Inspector General: Reform Santa Cruz sheriff force, body camera policies

The first annual report of a new Office of Inspector General calls for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office to change how it handles the use of force and adopt a policy of requiring deputies to activate their body cameras at the outset of any response to a call for service, investigative or enforcement activity.

A public meeting to discuss the report will be held from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 28, in the Community Room in the basement of the county building at 701 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Spanish translation services will be available, and participation via Zoom will also be available at this link. The report will be formally presented to the county’s Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Oct. 29.

While praising outgoing Sheriff Jim Hart’s cooperation with the firm hired to run the inspector general’s office, the report recommends an overhaul of the “scope and format” of internal investigations “to ensure they are consistently detailed and inclusive and thoroughly address all performance issues that emerge.”

It also calls for a more rigorous approach to investigating use-of-force incidents and avoiding them in the first place, “including supervisor reviews and holistic evaluations” to monitor issues “concerning tactics, decision-making, planning and coordination, choice of force options, de-escalation efforts, equipment or supervision.” 

The Santa Cruz County Office of Inspector General was formed after a state law was passed in 2021 that encouraged counties to create them in the wake of national scrutiny of policing after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. A Long Beach-based consultant specializing in police oversight, OIR Group, was hired to fill the role.

The report praised Hart, who is retiring this fall and will be succeeded by Undersheriff Chris Clark, for supporting the idea of an inspector general from the start. “Only a handful of the 58 Sheriff’s Offices in California have adopted any form of oversight since the 2021 law passed, and few have done so with the level of commitment as Sheriff Hart,” it said.

OIR Group started work in July 2023, and began by meeting with the sheriff and his leadership team, the county’s board of supervisors and staff and other stakeholders.

“We also received formal complaints from members of the public, which we forwarded to the Sheriff’s Office and monitored through completion,” the report said. “We heard frequently from incarcerated persons who had specific complaints or questions, as well as strongly-held views on potential jail reform efforts.”

Unhappiness with conditions at the county jail was among the chief complaints that the inspector general’s office heard over the past year. While the issue is addressed in the report, OIR wrote that it was “impressed” by the Sheriff’s Office’s “sincerity in understanding the community’s frustrations.” It also acknowledged related challenges “beyond its immediate control,” including “an antiquated jail facility that is maintained by an entity outside the Sheriff’s span of control,” work with a medical and mental health services contractor “whose quality of care raised enough concerns that the county recently replaced it with a new provider,” and a “nationwide staffing crisis for law enforcement that in Santa Cruz County has required correctional officers to work mandatory overtime shifts for over seven years.” 

Conditions at the jail have also been tackled by the Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury, a state-sanctioned citizen watchdog entity, including a June report that sharply criticized the Sheriff’s Office over mental health care there. 

Allegations of misconduct

Over the course of its first year, the Office of Inspector General reviewed a cross-section of 46 internal investigations that the Sheriff’s Office conducted in 2023, of which 38 were sparked by allegations from a member of the public and eight came from within the department.

“They represented a variety of allegations — ranging from complaints about cases not properly investigated, to the conduct of social media posts, unprofessionalism, rude or dismissive conduct, unnecessary use of force and unlawful detention,” the report said. “Five of these cases resulted in sustained findings of policy violations by the Sheriff’s Office personnel.”

The report recommends a number of improvements in how the Sheriff’s Office should handle future investigations, including:

• Clear documentation of the timing of when complaints are received.
• In cases where an investigation takes longer than usual, explanation of why.
• Better documentation of timelines involved in complaints and the facts and evidence that back investigators’ findings.
• Consultation with trainers and identification of re-training needs when investigating complaints about excessive force.
• Stronger engagement with and “customer service” for members of the public who have faced a difficult situation, even if an investigation finds the Sheriff’s Office did nothing wrong.

“In some cases, we saw missed opportunities to provide training, feedback or other remedial actions that would improve deputy performance,” the report said.

It cited a case in which a woman complained that a sergeant who responded to a call did not have the right to demand she provide identification. 

“In that case, the sergeant’s and other deputies’ insistence that she provide identifying information escalated the encounter …” the report said. “But the investigative report assumed that the deputies and supervisors were correct in their insistence that the complainant was required to identify herself, when in fact this was an erroneous understanding of California law.”

The inspector general’s office said this case “suggests that all involved (officers and supervisors on scene as well as investigative personnel) need retraining on the legal standards around the rights of individuals detained based on reasonable suspicion.”

Body camera policy

According to its report, the inspector general’s office found numerous cases in which deputies failed to activate body cameras in an incident where use of force or an allegation of misconduct happened.

The Sheriff’s Office “too narrowly defines the circumstances under which deputies are required to turn on their cameras,” according to the report, and the inspector general’s office recommends that it become a required routine.

“By the time a deputy realizes a seemingly routine contact is going to necessitate force, it is often too late to expect a deputy to be able to safely activate a camera,” the report said, recommending that the Sheriff’s Office follow the lead of other law enforcement agencies across the country instead. “A more effective policy requires personnel to activate their body-worn cameras at the outset of any investigative or enforcement activity, and before initiating contact specifically related to a call for service.”

The current policy calls for deputies to activate their cameras “as soon as it is safe to do so.”

In short, the inspector general’s office is recommending that deputies activate their cameras “as they are traveling to a call rather than wait until they arrive at a location which may require a dynamic response.”

Use of force

While citing several incidents in which deputies went above and beyond in dealing with mental health or other issues without the use of force, de-escalation tactics are not enough of a focus in the department, the inspector general’s office found.

It recommends that the department require that all deputies explain in writing their efforts to de-escalate prior to the use of force or why de-escalation tactics were not used, and to include whether de-escalation had been attempted when investigating use-of-force incidents.

It recommended that the Sheriff’s Office “require uninvolved supervisors to thoroughly review and evaluate all uses of force and document their actions, findings and conclusions in a stand-alone use of force report that is separate from the incident report” and “routed to command staff for review, approval and further action.”

The inspector general’s office is also recommending that supervisors reviewing use of force talk directly to the people on whom force was used or cite a good reason for not doing so, that supervisors get additional training on how to conduct those interviews, and that they be prohibited from conducting those interviews in the presence of the deputies who used force.

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