Sheriff Dept.’s Long Slide

An internal investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has turned up more troubling news. The department has arrested one of its own administrators and an independent food service contractor on bribery charges involving millions of dollars in allegedly padded contracts for county jail system food. The investigation uncovered a pattern of corruption spanning at least two years.

Department investigators told The Times that the alleged wrongdoing went undetected because of serious lapses in management and oversight. “I’m sure there are a lot of things we will never prove, never find,” said Sgt. John A. Nemeth of the department’s Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau. “It’s a den of thieves, this food service business.” County taxpayers ought to find this assertion unnerving and infuriating on several fronts.

The internal investigation began after a Times series in November 1996 pointed out a bewildering array of questionable expenditures and chunks of fat within the department’s supposedly lean and almost sacrosanct budget, including its food service contracts.

Sheriff Sherman Block claimed at that time that a full fiscal audit of his department “will show that we do a very good job of managing this department.” He also issued a challenge: “I defy you to find a better-managed law enforcement agency of this size anywhere in the United States.” Unfortunately for Los Angeles, finding a better managed large law enforcement agency no longer is much of a challenge.

In the past 15 months there has been more than enough evidence to demonstrate that the Sheriff’s Department has been rudderless in key respects: Its work release program was a sham, allowing inmates to walk away and become fugitives; jails were racked by nearly riotous fights on a regular basis, sometimes involving hundreds of inmates at a time; there were allegations of guards provoking assaults on inmates. Until recently, the department’s treatment of mentally ill inmates was appalling. Block’s department was releasing inmates by accident, including murder suspects, while keeping other inmates long past their release dates. The latter necessitated $200,000 in preemptive settlements so that the inmates wouldn’t sue.

On Monday Block said, “In an organization of this size, you will have people, individuals who, for their own reasons, try to do their job based on their own sense of morality and that is not acceptable. But the biggest issue is what does the organization do in response when these things come to the fore. And I think we deal very aggressively with them.”

Problem is, these things keep coming to the fore. Now, the allegations of bribery and padded contracts cast another pall over the depart- ment.

After 16 years in office, Sheriff Block is running for reelection to his fifth term. He has a lot to answer for.