Los Angeles County’s jails are set to be under the watch of thousands of new digital eyes.
The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has purchased 4,641 body-worn cameras for deputies to wear in the facilities, which have seen a spike in inmate deaths this year.
The department has also reached an agreement to implement the technology with the labor unions that represent its employees, according to a recent report by the office of Inspector General Max Huntsman.
The rollout of the cameras began Oct. 1 at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, Men’s Central Jail, Inmate Reception Center, and the Century Regional Detention Facility, the department said.
“The use of body worn cameras will help to improve officer safety, evidence quality, transparency, and accountability,” the department said in a statement Thursday, adding that body-worn and CCTV cameras “will be impactful for investigations, thus enhancing transparency and accountability.”
Advocates and oversight officials hailed the arrival of the cameras as a positive development, but said questions remain about whether they will be used effectively.
Huntsman said body-worn cameras add a level of accountability beyond that provided by the jails’ existing CCTV systems by capturing audio, showing angles that fixed cameras can’t capture and creating new evidence to support or disprove claims of misconduct and other wrongdoing.
“I think the challenge will be getting them trained up on it, making sure they turn them on,” he said.
Problems with body-worn cameras remain, even when they are charged and running, Huntsman said. For instance, someone needs to actually watch the video they record in order for it to be beneficial.
“I think it’s a good incremental improvement,” he said. “Again, it’s overshadowed by the fact that we have and we have had extensive camera coverage of the jails but nobody watches them in real time.”
Peter Eliasberg, chief counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, agreed, adding that the Sheriff’s Department has a history of not thoroughly reviewing video and failing to hold deputies accountable for improper use of force and other wrongdoing — even when it’s caught on camera.
As an example, he pointed to a 2022 incident at Men’s Central Jail that was recorded by a stationary CCTV camera. A short, silent video clip shows deputies slamming an inmate’s head into a concrete wall near his cell, seemingly without provocation, leaving him with a deep, 3-inch-long wound in bloody pictures taken afterward.
“Unless you have a department that is willing to objectively look at what’s happening and say, ‘That’s not OK, it’s out of policy’ … having more videos is not going to help,” he said.
Although two states and a number of other local jurisdictions across the country require body cams in jails, L.A. County has long resisted adopting the technology.
The cameras are being rolled out at a time when the county’s jails are under intense scrutiny.
Last month, state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced that the California Department of Justice was suing the county, the Sheriff’s Department and Sheriff Robert Luna over what he described as dangerously poor conditions inside the county’s jails. Rats and cockroaches are common, and clean water and edible food are difficult to come by, he said.
But perhaps most concerning, Bonta said in a news conference announcing the lawsuit, inmates are dying in record numbers. Men’s Central Jail is on track as of last month to see its most in-custody deaths in a single year in at least two decades. This year, there have been 40 deaths, including by overdose, homicide, suicide and natural causes.
Body-worn cameras alone won’t eliminate violence and other issues in the troubled facilities, Eliasberg said.
“If people think this is some kind of major sea change in improving accountability at least in the jails, the answer is no — if the department refuses to do their job and objectively review use-of-force incidents,” he said.
The post Deputies in L.A. County jails to be equipped with body-worn cameras appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
