LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Probation Department announced 66 sworn officers had been placed on administrative leave since January as they await a disciplinary investigation.
"The Department is releasing this information to regain public trust as it roots out employees who cultivate or contribute to a culture of violence, drug use, neglect and sexual misconduct in the nation’s largest probation agency," LA County Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa said in a statement along with the announcement.
This comes after two LA County juvenile halls were at risk of shutting down earlier this year due to being out of state compliance and found unsuitable for the confinement of youth. In April, the Board of State and Community Corrections that oversees all correctional facilities allowed them to stay open after they found enough changes were made to be in compliance with state regulations.
The issues that continue to come out of the department are not surprising to Eduardo Mundo, a former deputy probation officer who spent 30 years with the department, and said he noticed a concerning culture even then.
"I was just listening to the staff and how they spoke about the kids, how they spoke to the kids, and what their expectation was of how they should be housed," Mundo said.
Since leaving the department, he is now the chair of the LA County Probation Oversight Commission, where he now spends his time visiting the Sylmar Juvenile Courthouse to speak with those detained.
"Just try to get a gauge on what kind of services they're getting from probation and how they feel about probation and whether or not they think it's helping," Mundo said.
He explains that part of the issue we are seeing at the juvenile halls has to do with training and the hierarchy of the positions.
"When you're in the juvenile hall, it's an entry-level job to begin with. So usually the least experienced," Mundo said.
He said there is a certain amount of training that goes into working in the hall versus working in the field.
"CPR, first aid, how to engage a kid that's in crisis, how to physically separate two kids that are fighting, how to intervene when a kid is attacking a staff. So that can take up to 24 hours of your 40 hour training, which only leaves you with less than half the training to any training for engagement and counseling and how you approach kids and how you de-escalate," Mundo said. "In the field, you're not doing those 24 hours. It's all about service providers providing services, and that's a huge difference."
Training also was one of the pillars Chief Probation Officer Viera Rosa focused on as he reported the state of the facilities and ways they plan to make improvements to the LA County Board of Supervisors just last month.
"We've now trained staff that formerly were not working with juveniles up to standard. So that they can work inside of the facilities, the same expectations and training as those that are permanently assigned to those facilities. It's a game changer. It is an area that we had missed before," Rosa said.
The effort to reclassify officers is also in response to excessive call outs.
"There is a call out culture, and regardless of the reasons, in an agency like this, it's simply not acceptable. The level of call outs is just something so extraordinary that exists nowhere else," Rosa said.
While that problem still persists, he said, they have seen improvements and will continue to work to better the wellness component of the job to reduce call-outs.
Mundo said there are many reasons for the call-outs. He explains officers often have to stay past their shift, leading many to choose to call-out instead of having to miss out on picking up their children from school after work.
"But, you know, they have managers in there now. They have everybody trying to get that done and hopefully hiring enough new staff so our deployed staff can return to their field positions," Mundo said.
Along with addressing the call-out culture, Rosa also responded to the possession of contraband.
"For conditions with respect to contraband, while they continue to plague us, we see a marked improvement and I can tell you plainly the number of young people that were found to been under the influence in our facilities is different today than it was a year ago. While there is improvement to be had when you go into our facilities today, the expectation that there should be no drugs, there should be no contraband, is very clear to all," Rosa said.
He also talked about addressing rehabilitation efforts given the BSCC mentioned a lack of programming in their report.
"We're going to use a multi-disciplinary approach. That means when young people come into our facilities, we're going to focus on assessing them too, understand their individual needs, and then providing services for the period of time that they're with us that's specific to them as individual of those needs," Rosa said.
Mundo said those are moves in the right direction, but change will take time.