Department's next step is regaining trust

The Orange County Sheriff's Department has run head-on into a problem that can plague any large organization that deals with the public: how to regain trust after it's been damaged.

Major League Baseball.

Wayward politicians.

A major university.

A charitable organization.

Oh, I almost forgot: a newspaper.

If there's any commonality among those enterprises, it's that in times of crisis their leaders want to get on with business but find that they first must restore public confidence.

You could argue that the problem is particularly acute when it involves law enforcement. After all, these are the people responsible for public safety but who also carry the immense power to arrest and, uh, subdue. They also show up in court and testify. Sometimes, they're the only witnesses to an alleged crime.

When they testify or make other public statements, they must be beyond reproach. Mistakes we can live with. But when they lie or mislead us, it sends a shiver up our spines.

A lot of us shivered this week after the Orange County district attorney detailed either lies or deceptions by several Sheriff's Department personnel when they testified before a grand jury investigating the October 2006 death of Theo Lacy jail inmate John Chamberlain.

It was scary stuff because they seemed to do it so effortlessly. In one instance, a higher-up deleted relevant material that was to be presented to the jurors. In another, a second high-ranking official flat-out denied that he'd read a crucial bit of information in a file regarding the investigations of inmate deaths.

In a third case, an investigator denied under oath that he'd talked at length to a deputy about her testimony to the jury. "I'm sitting before you as a sworn witness . . . to provide you with accurate information," he said to the grand jurors. "And that's what I'm giving you."

Two days later, he admitted to the jury that he'd lied. Three deputies also gave either false testimony or improperly discussed their appearances before the grand jury with others involved in the case.

In yet another troubling moment, the department couldn't produce under subpoena the personnel file of the deputy "who was a strong focus in the jury's investigation," according to the D.A.'s report. The jury never found out why but did learn that the deputy's file "was the only one that was ever known to be missing" among the thousands that were secured, the D.A.'s report stated.