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Leaders of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department declined to write new rules for how officers use force against the public this year despite concerns from the county’s top law enforcement oversight department.
The recommendations came from the Office of Independent Review, a department of six employees with a $1.6 million budget that oversees five departments with a combined budget of $2.6 billion and over 10,000 staff members.
While the office was founded in 2008 to oversee agencies like the Sheriff’s Department and the local District Attorney, it has largely been catatonic for most of its history amidst repeated discussions by county leaders throughout the past decade on whether it should exist at all.
Since Robert Faigin took over the office at the end of 2022, only two reports have been published.
One focused on access to healthcare for pregnant prisoners and the other report reviewed the in-custody death of an 87-year-old man with Alzheimers and pneumonia.
[Read: Will OC’s New Police ‘Watchdog’ Be Proactive and Transparent? His Background is Sparking Questions]
But earlier this month, Faigin published a list of all 27 recommendations he made to the sheriff’s department after county supervisors questioned how effective his office was at making changes.
[Read: What Is Orange County’s Law Enforcement Watchdog Investigating?]
That report showed Sheriff Don Barnes threw out every single recommendation Faigin made regarding reducing use of force or writing new recommendations on when to use force, generally noting that the department already had policies around the issue.
The sheriff’s department did adopt 20 of Faigin’s other recommendations, all of which were related to family planning for inmates or access to prenatal care and birth control.
According to the report, sheriff officials rejected proposals to stop deputies who’d injured people from later interviewing them, and declined to clarify when deputies were allowed to hit people in the head or pin them down with their knee.
“It wasn’t a ‘Hey you have to do this type of recommendation,’” Faigin said in a presentation to the board of supervisors on Tuesday. “The fact that we have discussions on these recommendations I think is a win, and it opens the door for ongoing dialogue even if the recommendations themselves are not implemented.”
Most county supervisors did not question why all the use of force recommendations were thrown out when Faigin introduced the report at Tuesday’s meeting, instead praising him for getting so many recommendations implemented.
“Thank you for providing these updates,” said Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento. “You’ve been able to do a lot of the work I think that this board has requested and demanded of your office and your department.”
Supervisor Katrina Foley asked Faigin on Tuesday about the policies that were rejected, noting Barnes called her over the weekend to speak about the sheriff’s policies on allowing deputies to interview suspects after they’d injured them.
Faigin highlighted how in three cases where officers who injured an inmate got to interview them after, the inmates were uncooperative, adding that the sheriff’s department ignored their recommendation to change that policy.
“They have their reasons why they think their policy and procedure is appropriate.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @NBiesiada.
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