Editorial: Convicting Paul Tanaka doesn’t end the culture of lawlessness in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department

The conviction Wednesday of former Los Angeles County Undersheriff Paul Tanaka on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice concludes an essential chapter in the astonishing story of a Sheriff’s Department that unmoored itself from those values it is entrusted to uphold: protection of the powerless, respect for the law, commitment to justice and, above all, honesty.

The verdict stems from a 2011 effort by a group of sheriff’s deputies to hide an informant — a jail inmate — from FBI agents who were investigating allegations of brutality and misconduct by deputies. Former Sheriff Lee Baca long denied any knowledge of the plan, then blamed it on Tanaka, his second-in-command, and finally pleaded guilty in February to lying about what he knew. Tanaka tried to blame everything on Baca, but the jury declined to absolve him of responsibility.

Tanaka has tried to present himself as a dedicated sheriff’s deputy and somewhat bookish accountant who was called on by Baca to apply his management skills after the sheriff ineptly led his department into huge budget deficits. Once he reluctantly accepted the position, Tanaka has said, he was shocked at the level of disarray and mismanagement he found and did his utmost to impose some needed order.

That all may be true, yet it does nothing to counter the evidence put forward by federal prosecutors (or by a jail violence commission that investigated and reported on the department in 2012) that Tanaka was a vindictive leader who worked to cover up the brutal abuse of jail inmates by sheriff’s deputies.

Tanaka encouraged brutality but did not introduce it to the Sheriff’s Department, even if he was indeed a tattooed member of the Lynwood Vikings, a group of deputies who many assert made a sport or initiation rite out of violence against the communities they patrolled and the people they jailed. Brutality became part of the department’s culture before Tanaka’s arrival and could easily survive his conviction without a level of sustained scrutiny and civilian oversight that has been much discussed but has as yet failed to come to fruition.

Baca resigned his office and current Sheriff Jim McDonnell was elected in 2014 (handily defeating Tanaka, who had the audacity to run for the top job despite the ongoing investigations). Although the elections, indictments and convictions might end the chapter, they don’t end the story. County residents and leaders are deluding themselves if they believe the action by voters and federal prosecutors will be sufficient to eliminate a long-standing culture of lawlessness in the department, or to prevent the next Tanaka from committing, or covering up, a new round of abuses.

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