The Office of Independent Review was designed to shed light on how the Sheriff's Department operates. But according to Gennaco's 2004 contract with the county, as head of that office, Gennaco has an attorney-client relationship with the county and the sheriff, unlike the inspector general for LAPD. This means that what Gennaco sees, says and does in his investigations is confidential, the same as if Gennaco were Baca's lawyer. Gennaco cannot testify in court, for example, about any of his work.
Attorney Sonia Mercado, who lost a bid in court to get Gennaco to testify about an Office of Independent Review investigation, says, "As a lawyer, your duty and solemn obligation is to your client and to not do or say anything contrary to your client's best interests. If the OIR is Baca's attorney, we must stop calling it the Office of Independent Review. It taints itself to be so closely associated with the group it is supposed to be investigating."
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
The Men's Central Jail
Carrillo several days after being beaten
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Gennaco disagrees, arguing that the privilege allows his office access to otherwise confidential documents, such as Internal Affairs reports, critical to overseeing Sheriff's Department investigations.
"To me, it's a bunch of junk," Gennaco says. "The privilege provides us access, but it's never been used to try and influence what we do. I think the trade-off is important to have that access, and I think the civil lawyers are mad because we won't help them with their lawsuits against the sheriff."
Addressing the question of transparency, Gennaco wrote a letter to the ACLU and the county supervisors, stating: "Our work over the past eight years has provided more transparency regarding the internal investigative processes and discipline of LASD than any other sheriff's department in the country. In our view, it is in no one's best interest to keep these processes in the dark."
To back up his claim, Gennaco points to his office's public reports, which provide information concerning all Internal Affairs investigations, the outcome of the investigation and an assessment as to whether the investigation was adequate.
"You won't find another law enforcement agency in the country that does that," Gennaco says, with the exception of the California corrections department and the Orange County Sheriff's Department, whose processes were based on Gennaco's recommendations.
Yet Gennaco acknowledges that his office does not conduct independent investigations into every use-of-force incident. During a 2005 court hearing, Gennaco's attorney, Jennifer Gysler, said the Office of Independent Review does not "investigate the event itself." Instead, Gysler says in court papers, describing Gennaco's actual work: "They review what was done by the Sheriff's investigators ... [and] look at the investigation that was done through a legal prism" to make sure "it complied with the law."
Gennaco says that if an inmate kills himself or is murdered, he or his colleagues go to the crime scene to make sure sheriff's investigators are asking the right questions. But, he says, in cases where nobody dies, which make up the majority of the jail's roughly 80 abuse allegations that Gennaco's office reviews each year, his office conducts a review of the sheriff's investigation file.
If a witness is intimidated not to talk, or if a witness is never interviewed by the Sheriff's detectives, the Office of Independent Review might never know it. Eliasberg says the office's work therefore can only be as good as the investigations it is reviewing.
"We would need 40 times the people we have right now to do our own investigations," Gennaco says. However, "You are right that when we're not on the scene there may be a time when something might slip by."
Even Baca's spokesman, Whitmore, says, "The OIR doesn't have its own investigators, and I've always thought that it probably should."
In February, on the day Gabriel Carrillo was injured by several officers in Men's Central Jail, a sheriff's deputy escorted his girlfriend, Grace Torres, out of the little break room near the visitors' lobby, and seated her near a group of deputies. Ten or so minutes later, she saw officers walking out of the break room with blood on their uniforms.
Torres says she heard someone instructing the deputies who had been in the room with Carrillo to clean themselves up. Then, she says, she heard one of them say, "Should I say my rib or jaw hurts?"
Torres wheeled around. "Really?" she asked.
The officers then stopped for a moment, Torres says, and began whispering.
An hour later, Torres says, a deputy approached her and said he was going to interview her and that "Whether we let you go depends on what you say" — a threat to pursue charges against her for having a cellphone in her shoe.
The officer explained to Torres that her boyfriend's brother, who was in jail, had gotten into a physical confrontation with police the day he'd been arrested. The deputy wanted Torres to say in a recorded statement that her boyfriend was mad when he arrived at the visitors' area to see his brother.
"I told the deputy, 'No, he was not upset or mad,' " Torres says. "Then they turned off the recorder and said I'm not cooperating and that they can add charges to Gabriel — and that I could go to jail."
