With a popular and progressive but negligent and
unaccountable sheriff managing a department currently under federal
investigation for allegedly operating one of the most corrupt and
sadistic jail systems in the country, and a county tax assessor
currently sitting in one of those jail cells, facing two-dozen felony
corruption charges for allegedly taking bribes, now seems like an
opportune time to ask why these two jobs remain elected positions in Los
Angeles County.
In the case of the assessor,
chosen by the people since LA County was formed in 1850, the same year
California was admitted into the Union, the question of whether that
should become an appointed position was placed on the Nov. 6 ballot in
the form of Measure A, a nonbinding advisory proposition that ultimately
lost by 77.8 percent of the vote. Even the unfolding scandal involving
current LA County Assessor John Noguez — who remains behind bars after
pleading innocent to allegedly accepting $185,000 in bribes from a
campaign contributor in exchange for huge property tax refunds from the
county — was not enough to sway the electorate to begin the process of
changing the current system.
In Noguez’s absence,
the Board of Supervisors has appointed Santos Kreimann to serve as
acting assessor until the elected assessor is cleared or convicted.
The
Sheriff’s Department has also been headed by an elected leader for the
past 162 years, a position that, like that of the assessor, was written
into the state Constitution two years before the Board of Supervisors
was even seated. Although there have been many calls over the years to
change that job to an appointed post, nothing has ever come of them.
If
anything — as head of Homeland Security in Los Angeles and Orange
counties, manager of the nation’s largest jail system and provider of
police services for 42 cities, 130 unincorporated communities, 10
community colleges and, most recently, the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority — Sheriff Lee Baca has only become more powerful, heading a
16,000-employee law enforcement agency with vastly more responsibilities
and powers than when he first took office.
Up in the air
In
LA County, three top administrators are elected by the people: the
district attorney, the assessor and the sheriff. The closest the county
has come in modern times to having an appointed sheriff was in 1998,
following the death of former Sheriff Sherman Block, Baca’s mentor.
Block
joined the department in 1956 and, like Baca, worked his way up through
the ranks. He came to the job as did practically all of the others
before him: handpicked by his predecessor (in Block’s case, Peter
Pitchess, sheriff from 1959 to 1982) and backed by the all-white,
all-male county Board of Supervisors.
In 1998,
six years after the Los Angeles Riots, the reform-resistant Block ran
for a fifth term but died a few weeks before the election at age 74.
Nonetheless, his name remained on the ballot and Baca’s political
enemies asked the Board of Supervisors to formally support the dead
sheriff. That way, if Block had won, the five supervisors, some of whom
did not embrace Baca as part of “the club,” could have chosen his
replacement, at least temporarily, until another election could be held.
Baca, however, went on to win easily, getting 61.3 percent of the 1.8
million votes cast in that race. With the win he became the county’s
first American Latino sheriff since the 1800s (Eugene Biscailuz, who
served as sheriff from 1932 to 1958, was French and Basque) and the
first sheriff ever not pre-selected by his predecessor and the powers
that be.
To his credit, this moderate Republican
in a nonpartisan position, now in the middle of a fourth term, publicly
says many encouraging things and frequently speaks out for more funding
to better deal with the growing numbers of the homeless and mentally ill
people finding their way into overcrowded county lockups.
Under
the heading “Our Core Values” on the sheriff’s Web site, Baca writes:
“As a leader in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, I commit
myself to honorably perform my duties with respect for the dignity of
all people, integrity to do right and fight wrongs, wisdom to apply
common sense and fairness in all I do and courage to stand against
racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and bigotry in all its forms.”
But,
while hitting all the politically correct notes, in reality, Baca has
come under fire for being soft on celebrities like Mel Gibson and Paris
Hilton and for admittedly turning a blind eye to deputy abuse of county
jail inmates — including the mentally ill — and allowing a culture of
corruption and virtual gangsterism to flourish within the massive
department’s ranks.
In a recent searing review of
the sheriff’s performance regarding the jails, the Citizens’ Committee
on Jail Violence, a nonpartisan group of ex-judges, law enforcement
experts and activists appointed by the Board of Supervisors, found that
the sheriff ultimately bears responsibility for all the bad things going
on in the jails and the rest of the department. A “failure of
leadership” is how the commission put it.
Ever the
politician, and one clearly with an eye on a fifth term in 2014, Baca
did the politically expeditious thing by thanking commission members for
all their hard work, immediately agreeing with most of the findings and
publicly vowing to initiate nearly all of the dozens of recommended
reforms. Unlike his predecessor, who essentially ignored proposals for
reform made by the Kolts Commission formed after the 1991 beating of
Rodney King by police, Baca at least seems receptive to the concept of
change. After all, it’s not as if he has been oblivious to calls for
reform. During his time in office, Baca started the Office of
Independent Review (OIR), a group of six attorneys which examines
department policies and procedures in use-of-force and deputy-involved
shootings and makes recommendations for improvement. But it remains to
be seen whether any real change will occur as a result of the citizens’
commission’s recommendations.
Then again, Baca —
who grew up in hardscrabble East LA, worked his way up through school
and department ranks and now holds a PhD in public administration from
USC — could have very well told the Board of Supervisors, and the
commissioners, for that matter, to go to pound sand, putting his faith
in a supportive if uninformed electorate to keep him in office. For the
time being, the sheriff appears unprepared to go that route.
But
to that end, Baca seemed to think it was necessary to remind the
commissioners of potential alternative reactions to their findings. At
one point during that panel’s public hearings earlier this year, the
sheriff defiantly testified that only “the people” can kick him out of
office for unsatisfactory performance. And that doesn’t seem likely,
considering he ran unopposed in the 2010 election. When asked in
testimony before the commissioners how he should be held accountable for
the problems in the jails, Baca, according to a story appearing in the
Los Angeles Times, said simply, “Don’t elect me.”
Conflicting opinions
Chances
are most people don’t realize just how much power they are investing in
the person occupying the position of sheriff. If LA County were a
country — at 9.8 million people, it is nearly as populous as Greece or
the Czech Republic — Baca, head of the largest paramilitary force in the
United States, would be the equivalent of an army commander, an elected
general, a notion contrary to ideals of civilian democratic rule.
As
awesome as that power may sound, however, these duties are not really
that dissimilar to sheriffs of the early years, going back to the ninth
century. Back then, the serfs, or citizens of “shires,” or towns in
feudal England, chose a “reeve,” or guardian appointed by the king to
protect the people as well as the royal investments by settling
disputes, collecting taxes and punishing those who didn’t pay up. Hence,
the terms “shire” and “reeve” were eventually combined to create the
word “sheriff,” according to a brief history by Sheriff Roger Scott of
DeKalb County, Ill., writing in “Roots: An Historical Perspective of the
Office of Sheriff” at sheriffs.org. But make no mistake: The sheriff
really worked for the king, not always the people. Today, of the
country’s 3,083 sheriffs, roughly 98 percent are elected, Scott wrote.
Similar
questions about the roles of what amount to bureaucratic heads of
mission-specific county departments, like the sheriff’s, have also been
raised in the tax profession over the years. Tax assessors — holding an
office that originated in England and found its way to the American
colonies in the late 1700s — are as ubiquitous as elected sheriffs.
“From England, the 13 American colonies inherited the same scheme of
organization and principles: Voters had to be landowners, and personal
property, such as household goods and vehicles, wagons in those days,
was taxed. The tax man,” according to a history of the job by the Harris
County (Texas) Tax Assessor’s Office, “whether sheriff or tax
collector, kept the records and collected” the money, states the report
found at hctax.net/forms/TaxOfficeHistory.pdf.
In
some American counties, the roles of sheriff and assessor have been
historically interchangeable. In Josephine County Ore., for instance,
the office of assessor was created in 1844 by the would-be state’s
provisional government. The following year, the Legislative Assembly
decreed that assessments were to be made by the sheriff. Five years
later — just nine years prior to Oregon’s statehood — the assessor was
authorized to make assessments and the sheriff was authorized to collect
taxes. It wasn’t until 1970 that all that changed, according to
Josephine County Online, and responsibility for collecting taxes shifted
to the assessor, treasurer or tax collector. But even today, states
the Harris County report, “the sheriff is the tax collector in many
small Texas counties.”
In the last general
election, both the LA County Republican and Democratic parties, along
with the Los Angles Times, opposed Measure A, with the Times opining
that doing away with an elected assessor would limit democracy, as the
caption, “Hey, LA, do you want more democracy, or less?” on one of the
story’s accompanying photos suggests.
Yes, the
Times acknowledges, “It is true that political corruption is an inherent
problem with elected assessors, because they need campaign money when
they’re running for office and, once elected, they have the power to
reward supporters and punish opponents by setting taxable property
values.”
And true, the editorial continues,
“Voters know as little about assessor candidates as they do about people
running for Superior Court judge … [J]ust as they must be wary of
judicial candidates raising campaign money from the very litigants who
will bring cases before them, [voters] must be concerned as well about
assessor candidates who will be setting the taxable value of property
belonging to big campaign donors.”
But — and this
is where the editorial draws a vague but critical line — Measure A
should be opposed because “it doesn’t answer any of the balance-of-power
questions raised by the Noguez scandal … Appointing the assessor and
removing the voters’ oversight merely trades one set of hazards for
another,” among them making the assessor susceptible to the self-serving
political whims of the Board of Supervisors and disrupting the current
system of checks and balances, a system which didn’t seem to be working
very well in the case of Noguez, a former mayor of Huntington Park.
Interestingly,
the Times’ stand conflicts substantially with other lesser-known
positions taken by nonpartisan tax experts, who have for years
questioned not only the role, but also the effectiveness of elected tax
assessors. In “Elected Versus Appointed Assessors and the Achievement of
Assessment Uniformity,” appearing in the National Tax Journal in 1989,
writers John H. Bowman and John L. Mikesell found widespread support
among those in the industry for appointed assessors.
“Appointment
of the assessor does not assure competent performance any more than it
does for other key administrative positions, and there are many capable
elected assessors; but when appointment is limited to persons with
certified professional qualifications, there is more assurance of
employing a person with the required technical and administrative skills
than if the selection is left to voters,” Bowman and Mikesell quote
from the report, “Assessment Administration — Elected or Appointed.”
“Running
for re-election steals time from the work of assessing, and when the
turnover of the office is frequent, a community is likely to experience a
succession of incumbents each learning his job at public expense,” that
report states.
“On balance,” Bowman and Mikesell
conclude, “the traditional argument still is that appointed assessors
can be expected to perform better than elected assessors.”
What is democratic?
The
Times calls the county’s current election system for assessor a
“hybrid,” inasmuch as its leaders over the years — with the exception of
Noguez, the first Latino to hold that office since the late-1800s —
have not really been elected as much as handpicked prior to election,
much like the ages-old procedure in the Sheriff’s Department. In the
case of the assessor, it’s been rare, the Times points out, “to have an
open election for assessor, with no incumbent seeking to keep the seat.
More often, an assessor resigns or retires in the middle of his term,
the Board of Supervisors appoints an interim replacement, and that
person runs, and generally wins, as an incumbent.”
The
race for the District Attorney’s Office, won by longtime Deputy DA
Jackie Lacey, the first woman and the first African American to hold the
position, was the first time in 50 years that an incumbent DA didn’t
run, the Times reported, although Lacey was 12-year incumbent DA Steve
Cooley’s handpicked choice for the job.
But, the
truth is, the Sheriff’s Department, the assessor’s job and the DA’s
Office are small potatoes compared to even greater examples of
democratic opportunities blown or misused and public participation
thwarted in LA County.
First on that list: The Board of Supervisors.
Most
of the five supervisors are now thoroughly entrenched incumbents many
times over who never really had to worry about being re-elected once in
office. Representing roughly 2 million people apiece and lording (as
feudal kings or queens might) over 4,083 square miles of rugged
mountains, scenic coastline, vast farmland and inhabitable desert, they
all know it would take a millionaire — which some supervisors have
become while in office — to beat them.
The
composition of the board today is a far cry from that of just 30 years
ago. In 1979, Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, who had just served in Congress,
became the first woman and first black member of the Board of
Supervisors when she was appointed to fill a vacancy on the board by
then-Gov. Jerry Brown. She lost the 1980 election for the District 4
seat to Deane Dana, returning the board to its all-male and all-white
status.
Twelve years later, Burke ran again, this
time for the District 2 seat vacated by legendary Supervisor Kenneth
Hahn, who had served on the board from 1952 to his retirement in 1992.
Hahn, who had served on the LA City Council before becoming supervisor,
headed an LA political dynasty; his son, James, now a Superior Court
judge, served as mayor of LA, and his daughter, Janice, now a
congresswoman, was on the LA council. For the record, Kenny Hahn, who
died in 1997, was no relation to former County Assessor Kenneth P. Hahn,
who was the first openly gay person to serve in the position.
Just
as it had zero black members before Burke, the board had also had no
one with a Spanish surname since the late 1880s. Then, in 1992, former
LA Councilwoman Gloria Molina won the board’s District 1 seat, formerly
held by Pete Schabarum. She has been in office ever since.
Burke
was replaced on the board in 2008 with the election of Mark
Ridley-Thomas, also African American and also a former LA City Council
member. With his election, the former state Senator and Assembly member
remains the first and only African-American man to serve on the board.
In
other seats, Dana retired in 1996 and was replaced in the District 4
seat that year by Don Knabe, Dana’s longtime friend and former chief of
staff, who won election to the position. Ed Edelman was replaced in the
board’s District 3 seat in 1994 by Zev Yaroslavsky, also a former LA
Council member, when Edelman, himself a former council member, did not
seek re-election after 20 years on the board. Today, the longest serving
supervisor is Mike Antonovich, who’s represented District 5 since 1982.
With
2002’s Measure B, which passed with 63 percent of the vote that year,
supervisors are now limited to serving three consecutive four-year
terms. This means Molina and Yaroslavsky will be termed out of office in
2014, and Antonovich will be forced to step down in 2016 after 34 years
in office — six years shy of tying Kenny Hahn’s record.
By
comparison, the LA City Council, representing 3.8 million people, has
an elected mayor and 15 members — a citizen-to-councilperson ratio of
252,000 to 1. Even the city of Pasadena, with roughly 140,000 people,
has seven council members and an elected mayor.
Then
there is the 13-member Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro)
Board of Directors, which looks, acts and sounds democratic but actually
consists of the mayor of the city of LA, the five supervisors, the
mayor’s respective appointments, city council members from communities
most affected by the mass transit system and one non-voting appointment
of the governor. Few activists, business leaders or mere citizens have
been members of this important powerful body. The MTA is but one of many
such boards that make monumental decisions, recommend spending lots of
money and forward critical recommendations to other governing boards,
yet are populated by nothing but already elected officials, who are paid
stipends and other perks for their “extra service.”
Shouldn’t
members of these boards — especially the Metro board, which is
presently deciding whether to connect the 210 and 710 freeways with
multibillion-dollar, 4.5-mile-long traffic tunnels underneath parts of
Pasadena — be responsible to the electorate for their actions in these
extra-legislative capacities? These current members may be elected
officials elsewhere, but no one voted for them to do these other jobs.
Exactly how inclusive or democratically representative is that?
For
that matter, to use the Times’ rationale, why not make all top
leadership jobs in county departments — public works, education, health
and welfare, the register recorder and registrar of voters, which are
also susceptible to undue influence by supervisors and others — elected
positions?
After all, the question is not whether
to increase democracy. That should be everyone’s goal. The question is
how to use the instruments of democracy that we have available to make
our present system stronger, more inclusive and representative, and
better.
And while we’re on the subject of making
government more accountable and increasing opportunities for people to
participate in the workings our present democratic system, why is there
no appointed or elected citizens’ panel overseeing the Sheriff’s
Department, much like the one that watches over the LAPD?
Answer:
Unlike the Sheriff’s Department, the LAPD chief is hired by the mayor,
with the approval of the City Council, not elected. The mayor also
appoints members to the Board of Police Commissioners, which “serves as
the head of the Los Angeles Police Department, functioning like a
corporate board of directors, setting policies for the department and
overseeing its operations. The board works in conjunction with the chief
of police, who acts as a chief executive officer,” and reports to the
board’s five civilian members, according the LAPD Web site.
The
LAPD also has an independent inspector general’s office, a Christopher
Commission reform recommendation in 1991, which reports directly to the
citizens’ board on such things as misconduct, use of force and
officer-involved shootings. No such office, except Baca’s OIR, which
serves more as a tool of remediation than prosecution, exists to keep an
eye on the Sheriff’s Department. There is no appointed or elected
citizens’ board in Pasadena overseeing that city’s Police Department
either, though there have been sporadic calls for the formation of such a
body in the years since the riots. Also unlike the sheriff, in
Pasadena, the chief of police is hired by the city manager.
On
the upside, though, among the 77 recommended reform measures
recommended by the Citizens’ Commission on Jail Violence, one calls for
the hiring of an expert on maintaining people in custody and another
suggests appointing an inspector general, much like the LAPD’s — and
both proposals have been enthusiastically supported by Baca.
Don’t count on it
They
say out of crisis grows opportunity, and perhaps that’s how time will
treat the abominable situation in our county jails and the Noguez
affair, still under investigation, as Noguez (whose name is really Juan
Reynaldo Rodriguez, unbeknownst to most people, including voters) heads
to trial. But good things will come of them only if they spark
substantive democratic reforms which turn up the volume on
long-marginalized citizen voices instead of stifling them further by
incumbent officeholders’ clinging to antiquated political ideas and
counterproductive election practices.
But in LA
County’s ossified political system of exclusivity, privilege and
patronage — which the Times calls “hybrid,” but seems more like a type
of medieval oligarchy dressed up in modern democratic clothing — don’t
count on it. As we’ve seen, carefully cultivated power once placed in
the hands of the favored few is only relinquished with great care,
caution and, on rare occasions, struggle, no matter who’s in charge,
what party they belong to or how they got where they’re at.
