By Danny Fenster
ticklethewire.com
LA County Sheriff Lee Bacca won’t be winning any managerial or humanitarian awards any time soon.
Ticklethewire.com has reported on Baca before. He has been accused of allowing a culture of violence and inmate abuse run rampant in LA prisons. And the Sheriff previously expressed anger that the FBI smuggled a cell phone to a prisoner acting as a mole to investigate claims of abuse. Now, reports the LA Times, an ACLU report has documentation of dozens of cases of abuse under Baca’s jurisdiction.
“If he were a CEO, he’d have been out a long time ago,” former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI‘s Los Angeles office Tom Parker told the Times.
Parker, hired by the ACLU to conduct his own research and compare it against the ACLU findings, says he has been in over 40 jails and prisons nationally. And in his report, he wrote he has “never experienced any facility exhibiting the volume and repetitive patterns of violence, misfeasance and malfeasance impacting Los Angeles County.”
“To an astonishing extent, unchecked violence, both deputy-on-inmate and inmate-on-deputy, permeates Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers Jail,” he wrote.
Writes Steve Lopez, of the LA Times: “Baca, as I’ve said before, is an unorthodox guy — more of a shaman than a sheriff — who’s distinctly progressive on some issues. But he’s been a lousy administrator and leader in many ways, whether he’s handing out badges and guns to celebrity pals, giving special treatment to acquaintances or loading up on more gifts than all the state’s other county sheriffs combined.”
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