Members of the Orange County Board of Supervisors are starting to ask questions about how much impact their internal auditor for law enforcement, the Office of Independent Review, has on the agencies it’s required to oversee.
“What we’re missing is the implementation piece,” said Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento during Tuesday’s meeting. “Seeing if the things you called into question – have they been cured?”
It’s an office that has long faced questions from county supervisors over how effectively it can do its job, with six employees and a $1 million budget to oversee five departments with a combined budget of $2.6 billion and over 10,000 staff members.
While the office was founded in 2008 to oversee agencies like the Sheriff’s Department and the local District Attorney, it has largely been catatonic for most of its history amidst repeated discussions by county leaders on whether it should exist at all throughout the 2010s.
Those discussions came as the sheriff faced numerous questions over the jail snitch scandal, with the US Department of Justice ultimately ruling the sheriff’s department systematically violated inmates’ civil rights.
Robert Faigin, the current director of the Office of Independent Review, took over in October 2022, and has published a single report, highlighting the sheriff’s department’s work providing healthcare products in county jails.
[Read: Will OC’s New Police ‘Watchdog’ Be Proactive and Transparent? His Background is Sparking Questions]
That report also acknowledged Faigin never had any reason to suspect there was a problem with healthcare in the county jails, and the only reason they started an investigation was because they were asked by Planned Parenthood what services were currently being provided.
“The genesis of this review was not as a result of complaints,” Faigin and staff attorney Rachel Melford wrote in the report. “It appears that a lack of publicly available information regarding the implementation of AB 732 within the OCSD jails prompted requests to OIR for a review.”
At a presentation to the board of supervisors on Tuesday, Faigin said many of the delays were due to how much of a struggle it was to staff his department, noting they’d only reached full staffing in the last three months, and one of their six employees was leaving on Friday.
He also highlighted two more investigations his department is currently conducting – a review of all the deaths at the county jail in 2022 and an investigation on the use of pepper spray at juvenile hall.
“My role is to give the public confidence that what the sheriffs and district attorney’s office are doing is accurate,” Faigin said in an interview ahead of the meeting.
Faigin said his goal moving forward is to publish at least one report a year, but he acknowledged he had to wait until the DA and Sheriff’s Department finished their own internal reviews on issues before he could launch his own investigation.
So far, the DA has issued reports on 12 of the 16 deaths in sheriff custody from 2022, and Faigin’s report said he was still waiting on the DA for any information about the deaths in 2023 and 2024.
When asked by Supervisor Doug Chaffee if the office had enough funding to do its job, Faigin said they would be able to finish the reports he’d already announced.
“I’ll say this supervisor, we could always use more resources,” Faigin said. “As long as we stick to the things in the ordinance and one or two systemic reviews, we can complete those with the staff we have.”
But when asked by Supervisors Katrina Foley and Vicente Sarmiento what reforms had been put in place as a result of Faigin’s work, he said he was too short staffed to follow up on what changes had been made.
“We’ve made several recommendations. I have not, due to resources, gone back to see if they’ve been implemented,” Faigin said. “They’ve been willing and receptive to the recommendations, I just haven’t had the ability to go backwards.”
Both Sarmiento and Foley asked for Faigin to work with the sheriff’s department and the DA’s office on making a public tracker for what impacts his office had on the office’s website.
Right now, most of the office’s website links to dead or empty pages.
Faigin said they were “priming the pump” so more information could come to the website, including the new reports they were working on and other future documents.
“Our goal,” Faigin said, “is to be as transparent as we can and provide as much public information as we can.”
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org or on X @NBiesiada.
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