By Lyn Jensen, Carson Reporter
Alex Villanueva, who’s hoping to become Los Angeles County’s next sheriff come the Nov. 6 election, has a history of whistleblowing within the sheriff’s department, including uncovering promotions linked to campaign contributions. Despite his own high test scores and decades of experience, he says he was denied promotion hundreds of times while Lee Baca was sheriff. Even after Baca resigned in disgrace over a jail-corruption scandal, and Jim McDonnell was voted sheriff in 2014, Villanueva was still “blocked and blackballed,” he says.
Now retired from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department after 32 years, Villanueva says, “There’s one job he [McDonnell] forgot to block me out of — his job.”
If Villanueva does take McDon-nell’s job, it will be the first time since 1914 an incumbent Los Angeles sheriff has been voted out of office. Villanueva would be the first Spanish-speaking sheriff since 1890 and the first Democrat to hold the non-partisan office since 1880.
He says he’s running for sheriff now because, “I saw a progressively deteriorating department with a succession of sheriffs who were failing to do their job, and that leads us up to the current sheriff.”
Asked for details about his whistleblowing, he recounts being repeatedly denied promotion to lieutenant in favor of people with lower test scores, “They kept announcing lists of people that’d been promoted, and I wasn’t.” He uncovered evidence that the promotions matched campaign contribution reports for Baca and then-undersheriff Paul Tanaka, who was also eventually caught in the same jail-corruption scandal that ensnared Baca.
Villanueva filed a discrimination and retaliation lawsuit and a civil service appeal and neither went anywhere, he says, adding, “2011, I think, they finally promoted me to lieutenant. I think because they thought we’ll toss him a bone to remove the lawsuit.” He was then “blocked and blackballed” from being promoted to captain.
In the 2014 election when multiple candidates campaigned on reform platforms, Villanueva supported Robert Olmstead, who had his own history of whistleblowing and suffering alleged retaliation, during the years when Baca was sheriff.
Despite McDonnell’s campaign promises of reform, Villanueva says that hasn’t happened, “He [McDonnell] had a chance at reforming and getting a new start, the entire organization and it turned out he made it a lot worse.”
“I don’t want to walk away and leave the organization in the state it is right now,” Villanueva explains about his decision to run for sheriff, “So I made a simple plan that was to reform, and build up from the principles of community policing.” His campaign slogan is “Reform. Rebuild. Restore.”
Villanueva says should he win, “First priority is, I’m going to clean house and get rid of all the elements of corruption that are still embedded within the organization, get rid of people that were involved in the corruption. I want to get rid of the pathways that allowed people to gain control of the organization. All the pathways that Tanaka used to get control of the organization, McDonnell wouldn’t even touch them.”
For a model of community policing, he provided as an example his seventeen years on patrol including two years cleaning out a housing project of gangs and violent crime in East Los Angeles, “The measure of their success is not how many people they arrested but how safe is that community. That is a shift in philosophy.”
“Community policing is an actual philosophy that governs an entire organization and I intend to use it and I intend to use that role model that was very successful in ’93 and I want to do it in the entire county,” he says and adds, “We need to get that familiarity back … We’re going to reconfigure the entire organization around community policing.”
Villanueva’s third priority is to increase recruitment and retention, to address what is currently a deficit of about 15,000 deputies. He blames much of the current personnel shortage on McDonnell, “He fires first and asks questions later. In so doing he’s wracked with unlawful termination suits, just like he did in Long Beach [McDonnell was chief of the Long Beach Police Department before becoming county sheriff], on a much bigger scale.”
“My challenge coming in as sheriff, one, I have to stop the bleeding of people leaving and two, I have to rebuild our recruitment process. Attract a higher caliber recruit and then I have to convince people, I want to bring people out of retirement,” he sums up, “to help me train a new generation of leaders.”
The sheriff’s office is non-partisan but this campaign season, when a Blue Wave of Democratic votes is predicted, party affiliation is having some effect. McDonnell is a lifelong Republican, even though his voter registration reads Decline to State. “His policies and his policies as an employer, a total disregard for organized labor, memorandums of understanding, due process for his employees, he’s shown his true Republican colors,” says Villanueva.
Asked about ways partisan politics may affect the county sheriff’s job, “You need go no further than that man right there,” Villanueva says, pointing to a picture of Donald Trump on the cover of a copy of Random Lengths. “[Trump has] politicized immigration enforcement for starters. Guess who is at the front end of that? The sheriff. So whether people like it or not, there’s no such thing as a non-partisan office, at the county sheriff level, and this city election is going to prove that.”
On the issue of immigration law, McDonnell sided with the Trump administration instead of California, Villanueva charges.
The state passed SB 54, the “Sanctuary State” law in 2017 and Trump’s attorney general Jeff Sessions is fighting it. “March 8 of this year he [McDonnell] was in Sacramento with Jeff Sessions when Jeff Sessions announced a lawsuit against the state of California, for SB54,” Villanueva says, “instead of standing with shoulder to shoulder with Gov. Brown and attorney general Xavier Becerra.”
The extent to which the sheriff cooperates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a major controversy which Villanueva plans to address. “Someone in the jail sees an ICE agent in uniform, all they know is, ‘Hey! ICE is here in the jail!” he suggests, so if transfer of custody is necessary, “We’ll do the transfer outside the view of the inmates.”
Villanueva also pointed out how his campaign has opened up a divide in the Democratic Party. Dozens of Democratic office-holders including supervisor Janice Hahn and assemblyman Mike Gipson have endorsed McDonnell, although the Los Angeles County Democratic Party has a rule against Democrats endorsing non-Democrats.
“As elected sheriff, you don’t, obviously you don’t lead the organization based on what people’s party affiliation is,” he says, “But the terms of your policies is an occasion of what your values are, your thoughts are, processes, and my values align with the Democratic party.”