The scandal was slow in building, but by September 2011 it was too big for Baca to ignore. His first reaction was to lash out. He accused the FBI of breaking the law in its investigation, and he accused the media of focusing on a few bad apples. He wanted them to pay attention to his "innovative" effort to teach inmates life skills. But all the media wanted to talk about was broken jaws.
Baca realized that he had a serious PR problem. So he reached out to Jeffrey Schwartz, a nationally recognized prison expert who has reformed jails across the country. Schwartz's motto is that prisons should be "clean, quiet and constitutional."
David Plunkert
Ted Soqui
“You ever see a liberal mom or dad who lets
their kids do everything? That’s what Baca
is,” Robert Olmsted says of Sheriff Lee Baca,
pictured.
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Schwartz was alarmed by the conditions in L.A. County.
"The situation is very bad and very much needs change," Schwartz tells the Weekly. "This is not something that the media created."
At their first meeting, Schwartz found himself encouraged by the sheriff's personality. He was no redneck. Baca's office was decorated with Persian art, and Schwartz saw a copy of Plato's Republic on the same shelf as a self-help book by Suzanne Somers.
Baca seemed a mixture of street cop and philosopher, with good values. He was, Schwartz believed, completely sincere in his compassion for inmates. So Schwartz couldn't understand how Baca had presided over a hall of horrors.
"At some point there's some disconnect between who he is as a person and as a leader and what's gone on in the jails," Schwartz says.
As Schwartz started to work, he began to understand the disconnect. He drew up a new force policy but quickly ran into resistance from a group of five commanders Baca had assigned to clean up the jails. Most were loyal to Tanaka, and all of them had contributed to Tanaka's campaigns. One commander told Schwartz they would incorporate some of his language into existing policy. Another claimed that his proposals were no different from existing policy.
"It was pretty obvious that I'm getting reactions from people who don't know what they're doing," Schwartz says.
He complained to Baca, but the sheriff didn't respond. Instead, a commander called and asked, "Why are you bringing negative stuff to the sheriff?" Frustrated, and facing more roadblocks, Schwartz quit.
He never heard from Baca again.
In October, Baca called a press conference in the Men's Central Jail. The media were herded into the jail chapel. Behind pews reserved for the press were rows of inmates in blue jumpsuits. There, Baca unveiled a new organizational chart. It showed Tanaka moved off to one side, out of the line of responsibility for patrol and custody functions.
"I had to revise the chart to establish that I'm the one calling the shots," Baca explained.
But it soon became clear the new chart was mostly for PR purposes. Under follow-up questioning, the sheriff admitted that no lines of authority had changed — he just wanted to correct the misimpression that Tanaka was in charge.
Department insiders don't buy it.
"Tanaka runs the department like his personal sandbox," says one sheriff's administrator. "Now the sheriff is trying to take it back from him, but the damage is done. All those people he promoted are extremely loyal to him."
Under intense outside pressure, assaults on inmates have begun to drop. But Baca still has not reckoned with the brutality in his jails. He continues to doubt the ACLU's allegations, claiming they were based on unreliable inmate accounts. When he was called to testify before the jails commission, he said he was more interested in the future than the past.
As he often does, he deflected criticism with gnomic pronouncements.
"The vehicle of change is not the provable past exclusively," he told the commissioners. "The vehicle of change is the vision of human behavior and where it can change."
Asked why he hadn't done something sooner about the jail situation, Baca replied: "A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. And I'm one who tries to see more than is able to be seen."
The commission issued a scathing report in September, faulting Baca for a "failure of leadership." It called for 63 reform measures, including setting up an independent inspector general, revamping the discipline process and hiring a civilian assistant sheriff to supervise the jails.
At the press conference, Baca made a surprise announcement. He agreed with all of the recommendations. It was clear he did not agree with the commission's harsh criticism, but he took it without hitting back. "I deserve all criticism, whether it's fair or not," he said. "Whether it's accurate or not doesn't matter to me. ... It's not necessary for accountability to be derived only through factualness."
Baca seemed to believe he had outsmarted his critics again. "I don't lead with my ego," he said. "I lead with my intellect."
Two weeks later, he informed a skeptical Board of Supervisors that implementing the reforms would cost $69 million.
By agreeing to them at all, Baca may well have been treating the commissioners the way he treated his deputies when he was first elected: trying to win them over by promising them everything they want, only later to discover that he can't deliver.
