Support Your Local Police

After an LA Times reporter received a list of cops whose records made them unreliable witnesses, the L.A. County sheriff launched a criminal investigation into the reporter. 

You know, maybe it would be a better do launch an investigation of the deputies who planted evidence, lied on the stand, brutalized people, filed false reports, and sexually assaulted children.

Then again, maybe I just don't understand policing:

For at least three years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department secretly investigated — and ultimately urged the state attorney general to prosecute — a Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote about a leaked list of problem deputies, according to internal department records.

The probe began in 2017 when investigators under then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell tried to figure out who slipped the list of roughly 300 names to reporter Maya Lau. The case soon fizzled out. But after Alex Villanueva took office in 2018, the department revived it, according to a 300-page investigative case file recently reviewed by The Times.

The department eventually deemed Lau a criminal suspect — alleging she knowingly received “stolen property.” And it fingered Diana Teran, its own constitutional policing advisor, as the source of the leak, even though Teran was the one who’d initially reported it and denied passing along the information.

Sheriff’s officials sent the case to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta in 2021, and in May of this year his office formally declined to prosecute. The office declined to answer specific questions, saying only that it “found insufficient evidence” to merit criminal charges.

………

The years-long attempt to prosecute Lau is not the only time the Sheriff’s Department has targeted a reporter in recent years. In 2020, LAist reporter Josie Huang was slammed to the ground and arrested by sheriff’s deputies while covering a protest. Her press ID was visible on a lanyard around her neck. Villanueva defended his deputies’ handling of the incident and referred the case to the district attorney’s office so Huang could be prosecuted. Prosecutors declined to take up the case, and Huang sued, settling with the county last year for $700,000.

Two years after Huang’s arrest, Villanueva targeted another Times journalist in a criminal leak investigation for her reporting on a departmental cover-up. After announcing the probe at a public news conference, he backed off under a barrage of criticism and denied that he considered the reporter a suspect.

Both of those cases received widespread media coverage, and this week independent journalist Cerise Castle reported on department records showing that sheriff’s officials had been keeping an eye on her as far back as 2021.

As bad as police departments can be, Sheriffs departments tend to be even worse, because unlike chiefs of police, they have no civilian oversight at all.

This will not change until criminal prosecutions for this sort of behavior become the rule rather than the exception.