Another Blow to Law Enforcement

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is snarled in the biggest criminal investigation of its own deputies and civilian staffers since a narcotics unit scandal in the late 1980s. Both deputies and civilian employees are alleged to have participated in credit card fraud, and at least two are also suspected of selling drugs to jail inmates. The allegations, coming on the heels of the L.A. Police Department probe, are another sharp blow to the region’s public confidence in law enforcement.

So far, 11 department employees, including four deputies, have been relieved of duty and referred for criminal prosecution. Two of them, a deputy and a civilian jail employee, are also being investigated for possibly selling black tar heroin to inmates at the Twin Towers Jail in downtown Los Angeles. There have been suspicions for years that the amount of drug abuse in some county jails could not have resulted entirely from visitors managing to slip narcotics to prisoners.

The department’s internal criminal investigation began after officials received a tip about the credit card ring’s operation. Sheriff’s officials discovered that one of the deputies, David Osorio, was allegedly involved in a second and bigger credit card fraud scheme that did not involve the department. The second ring has become a major focus of the investigation. Sheriff Lee Baca said Thursday he expects the allegations to expand.

The case, although of a different nature and scale, has implications nearly as chilling as anything the LAPD scandal investigation has come across. Osorio, the alleged mastermind in the credit card plot, was said to have been engaged in a credit card scam involving use of cards stolen by a postal employee when he was hired by the Sheriff’s Department four years ago; later he allegedly came to lead another scam, one involving department employees.

Osorio worked at the Sheriff’s Department’s North County Correctional Facility in Castaic. The other 10 department employees were assigned to the Twin Towers Jail in downtown Los Angeles. One deputy was alleged to have joined the credit card ring less than a year after completing law enforcement training at the sheriff’s academy. One of the employees is said to have furthered the credit car operation by running license plate checks to obtain personal information. To what extent did Sheriff’s Department’s electronic access to important data figure in the fraud?

The good news is that the Sheriff’s Department got wind of the credit card scam and immediately turned it over to the department’s internal affairs office, which wound up conducting a sting operation replete with videotaped evidence. That, in turn, led to evidence of the alleged heroin sales.

Sheriff Baca and his investigators can’t rest until they are assured that they have found all of the department’s bad eggs. If Baca needs help in doing that, he must not be afraid to ask for it.