Los Angeles County’s inspector general is retiring as chief watchdog for the Sheriff’s Department, stepping down from the post he has held since it was first created a dozen years ago.
Max Huntsman, 60, announced his plans in a letter Tuesday.
“It has been my honor to work with a talented, brave, and tireless group of public servants to ensure that the public knows what its government is doing,” he wrote.
Huntsman, a former L.A. County prosecutor, also included comments that were critical of how the county has responded to efforts at civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Department.
Time and again, he wrote, efforts by his office “were ignored” by county leaders.
“The county is putting all its efforts into convincing the public and the courts that it is following the law and has no room to honestly evaluate itself and make the changes it would need to really follow those laws,” Huntsman told The Times in a message early Tuesday. “That’s not compatible with my oath of office.”
In stacks of detailed reports, the inspector general’s office has described a wide range of abuses and failures by the Sheriff’s Department, the L.A. County Probation Department and county leaders. Huntsman’s office has documented poor conditions in L.A. County’s jails, called out the Sheriff’s Department’s for noncompliance with portions of of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and criticized the inability or unwillingness of sheriff’s department officials to rein in so-called deputy gangs, whose tattooed members have repeatedly been accused of misconduct.
The Inspector General’s Office has independently probed hundreds of on-duty shootings by deputies, along with other use of force incidents. Under Huntsman’s direction, the office also scrutinized deficiencies in the county’s skilled nursing facilities during the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic.
In 1991, Huntsman graduated from Yale Law school and immediately joined the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office. A father of two, he served as a deputy district attorney for 22 years, prosecuting political corruption, police misconduct and fraud cases before leaving the courtroom for the helm of the new Office of Inspector General.
One of the main reasons the Sheriff’s Department is still plagued by many of the problems Huntsman confronted when he first became inspector general, he wrote in the Tuesday letter, has been the county’s reluctance to swiftly implement many of his office’s recommendations.
“In my twelve years at this work, I have longed for the day that the county would address the conditions in our reports without a court fight,” he wrote. “Some things never change.”
The Inspector General’s Office is now expected to undergo a sea change with the retirement of the only leader it has ever had.
Huntsman is the latest in a recent string of oversight officials to abruptly depart from their posts. In June, L.A. County Civilian Oversight Commission Chair Robert Bonner told the public that county officials were terminating him from the position. Earlier this year, Sean Kennedy, a member of the commission and its former chair, resigned over what he described as undue county interference in the commission’s activities.
The oversight bodies themselves also have faced cuts. In August, a county office proposed eliminating the Sybil Brand Commission, which conducts civilian oversight of the largest county jail system in the U.S. The county also announced that it would be reassigning or eliminating about a third of Huntsman’s staff.
Yet Huntsman and other county oversight officials continued to advocate for change. For instance, in October, state lawmakers approved Assembly Bill 847. The law will allow oversight commissions across the state, including L.A. County’s Civilian Oversight Commission, to view confidential documents in closed session.
“When government abuses occur, they are sometimes kept secret, but that is no longer the case for much of what is happening in Los Angeles County,” Huntsman wrote at the end of his Tuesday letter. “What you do about it is up to you.”
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