Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva is often called “the Donald Trump of American Sheriffs” and in my opinion is the dangerous model for the next Trump-style demagogue / populist threat to democracy. He himself, like a widely feared and beloved J. Edgar Hoover is content to hold onto his high office and will not reach for higher office, but his style of governing, conservation and consolidation of power is something to study for those who fear and those who would emulate the next Donald J. Trump. His power comes in part from the Democratic party which makes this all the more frightening to confront. Villanueva was the first L.A. County sheriff in 138 years to secure a Democratic Party endorsement, and the party once declared his election its biggest victory.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” as Walt Kelly once quipped in his prescient comic strip Pogo.
HIs former supporters are running away in droves while at the same time he gains new ones on the right. The party officially turned on him last year in August, issuing a severe rebuke.
Democrats helped Alex Villanueva be elected sheriff of Los Angeles County in November. Many of the party faithful have since come to regret it.
Frank Stoltze of the LAist reports that the Sheriff's Civilian Oversight Commission called on him to resign as leader in October. Villanueva dismissed the charge with a tweet, calling the resolution a "meritless politically motivated attack... unsupported by real facts."
Who is this man?
Villanueva was an unconventional candidate for sheriff when he beat incumbent Jim McDonnell in the 2018 election. He was a retired lieutenant with little management experience who had never supervised more than 100 people.
Now, Villanueva runs a department that wields an annual budget of $3,303,110,000 and oversees approximately 18,000 employees. The department's three main responsibilities entail providing patrol services for 153 unincorporated communities of Los Angeles County, California and 42 cities, providing courthouse security for the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, and the housing and transportation of inmates within the county jail system.
If you read one full article as a result of this diary, read this piece from the very comprehensive but tiny independent and independently-funded investigative journalism publication WitnessLA. In much more eloquent and responsible prose than I can muster here on Kos, it presents a case that is somewhere between cinema’s deeply disturbing “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and the Twilight Zone’s “Wish it to the cornfield” episode of the omnipotent toddler who Cannot Be Stopped. We have an issue in this nation where once someone reaches high office, they have the opportunity to do what they will until the next election without effective oversight due to the previous decades of democracy not contemplating how venal some candidates truly are under the sheen of attack ads, media coached campaigns and internet presence that got them elected. We pick the shiny object, the new iPhone, the next app or gadget so quickly these days based on what we see on our cell phones as we race around trying to survive.
Forty-six states in the U.S. elect their county sheriffs, California prominently included. On one hand, this structure should represent democracy at work. Yet, as the need for justice reform and reimagining becomes ever more pressing, urgent questions are being raised, both locally and nationally, about whether electing a county’s top law enforcement figure conveys a large amount of power without much accountability.
The Wall Street Journal here covers the ongoing feud between the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Villanueva. Sheriff’s are elected, not selected and appointed like a municipal chief of Police is, and as such have independent powers that are difficult to check and balance. The BoS controls the budget but needs a Sheriff’s department to function, corrupt or not. The city cannot run without it, and Villanueva quietly sits like a tainted patriarch who holds the deed to the farm over his starving children and wife. Like Trump, he’s hard to topple once he mounts his throne, and will remain in office for four years absent some radical, almost unprecedented moves by his opponents who were once his strongest supporters..
A proxy war between the two parties, the Sheriff and the Board of Supervisors who grants the three billion each year is underway in the form of a Coroner’s inquest looking into the highly suspicious “Deputy-involved shooting” death of 18 year old Koreatown Salvadoran-American youth Andres Guardado. He was shot six times in the back by a Sheriff’s deputy last June at his place of work, a Gardena auto-body shop where Guardado worked as an informal security guard.
I have filed over a dozen Kos Diaries on this matter, which is boiling to a head this week after six months of LASD lies, slander, spin and stonewalling. We know the playbook by now, and it’s just as bad as George Floyd or Breonna Taylor, et al, only less widely publicized, in a great part due to Villanueva’s careful strategy of not appearing like a heinous racist monster when he appears on television. He’s quiet, reasonable-sounding and slick as bug snot. He’s also Latino in a heavily Latinx- influenced city where 45% of the Sheriff’s department is also Latinx, and a traditional employment stronghold for the Latinx community. Technically, he’s “waiting for the results of an internal investigation” but in reality he’s stonewalling and running out a clock while possibly overseeing a criminal conspiracy to help his deputy get away with murder, and to cover up the conspiracy that began in the immediate aftermath of the murder when deputies began smashing security cameras that may have filmed the shooting.
A coroner’s inquest, the first of it’s kind in over 39 years is underway “to determine the cause of death” which in this case is known — bullets. But the wider question of how and why is being addressed as a means to ramp up pressure on the incoming District Attorney for Los Angeles County, who may or may not convene a grand jury or proceed directly to filing murder charges against Deputy Miguel Vega, who is currently, according to his Police Union appointed lawyer outside of the USA while the fight is settled. Astoundingly, the LASD Homicide detectives who were called before a judge presiding over this inquest pled the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer the most basic questions regarding the incident. Yet though this all, Villanueva maintains an even strain and holds regular social media “fireside chats” where he panders to his supporters and spins away any and all challenges to his power. It’s a miniature, less fire-breathing version of Trump rallies.
Villanueva has a great deal to explain away. His department, which administers the court security and houses the jailed suspects and guards them, is riddled with “deputy gangs” and cliques that mirror the street gangs they come in frequent contact with, sure members with and live with in their families, communities and on the streets. One such clique is The Executioners, said to control the Compton station house with over half the members either in the gang already or acting as “prospects,” or gang-affiliated and acquiescent members. A lawsuit alleging all of this corruption is ongoing, and may have some connection to the Andres Guardado incident, as the deputies involved there are said to be either members of prospects “chasing ink,” which is the phrase for hoping to earn respect and the right to wear an executioner’s tattoo as a badge for having taken a lift in the line of duty. But that’s just a single representative example of one of the many fires Villanueva has to deal with on a weekly basis.
The following is from LA Mag’s article headlined “The Sheriff Has Lost the Public’s Trust”: L.A. Dems Vote to Rebuke Villanueva
As Los Angeles reported in a profile of the sheriff published on July 26, Sheriff Villanueva has faced mounting criticism for a series of controversial actions he’s taken in recent months. Villanueva has deactivated an alarming number of misconduct investigations, unilaterally reinstated deputies previously fired for misconduct, including Caren Carl Mandoyan, a former campaign driver of Villanueva’s fired for allegations of domestic violence, and created a “truth and reconciliation” process to consider reinstating as many as 400 more deputies and civilian employees fired under his predecessor for causes that include unreasonable use of force, lying to investigators, and domestic violence.
Villanueva’s predecessor, Sheriff Jim McDonnell was defeated by Villanueva as part of the 2018 Blue Wave, but immediately began a process of doing almost the opposite of what he campaigned to do. Most of the reforms Villanueva promised were really Trojan horses for a consolidation of his powers. He promised to “physically remove ICE agents” from the jails, which he did, replacing them instead with private contractors. Under Villanueva the number of inmates transferred to ICE custody had dropped by just 1.9 percent, yet the Sheriff claims he has made that number drop by 79%. These are the Trump-like tactics we’ve seen for four years now — if you’re are going too lie anyway, may as well lie big.
This diary is just scratching the surface on this issue, but if you have further interest please read the linked articles and comment. I published this to gain perspective as much as to share what I see as a frightening trend. I am an advocate for justice for Andres Guardado, that is my focus here but this is the environment in which the fight for justice on the streets of LA is going down. I don’t think I’ve adequately described how this Sheriff is staying in power and possibly gaining support, because frankly, like Trump’s presidency has demonstrated time and again, I don’t fully understand how an unqualified and immoral elected official holds sway over a population. But we better learn, quick.