The ‘interim’ L.A. County sheriff? No, John Scott is the sheriff.

The Board of Supervisors could have picked an insider to succeed Lee Baca and serve as Los Angeles County sheriff for the next 10 months. A top deputy would have given the Sheriff’s Department someone already acquainted with the policies and pecking orders that give the place its culture, and with the people who patrol the streets and the jails. But that’s just the point: Continuity isn’t always a plus. The department needed an unmistakable break from its past, so choosing an insider wouldn’t have been the best move.

So the board could have gone with an outsider, a person from another law enforcement or corrections agency with a solid resume of experience untainted by any time in Baca’s department. But that would have meant a person trying to fix, or even just run, the department without much knowledge of its particular assets and problems. Such a sheriff might have had trouble gaining support or even respect from either internal would-be reformers or old-school foot-draggers, all of whom would have recognized that their boss was a short-termer who would be gone by Dec. 5, when the newly elected sheriff is sworn in.

In picking Orange County Undersheriff John Scott, the board went with someone who’s got a foot in each camp. He’s an outsider, coming from Orange County, and an insider, having been with and retired from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department before being brought over by Sandra Hutchens — also formerly of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department — when she was appointed Orange County sheriff in 2008 to succeed Mike Carona. (Carona was convicted on corruption charges and imprisoned.)

Scott was Hutchens’ boss at the L.A. Sheriff’s Department for a time. Hutchens answered the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ call to correct the troubled Sheriff’s Department there, and Scott is now coming back to Los Angeles County, also to fix a troubled department.

He is well liked by rank-and-file deputies, and of course that cannot be a bad thing, in and of itself. It could suggest that he has the respect needed to push through necessary but difficult reforms. Or that he represents an insufficient break from the current department culture. Or that he will be a placeholder whom top sheriff’s personnel will expect to simply wait out pending election of a new sheriff.

County supervisors are calling Scott the “interim” sheriff, and there is a certain amount of sense in that, given that he will serve only until Dec. 5, when his elected successor is sworn in. And it could be that in using the term “interim,” they are comforting themselves with the notion that they will be his boss.

But they would be wrong. He will not be the acting sheriff beginning Jan. 31 but the sheriff, with the same authority he would have if he were independently elected. The supervisors lack any power to remove him if they grow disenchanted with his performance over the coming 10 months. Nor is there any guarantee that Scott would step down in June to defer to any candidate who might win outright in the June 3 primary.

A candidate who wins more than 50% of the vote in June is elected sheriff but ordinarily would not take office until December. If no candidate gets more than half the vote in June, there will be a November runoff.

If there is a winning candidate in June, the Board of Supervisors would have the power to appoint that person to get an early start — but only if there is a vacancy, and there would be a vacancy only if the current occupant resigns.

It’s not clear whether the board and Scott discussed a potential June resignation. The board could have conditioned the job offer on a signed but undated resignation, much as Los Angeles mayors do with commission appointees, but it’s not clear whether that happened either.

Scott was not among those whom Baca publicly encouraged to run to replace him or to apply for the appointed position. Baca recommended that the board pick Terri McDonald, whom he brought in a year ago to head the troubled Custody Division. McDonald has plenty of experience in corrections, having begun her career as a state correctional officer — a prison guard — a quarter-century ago. But the supervisors were advised that they could not make McDonald sheriff because she lacks requisite law enforcement certification.

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