JAIL DEATHS ARE SHERIFF MARTINEZ’S TO SOLVE

On Monday, a week after beginning her job as San Diego County’s new sheriff, 38-year department veteran Kelly Martinez will be sworn in along with other newly elected county officials in a ceremonial event at the County Administration Center’s Board Chamber. Her election as the county’s first female sheriff is a historic achievement and everyone in the region, from the thousands of inmates in the system on any given day to those lucky millions among us who will never step foot inside a jail cell, should wish her the best. But after successive years of record jail deaths, she has her work cut out for her. Her list of priorities needs to start with the basic function of keeping inmates alive and the complex work of changing the culture of a system that has seen more than 220 jail deaths since 2006. Can she truly shake up her department? Can she break with the history of Bill Gore, who was sheriff from 2009 until last February and who endorsed Martinez and encouraged her candidacy as her endorsements from establishment politicians began to roll in?

For some of his time in office, Gore — a 32-year FBI veteran — did a solid job with his department’s responsibilities and challenges. Although violent crime has been drifting upward of late, crime overall is significantly less in the county than in most other populous U.S. counties. Complaints from local cites that contracted with the sheriff to provide their law enforcement were relatively rare and his relations with other agencies were generally good.

But the longer Gore was on the job, the more inclined he became to reject, ignore or downplay legitimate criticism of his department. Despite dozens of people dying in county custody since 2006 — and dying at a rate much higher than in the state’s other large county jail systems — Gore and his department didn’t even want to acknowledge the problem. Not when Gore assumed the top job in 2009. Not when the U-T’S Watchdog team documented the deaths to date in 2019 after a six-month investigation called “Dying Behind Bars.” And certainly not when the state released an audit last February on the day Gore resigned from office, an audit that corroborated the U-T’S findings and detailed jail workers’ cavalier attitude about the health of inmates, especially those who were newly admitted.

A mix of incompetence and inhumanity was on the most tragic display in 2019 when a drug-impaired woman blinded herself in her cell with no intervention from staff members. Yet the department’s formal response rejected the audit’s criticism as overblown and at times inaccurate. The fact that it had paid out at least $7.9 million to resolve legal claims over wrongful deaths over the previous decade — quadruple what was seen in the 10 years before that — was not acknowledged.

The county had a record 18 jail deaths in 2021 and eclipsed that last year with 20 amid the election to replace Gore. All of the 2022 deaths occurred after Gore’s departure, confirming the state audit’s concerns about a fundamental culture problem within the department. After endorsing Gore in each of his elections, though raising reservations about his leadership in 2018, The San Diego Union-tribune Editorial Board ultimately endorsed outsider John Hemmerling in the 2022 general election despite his own flaws. Our editorial noted that while Martinez said the right things about jail deaths, she opposed random drug screening of staff entering jails and proposals to expand the budget and staff of the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board, which investigates allegations of misconduct by county law enforcement. It’s hard not to think of her stands when viewing the video released by the department showing Martinez getting a standing ovation from smiling staff members when entering department headquarters last week on her first day as sheriff. Was this all good will for a respected colleague — or an expression of relief that a department set in its ways won’t be forced to change? Time will tell.

Martinez wrote in September that she was “uniquely positioned to shepherd the changes and improvements the Sheriff ’s Department needs.” San Diegans should hope those words were sincere. San Diegans should also be watching the department for signs change is — or is not — coming. The San Diego Union-tribune Editorial Board will be watching. We will monitor Martinez all year long, exploring the jails’ failings and the state of affairs in other jails, advancing expert views and policy solutions, and trying to break the status quo, all so that this year doesn’t set another record for deaths.