Editorial: Let voters determine the supervisors’ power to remove a sheriff

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will decide Tuesday whether to send voters a ballot measure to permit a supermajority of the board (four out of five votes) to remove the sheriff. The proposed charter amendment would be modeled on an ordinance that their San Bernardino County counterparts have had on the books since 2002. It was challenged by the sheriff and was upheld in court as constitutional. If that kind of oversight is good in San Bernardino, it’s worth considering in Los Angeles. The board should move forward.

Ever since the current L.A. County charter took effect in 1913, power over the Sheriff’s Department has been a tug of war. Supervisors ousted Sheriff John C. Cline just over a century ago by going to court to accuse him of misfeasance in office. The board appointed his replacement, as well as half the sheriffs over the course of the rest of the century. The sheriff and the board had a healthy respect for each other ever since — until the 2018 election of Alex Villanueva, who appears to consider working with the board to be an insult to his department’s independence.

Of course the Sheriff’s Department was not meant to be, and should not be, independent of the rest of government. Nor should any law enforcement agency or elected official. Most L.A. County sheriffs had the savvy to recognize that. A carefully crafted ballot measure could restore some of the cooperation that has been lost to the detriment of L.A. County residents, whether or not the board ever actually exercises its power to remove a sheriff.

Opinion

Editorial: Villanueva’s attempt to intimidate a Times reporter is a gaslighting assault on the press

Sheriff Alex Villanueva’s attempt to intimidate a Los Angeles Times reporter is the sort of tactic employed by tin-pot dictators and power-happy functionaries.

April 27, 2022

The method the board used to remove Cline in 1921 remains available, as does the recall process, which is currently being tried against Dist. Atty. George Gascón. Board pressure played a role in the resignation of Sheriff Lee Baca in 2014 after the supervisors created a commission to probe jail violence and Baca’s role in preventing it from being discovered and stopped earlier than it was. The formal process to be proposed in the ballot measure would provide an additional means of removing the sheriff, whether it be Villanueva or one of his successors in the office.

If the motion passes, county lawyers must draft appropriate criteria for removal. Allegations that are too vaguely defined, such as “flagrant and repeated neglect of duties,” as in the San Bernardino ordinance, would probably invite lawsuits, long trials and court rulings over just what constitutes “neglect.” Removal for criminal offenses, on the other hand, would in most cases be redundant because sheriffs are already removable upon criminal conviction.

The measure would, unfortunately, leave untouched the county’s biggest governance problem, which is a five-member Board of Supervisors that is inadequate to the task of representing 10 million residents as a combined executive-legislature. That kind of fix requires a thoughtful and principled approach or else L.A. County could wind up with a ballot-measure arms war of the type that has hindered San Bernardino County in the years since the sheriff‘s removal ordinance. Two years ago, voters there approved an initiative to weaken the Board of Supervisors by cutting each member’s compensation from more than $200,000 a year to $60,000 and limiting each supervisor to a single four-year term. That charter change is currently tied up in court.