Inspector seeks ‘full transparency’ on Santa Cruz County Jail deaths

The public deserves a “fully transparent accounting” from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office of how Tamario Smith, German Carrillo and Mark Beckner ended up dying and Tyler Luttrell was assaulted while in custody at the Santa Cruz County Jail, according to the first annual report of the agency’s new Office of Inspector General.

As soon as settlement of litigation in those cases allows, the sheriff’s office must present “factual details” and a “comprehensive corrective action plan to address the performance or systems deficiencies identified.” The report details numerous concerns raised by the public and incarcerated people about conditions at the jail, and while acknowledging facility and staffing issues that are beyond the control of the sheriff’s office, recommends an overhaul of use-of-force policies and a better accounting of how people with mental illness are treated and the rationale and duration of the practice of solitary confinement.

The first annual report of the Office of Inspector General, created 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, will be formally presented to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. The office has been run on a contracted basis by a Long Beach-based consultant specializing in police oversight, OIR Group, which started work in July 2023.

Unlike its scrutiny of other incidents at the jail in the past year, OIR said that it did not investigate the four high-profile in-custody deaths and sexual assault because they happened between 2018 and 2022, before the Office of Inspector General started work. But it has heard a lot from the public about them.

“The refrain we heard from members of the public is that they want the ‘full story’ of these incidents. The facts as reported publicly lead to understandable questions about how such events could occur and what the Sheriff’s Office is doing to ensure they never happen again,” the report said. “While the County has been focused on litigation of these cases, the public has not forgotten about them. It will be difficult for the Sheriff’s Office to move forward and establish trust with some segments of the community until there has been a fully transparent accounting of these cases and a comprehensive corrective action plan for how to address any systems deficiencies these incidents revealed.”

One driver of mistrust, the report said, is “that the public had yet to learn about the results of any internal investigative review the Sheriff may have conducted about these incidents, including whether these investigations resulted in officer discipline and any changes in jail policies or procedures.”

OIR’s report, which was scheduled for a public airing Monday night prior to Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, also addressed criticism of the use of solitary confinement in the county’s jails, an extended prohibition on in-person visitation that started during the onset of COVID-19, the use of force and chemical agents against incarcerated people, the condition of jail buildings and how the sheriff’s office treats people suffering from mental illness.

The firm scrutinized four cases in which jail staff used “chemical agents on incarcerated persons” to remove them from their cells “for reasons related to severe mental health issues.”

While acknowledging that the choice to shoot pepper spray-like chemicals into a cell can help “limit the need for additional force,” the report said it “creates the risk of injury to both the incarcerated person and staff,” as well as “collateral contamination.”

As with similar recommendations over the sheriff’s office’s use of force outside the jail, OIR said that the agency needs to improve how it documents such incidents and do a better job working with mental health professionals before and after to ensure such actions are justified and possibly avoid them in the future.

While OIR found that the agency was justified in each case, in the sheriff’s office’s reporting of them, “there were no clear timelines provided,” “in some cases, the warning that chemical agents would be used were not clearly given,” there was no body camera footage backing up the agency’s claim that voluntary compliance was sought first, and there was no documentation of the sheriff’s office checking on whether any medical conditions of the people affected were considered first.

In its report, OIR said it heard a great deal from the public about the conditions of the county’s jails.

“Those include: concerns about an increase of double and triple bunking and bunk beds being placed in day rooms at the jail; the use of solitary confinement, particularly for those with mental illness; the status of jail maintenance projects such as the repair of emergency call buttons and non-functioning intercom systems; questions about the status of promised updates to the classification system used in custody facilities; and the quality of medical and mental health care for those in the jail facilities,” it said.

While the condition of jail buildings “is a source of regular frustration that there is little the Sheriff can directly do to make corrections,” OIR noted that a $5 million upgrade to emergency call buttons and door locks was recently completed.

The sheriff’s office has also overhauled the way it classifies incarcerated people based on the severity of charges and history of violence to assign them a security level that can help guide decisions about where they’re housed and what types of programs are available to them.

OIR also noted that in-person visitation recently resumed at the county’s Blaine Street jail housing women, and that a new body scanner will soon be installed at the Rountree jail in Watsonville to facilitate the resumption of in-person visits.

Undersheriff Chris Clark, who was appointed this fall to succeed Sheriff Jim Hart when he retires in December, has said that restoring in-person visitation at the jails is one of his top priorities.

Conditions at the jail, especially as they relate to the treatment of people suffering from mental health issues, was the subject of a scathing report earlier this year by the Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury, a 19-member, state-commissioned citizen watchdog committee. Hart rejected and criticized the findings of that report.

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