LA county axes leadership in juvenile detention system

July 8, 2024

LA Probation Dept cuts 14 managers, 13 chief deputies amid struggles with violence and staffing.

(Fox News)~ Authorities in Southern California have axed more than a dozen top officials after complaints of violence and injuries from rank-and-file officers in the county’s juvenile facilities.

Los Angeles County Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa said that 14 top managers would be impacted and 13 chief deputy positions would be eliminated – “an entire layer of management” in the department, which has 6,600 employees.

The impacted individuals were offered positions in other county offices, authorities said.

The shakeup is connected to chaos within the county’s juvenile facilities. Officers have been complaining of increasing violence against themselves and between inmates at the jails for at least the past two years. 

The cuts came in expedited fashion after Viera Rosa’s office asked the county board of supervisors to eliminate funding for the jobs in its latest budget revision.

“A streamlined organization will not only allow us to enact internal reforms more effectively, but it will also align us better with the new County Departments of Youth Development, and Justice Care and Opportunities,” the probation chief said in a statement.

The cuts come as the department is facing a class action lawsuit from officers who accuse leadership of discriminating against officers with injuries, and the county as a whole struggles with crime.

The Los Angeles Times last week revealed that dozens of probation officers assigned to the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall facility were calling out on a daily basis, due to the unchecked inmate violence.

Last year, overcrowding at the facility forced police to wait with suspects in their squad cars in the parking lot for hours.

Los Angeles has shied away from prosecuting juveniles for minor offenses – so the ones who do make it to lockup are accused of serious and often violent crimes. Last summer, the juvenile hall endured an inmate riot and a jailbreak. On the night of the escape, 60 officers out of 100 scheduled to work that shift had failed to show up, according to the LA Times report.

And although it is a juvenile facility, there are still offenders housed there who are above the age of 18.

And juvenile inmates have been growing bolder at the same time.

On top of the probation department’s funding problems, the county is facing a number of whistleblower retaliation lawsuits aimed at the district attorney’s office – two of which have ended in multimillion-dollar payouts – and at least one other major labor lawsuit from Viera Rosa’s predecessor, Alfredo Gonzales.

Gonzales’s lawsuit states that he repeatedly told the county board of supervisors that the department was so understaffed that it violated state law. When state inspectors conducted a review of Los Angeles’ juvenile facilities, he told them that compliance issues were due to the staffing shortage.

Then he was fired.