| Los Angeles County, CA | June 6, 2006 Election |
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Staffing problems are running rampant.By Ray LeyvaCandidate for Sheriff; County of Los Angeles |
This information is provided by the candidate | |
Staffing is reached a critical level and must be addressed.Budgetary decisions have been inadequate on most occasions, ignoring the retrofitting and improving of jail capacity until it became a crisis, and spending millions of dollars on sophisticated spyware to monitor employee's computer use, while at the same time leaving deputies in the field with 1970's vintage mobile digital systems. Strategic planning appears to be poor in scope and human resource management is a foreign concept. And for the truly important statistic, our homicide rate has skyrocketed over 55% in the past five years. It is no wonder the most experienced and educated personnel are leaving the Department in droves. The Department has left them little reason to stay and adjacent Counties are more than eager to hire a fully trained Deputy. Most became Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff's because the institution was a proud organization, at the forefront of leadership in law enforcement circles, and the envy of many police agencies. Times have changed. The Department is currently 1300 Deputies below approved staffing levels and the department cannot even hire enough Deputies to keep up with attrition. Deputies, that once expected to do a tour of Custody duty of up to 18 months, are now being held up to six years with very little relief to look forward to. That means that the very valuable and expensive Academy training is being wasted on perishable skills. Because of the lack of better financial planning and failed hiring efforts, just for the Central Jail facility alone, approximately 7000 hrs of overtime per week is being consumed because of an understaffed facility. Other, more distant facilities are operating in the same manner and the parking lots are scattered with motorhomes of employees, forced to work 16 hr shifts. Patrol officers are not fairing much better as, they too, are often drafted to work double shifts. Family necessities such as child care, etc. are only marginally considered. Some cars that are assigned to work Criminal calls, for safety purposes, were once never manned with less than two Deputies per Car. This rule is now often ignored. Until the Department is turned around and these problems are addressed, I don't expect anything to happen except for the situation to get worse. Already, and for some time now, the Department is so understaffed that inmates are being released each day after doing as little as 10% of their sentence, undermining the crime fighting efforts of our sister agencies in Los Angeles County. Ray Leyva, by running for office, has become the first incumbent manager to ever challenge a sitting sheriff. Having been the unit commander of Sheriff's Headquarter's Bureau, Men's Central Jail, and Court Services West, Ray Leyva has been in charge of units that have over 700 employees, and managed annual budgets that exceed $120 million. Not exactly your average municipal police department, in fact there are only three agencies in all of Los Angeles County that exceed those numbers. It is time to refocus the Sheriff's Department back to public safety, and Ray Leyva is the person to do it. |
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ca/la Created from information supplied by the candidate: May 8, 2006 07:47
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