The slide the instructor was discussing was titled, “Make a good movie.” “In my day,” the instructor said, “you knew just where to go in order to tweak a problem inmate’s fingers while you were handcuffing them.” Several people who were currently or previously incarcerated in Orange county jails independently confirmed to investigators that this had been done to them.ĭuring an official department training, one instructor explicitly referenced this illegal tactic of abusing jail inmates out of sight of surveillance cameras, while explaining the importance of employees knowing where cameras were placed within the jail, the investigators found. Deputies could “really screw someone’s wrist up without having to write a report”, the former staff member said. When supervisors conducted interviews of the people who had been targets of a deputy’s use of force, as the department’s policy required, they sometimes allowed that deputy to be present for the interview, creating a potential “chilling effect”.Ī former correctional staff member of the county jails told investigators that sheriff’s deputies used the “twist up”, or the manipulation of people’s fingers, as a punishment for incarcerated people when deputies felt they were “disrespected”, not for any justifiable reason. Sheriff’s deputies were allowed to submit reports on their use of force late and with little detail, obscuring what actually happened in the incidents, the investigation found. The department’s policies on force were too vague, permitting officers to use undefined “alternative” force methods, not focusing enough on de-escalation techniques and even allowing them to fire warning shots, something other law enforcement departments have banned, the report concluded. The county investigators concluded that there were serious problems with every part of the sheriff’s department’s approach to using violent force.
“Refinement of policies, practices, and training must and does occur on an ongoing basis,” he said. “In 2020, out of the 309,009 calls for service and thousands of other daily public interactions, force was used in the community only 372 times, or 0.1% of calls for service,” Barnes said. In a statement, the Orange county sheriff, Don Barnes, called the investigators’ new report “lacking in substance and useful recommendations”, and defended the department’s current use-of-force practices. In late 2020, a former deputy was indicted for allegedly stealing 15 guns from a dead man’s house. A long-running scandal over evidence mishandled by the sheriff’s department resulted in more than 60 criminal convictions or charges being dropped, Orange county’s district attorney announced in early 2021. Since 2019, there have been dozens of incidents in which sheriff’s deputies were found to have engaged in dishonest behavior or violated the law, a Voice of OC investigation found. The report comes as the sheriff’s department, one of the largest in the country, has been embroiled in controversy for years over criminal behavior by deputies and even a former sheriff, who was indicted on corruption charges in 2007 and ultimately convicted on one count of witness tampering. The newly released investigation was conducted by the Office of Independent Review, a previously dormant Orange county public agency, and commissioned after the George Floyd protests last year. Another instructor illustrated a discussion of mental health regulations in California with a photograph of three convicted killers and the caption, “Why do all mass shooters look like mass shooters?” That claim was wrong, and might also “encourage individuals to discriminate against and mistreat others who are perceived to be mentally ill”, the investigators warned.
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