SAN JOSE — A new civilian watchdog report says a former Santa Clara County sheriff’s employee with a history of bullying and making physical threats against co-workers avoided punishment because of his ties to the previous sheriff and undersheriff, whose stalling of an internal investigation allowed him to quietly retire before he could be fired.
The employee, who is unnamed in the report by the county Office of Law Enforcement and Correction Monitoring, slightly outlasted his alleged protectors. Laurie Smith resigned then was formally expelled as sheriff after a civil corruption trial in late 2022, and her former undersheriff Rick Sung retired around the same time after two years on leave related to his criminal indictment in a pay-to-play concealed gun-permit scandal that also fueled Smith’s ouster.
“Corruption of a Sheriff’s Office Internal Investigation” is the second report from the oversight office that contends Smith and Sung obfuscated or terminated an internal affairs investigation into misconduct deemed embarrassing for the agency. OIR Group, the firm that serves as the county monitor, also excoriated Smith and Sung in the 2018 case of Andrew Hogan, a mentally ill inmate who catastrophically injured himself while riding unrestrained in a jail-transport van.
Hogan’s family later received a record $10 million settlement from the county for the agency’s lack of intervention. In 2022, OIR found that a subsequent internal investigation was improperly axed by Sung, seemingly to protect a jail supervisor who at the time led the correctional officers union supporting Smith’s 2018 successful re-election bid.
It was during OIR’s investigation of the Hogan case when the firm got word of another instance of a well-connected employee being shielded from misconduct discipline by the former top brass. The resulting report is being presented to the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
So why is the county re-litigating more alleged sins of a sheriff administration that has been out of power for two years? OIR says the two corrupted investigations exposed still-existing holes in the agency’s internal policies that need to be fixed.
Namely, the firm writes in the report, internal affairs investigations into employees with personal or political ties to the sheriff need to be divorced from the office and conducted by an outside entity; and the agency needs to create a mandatory progress log of IA investigations that gets updated monthly, which includes tracking and explaining inactivity on a case.
The absence of these controls, the report argues, meant that the sheriff and her commanders had unchecked authority to quash inconvenient misconduct complaints, and inconsistent documentation meant there was no way to readily know what happened to them.
“The ramifications for harmony and an effective workplace are serious when an employee is empowered to believe that the rules do not apply to him,” OIR Group lead Michael Gennaco wrote. “The dynamic that apparently happened here was one that undermined operational effectiveness – and one that illustrated why cynicism about law enforcement discipline processes persists.”
The sheriff’s office told this news organization that the former employee was a civilian technician at the time of his retirement and when the misconduct occurred, and OIR states that he was a patrol deputy in the past.
Sometime around 2018, this employee, who reportedly had a three-decade personal relationship with Smith, was the subject of a complaint that he challenged a retired employee to a fight in a social-media exchange, according to the report. But the complaint went nowhere and was never fully investigated.
That allegation ended up getting folded into a later internal affairs investigation into the same employee after he was accused of challenging a co-worker to a fight over some off-color banter in the workplace. The employee was reportedly told he was creating a hostile work environment, and when asked to try to get along with his colleagues, apparently responded, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
The investigation brought to light, through numerous witness interviews, a lengthy history of the problem employee being a chronic malcontent, bullying co-workers with violent threats and using ethnic slurs and homophobic language. All the while, he lorded over them his friendship and ties to then-sheriff Smith, and the report makes clear that other employees believed he was correspondingly protected from any discipline for his conduct.
But that investigation was terminated at the order of Sung, according to the report. It was revived only under duress, 16 months later, after another verbal altercation spurred a complaint.
By that point, the employee’s protection, which the report alleges was at the behest of Sung in service of Smith, was eroding. In late 2020, Sung was criminally indicted for his alleged role in a scandal that found concealed-carry weapons permits were being issued by Smith’s office based on political support and patronage, while ordinary residents had very little chance of getting the coveted licenses.
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Smith was also weakened by the scandal, though she was never criminally charged. A separate civil grand jury process put her on trial and spurred her retirement and resignation. With her and her former second-in-command relatively sidelined, the sheriff’s office sent the problem employee a letter signaling its intent to fire him.
The employee retired, ending that possibility. The OIR report states that two months later, he did get a formal letter that “advised the employee that had he not retired, he would have been terminated for his misconduct.”
In response to an inquiry from this news organization, the sheriff’s office said in a statement that policies were changed in the fall of 2022 — before current Sheriff Bob Jonsen took office — after the Hogan report, so that “premature termination of an internal affairs case would require a memo from the Sheriff’s Office explaining the reasons for such termination to be reviewed by OIR.”
The sheriff’s office added that “the lessons of the past are not lost on the current administration of the Sheriff’s Office,” and that Jonsen “agrees with both OIR recommendations for this current report and is committed to implementing them moving forward.”
This is a developing report. Check back for updates.
