buyers get concealed weapon permits quickly from the Sheriff’s Department. Unfortunately, those transactions didn’t violate federal law, so no action was taken.
According to KPBS which filed a lawsuit pursuing the data, more than one in six citizen complaints made to the Sheriff's Department never got a response of any kind out of a total of 425 complaints received between 2014 and 2018.
Finally, there was the Sheriff’s Department fentanyl copaganda caper, which received national publicity. Last August, the Department released dramatic body-camera footage showing a deputy officer, David Faiivae, falling over backward, supposedly as a result of exposure to a substance police later said tested positive for fentanyl. Over 400 health experts and others called the department’s bluff, saying “Absolutely nothing in that video is consistent with an opioid overdose.”
Folks, this is just (some of) the stuff they’ve been caught doing. Given that most actual crimes are NOT reported to the police, I have to assume there are similar numbers at play here.
The question becomes, if our Sheriff’s Department is failing at its mission, what is to be done?
First off, let’s deal with the low hanging fruit.
You can’t defund an office mandated by the State Constitution. Here’s Raphael J. Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State L.A, in a commentary for CalMatters.
In California, the elected sheriff is enshrined in the state constitution. As a result, county supervisors cannot easily oversee the sheriff in the way that mayors and councils can hold appointed police chiefs accountable. Supervisors could in theory use their budget authority to rein in the sheriff. But this is a stretch, since it might lead to cutting services.
In any case, the sheriff’s role can make it difficult for supervisors to push harder. It’s therefore incumbent on the state government to help beleaguered local officials hold the sheriff accountable.
The State Constitution’s requirement that each county’s chief law enforcement officer be elected may superficially seem like it’s a good thing, until you realize the actual track record of this practice is a long history of incestuous political powerplays that all-too-often run contrary to the voter’s expressed interests in the conduct of governance.
It’s rare that a sheriff’s contest in California is much more than a formal coronation of a chosen replacement. The sins of the last guy are hidden behind his endorsement of a successor.
In the most prominent exception to that rule, things have taken a turn for the worst. Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva was supposed to be a reformer. He turned out to be anything but, having upended the disciplinary process for sheriff’s deputies, defended sheriff cliques, and accused elected and appointed officials who questioned his actions of misconduct.
And it shouldn’t surprise anybody that he’s refused to enforce mandates relating to the coronavirus.
In the Calmatters essay, Sonenshein argues for the state’s role in overseeing the county sheriff system. AB 1185, signed by Gov. Newsom in 2020, gives county governments the authority to create an inspector general, vested with subpoena authority.
Another avenue for reform could be the State Attorney General, except that historically the politics of the job discourage the kinds of confrontations informed supervision could create.
Article V, Section 13 of the California Constitution states: “The Attorney General shall have direct supervision over every district attorney and sheriff and over such other law enforcement officers as may be designated by law, in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices, and may require any of said officers to make reports concerning the investigation, detection, prosecution, and punishment of crime in their respective jurisdictions as to the Attorney General may seem advisable.”
The most effective oversight of County Sheriffs has come from the Federal Government, which prosecuted Lee Baca of L.A. County and Mike Carona of Orange County; Baca for obstruction of justice in an investigation of inmate abuse, and Carona for witness tampering.
The ultimate problem with California’s sheriffs stems from their historical roots.
Here’s Joe Mathews at Zocalo Public Square, back in 2019
The job’s unaccountable nature is, like our two houses of Congress, a nasty artifact of America’s history as an English colony. Going back to the 9th century, English sheriffs apprehended criminals, but mostly used violence to collect taxes and extort bribes. That’s why we still celebrate Robin Hood and curse the sheriff of Nottingham.
That’s also why England turned the sheriff into a ceremonial position in the 1800s. But California, like other U.S. states, has preserved the problematic power of the sheriff. Last year, Governing magazine criticized the American sheriff as highly susceptible to corruption.
Then there’s the uniquely American flavor of this branch of law enforcement, as described by the Marshall Project:
After the Civil War, sheriffs assumed the power vacuum left behind by slave owners, according to Douglas Blackmon, author of the 2009 Pultizer-winning history “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” They were empowered by Black Codes to make arrests for congregating in public and being unemployed, and they oversaw the leasing of black prisoners as laborers in an economic system that in effect continued slavery. “Arrests surged and fell, not as acts of crime increased or receded, but in tandem to the varying needs of the buyers of labor,” Blackmon wrote.
Gilbert King, author of two books featuring Willis V. McCall, a violent, racist sheriff in 1950s Florida, found that throughout the civil rights era sheriffs were known members of the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1960s, Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Alabama, famously oversaw the beating of black voting rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama. Giving power to sheriffs was in the interest of pro-segregation Southern leaders because it would be much harder for the federal government to track the actions of hundreds of individual counties.
The idea that a sheriff could stand as a bulwark of local control against state and federal laws shifted in the 1970s, from opposition to civil rights to the more arcane intellectual sphere of the Christian Identity movement. Minister William Potter Gale “preached that the Constitution was a divinely inspired document intended to elevate whites above Jews and racial minorities,” journalist Ashley Powers wrote in The New Yorker. This thinking underpinned the “Posse Comitatus” movement of the 1980s, which violently clashed with federal law enforcement while promoting the idea of “sheriff supremacy,” and which, Powers wrote, “cross-pollinated with other kinds of right-wing thought.”
Given the heritage of the Sheriff’s position, perhaps it’s time to replace a 19th century institution with a 21st century approach in California. Doing so would require an amendment to the State Constitution, a tremendous amount of political capital, and the courage to imagine an agency responsive to the needs of all the people.
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