Baca

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has reversed his support for a controversial deportation program, announcing Wednesday that he will not comply with federal requests to detain suspected illegal immigrants arrested in low-level crimes. The sheriff's dramatic turnaround came a day after California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris issued a legal directive advising that compliance with the requests is discretionary, not mandatory. Until then, Baca had insisted that he would honor the requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold some defendants for up to 48 hours.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca is once again confronting questions about problems in the nation's largest jail system. The latest allegations center on whether deputies in his department routinely denied bail to people arrested for minor offenses - even after they were ordered released by a judge - solely because of pending immigration investigations. The sheriff's office denies that such a policy exists, although it acknowledges that the department holds immigrants under a federal immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on behalf of people who say they were denied bail for minor offenses after being flagged by immigration authorities. British filmmaker Duncan Roy, who says he spent nearly three months in L.A. County jails without a chance to post bail, is one of the five plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which will be filed today in U.S. District Court. Roy was arrested Nov. 15 in Malibu on an extortion charge. He was in the country legally but was identified as a suspected illegal immigrant through a federal program called Secure Communities, which sends the fingerprints of all arrestees through an immigration database.

The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has run the Mira Loma Detention Center, one of the largest immigration jails in the state, for more than a decade. But next month, the center is scheduled to close because Sheriff Lee Baca and federal authorities can't agree on the basic rules governing how the jail should operate. There are several areas of disagreement between the two sides. But in general, the Department of Homeland Security deserves praise for fulfilling its pledge to hold immigration jailers like Baca accountable and for imposing standards to ensure that the tens of thousands of immigrants across the country, including asylum seekers, are being treated fairly and humanely.

Reacting to a scathing report of sheriff's deputy brutality in the Los Angeles County jails, county supervisors Tuesday embraced dozens of reforms to curb inmate abuse and said they would be responsible for ensuring that Sheriff Lee Baca carries them out. The Board of Supervisors accepted the findings of a blue-ribbon commission that spent nine months investigating allegations of excessive force before concluding that Baca failed to heed repeated warnings...

After nine months of investigating the inappropriate use of force by deputies in Los Angeles County jails, the Citizens' Commission on Jail Violence arrived at an inescapable conclusion. As the commission's report put it: "The sheriff did not pay enough attention to the jails. " The commission, which we served as general counsel and executive director, found that there has been a persistent pattern of inappropriate force used against inmates. And although concerns had been raised repeatedly, Sheriff Lee Baca did not begin to address the problem until the violence made headlines last year.

Sheriff Lee Baca said this week that he's ready to shoulder the blame for years of unchecked deputy-on-inmate violence in Los Angeles County jails. And he promised to carry out all the reforms outlined in a scathing jail report by an investigative commission that laid the problem at the sheriff's door. But it's hard to know what to make of a leader - nationally respected and locally beloved - who ignored a decade's worth of brutality complaints and rarely visited the jails he runs, except to play sheriff-sage to the inmate-students in his Education-Based Incarceration program.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca surprised some observers when he pledged this week to implement reforms recommended by a panel created to investigate problems in the jails. Baca's embrace of those proposals is encouraging as well as surprising, given that the commission was highly critical of his leadership and concluded that his failings had allowed the problems to develop. Baca deserves praise for pledging to fix the problems that occurred on his watch. His promise to implement all 63 of the recommendations made by the Citizens' Commission on Jail Violence is also heartening, especially given the sheriff's appearance before the seven-member panel earlier this year, when he defiantly told the commissioners that they lacked authority to tell him how to do his job. Baca's lamentable resistance then has given way to a far more accommodating posture today.

Bowing to mounting pressure to fix the nation's largest jail system, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca agreed Wednesday to sweeping reforms to improve the management and oversight of his agency amid allegations of deputy brutality against inmates. One of the key recommendations accepted by Baca would create an independent inspector general's office with the authority to scrutinize Baca's agency. The move would significantly strengthen civilian monitoring by giving the outside body the power to conduct investigations inside the jails and elsewhere in the department.

Re "Jail violence Baca's fault, panel says," Sept. 29 That the problem of deputy violence in the jails has outlasted many sheriffs suggests that whatever L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca's role is, systemic factors are involved. Likely among them are the nontransparency of law enforcement, new deputies eager for patrol stuck in the jails, department isolation from the rest of county government and many in jail who could be safely released pretrial. The blue-ribbon commission's proposals - among them transitioning to a professional jail staff and having monitors report to the Board of Supervisors - look promising.