Civilian oversight approved for Los Angeles Sheriff's Department

[December 10, 2014]  By Alex Dobuzinskis
 
 LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A plan to create a civilian oversight panel for the troubled Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was approved on Tuesday, as county leaders moved to avert problems of the kind that triggered unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.

The measure is a bid to tackle thorny issues faced by the sheriff's department, such as allegations of excessive force and poor management of its jail system, the nation's largest.

The county Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to create the panel, which had been debated for two years and gained the support of newly elected Sheriff Jim McDonnell.

McDonnell joins a working group appointed by the board to thrash out details of the commission's mission, structure and ties with the sheriff and the department's inspector general, the office of Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said in a statement.

Debate has grown amid nationwide protests over policing practices.

Last week, a New York grand jury declined to indict an officer in the chokehold death of an unarmed black man, soon after a decision by another grand jury last month against charging a police officer in the shooting death of a black teenager in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

The name "Ferguson" has come to represent the sort of problems Los Angeles county must avoid, Ridley-Thomas said.

"The sheriff's department has long required a level of scrutiny that has been missing," he added. "The time has come."

The sheriff's department is edging closer to a federal consent decree for court oversight of its jail system, after the U.S. Department of Justice found the treatment of mentally ill inmates violated their constitutional rights.

A separate federal probe into prisoner abuse and other misconduct in the jail system led to the conviction of several current and former sheriff's deputies for trying to block the investigation.

Some critics of such a commission question if it will have enough power.

Creating the panel would be "a step backwards" from an existing plan for an inspector general to be a watchdog of the sheriff's department, Supervisor Michael Antonovich, who voted against the measure, said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Curtis Skinner and Clarence Fernandez)

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