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In its final report, issued this morning, the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence put a lot of the blame on Sheriff Lee Baca and his number two, Paul Tanaka, and said the department needs to be reformed top to bottom and undergo a management shakeup. "The commission heard repeated and consistent accounts of leadership failings in the department over a period of years,” the commission wrote. “Thus, it is not surprising that supervisors struggled to control deputy insubordination, inappropriate treatment of inmates, and aggressive conduct both on and off duty by deputies working in Custody....
"Both Sheriff Baca and Undersheriff Tanaka have, in different ways, enabled or failed to remediate overly aggressive deputy behavior as well as lax and untimely discipline of deputy misconduct in the jails for too long.”
Full report | Executive summary
Supervisor Yaroslavsky's website
LA Times story
Daily News
Witness LA
From the LA Times story:
The county commission, which was created last year to examine allegations of jail abuse, released a 194-page report condemning Baca and his top aides and recommending more than 60 reforms that included a management shake-up, harsher penalties for excessive force and dishonesty, and the formation of a new civilian watchdog.The creation of an inspector general position would represent a historic transformation of the department’s civilian monitoring by providing a politically insulated, outside civilian office that would have the power to conduct its own investigations.
Daily News lede: "A searing indictment of Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca..."
