Panic! Who will help the victims?
Los Angeles Sheriff Villanueva says he will give victims a "voice." Is it what they need?
In Los Angeles County, some members of law enforcement, victim’s rights advocates, and other tough-on-crime types have been agitating against the reforms implemented by the new District Attorney George Gascon, making moves to petition for a recall election.
One of his biggest critics has been Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who has thrown his hat in with Gascon’s opponents and come forward as the poster boy for the budding recall effort against the district attorney. The sheriff has said he will send deputies to parole hearings to give victims a “voice.” He even wrote a nastygram to Gascon to show how serious he is. He’s argued that Gascon’s reforms had led to an increase in crime. (That is just impossible; Gascon has only been in office a few months, and he can only prosecute cases that law enforcement present to his office.) He’s declared his support for victims in press conferences where he was also, coincidentally, arguing that Gascon should be removed from office.
Note: I am not sure about the ethics of a sitting sheriff actively campaigning against a sitting district attorney when said district attorney may soon have said sheriff under indictment. There’s nothing to forbid it. But, isn’t it weird?
There are a lot of good reasons to question this odd burst of activism from Sheriff Villanueva, a fellow who can’t seem to be bothered to show up for meetings with his own oversight commission. In the first instance, he knowingly rehired Caren Carl Mandoyan, a deputy who was fired from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for serious crimes against his girlfriend, including threats to harm her alongside the implication that because he was a deputy (and in a deputy gang at that), none of the LASD bros would come to her aid. The rehire of Mandoyan was so disturbing to some long-time members of the department that they quit rather than help Sheriff Villanueva generate fake documents to justify the rehire.
Above: Excerpt of deposition by Alicia Ault, taken in May of 2019
Sheriff Villanueva appears to be opposing Gascon as part of a political ploy to distract from the fact that his own deputies are creating plenty of victims. LASD deputies have shot and killed over 300 people since 2000. Plus, there’s an Attorney General investigation in the LASD’s continued deputy gangs, who gain points and status by killing, harassing, and framing civilians. On top of all that, Villanueva has subverted over and over again attempts by victims’ families to learn what happened to their loved ones, refusing to turn over evidence and even ordering deputies not to testify at a coroner’s inquest, which is a violation of his duty to be an honest and forthright civil servant.
Because the sheriff is elected, he seems to think that he can only benefit from all this politicking by scooping up votes from people opposed to Gascon’s common-sense reforms. It’s hard not to see this through cynical-colored glasses. There’s the additional irony that Villanueva asked Gascon’s office to partner with him on investigating government corruption, a move that “puzzled” the normally un-puzzled law professor and former prosecutor Laurie Levinson. Such investigations are, again, technically legal only because no one thought to make them illegal. (One of the people Sheriff Villanueva is investigating happens to be Max Huntsman, the Inspector General tasked with overseeing the LASD. Another happens to be Patti Giggans, a member of the Civilian Oversight Commission. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, as they say, I think you can be sure this is an improper investigation by a man who knows no bounds. ) The DA’s office refused the weird partnership, but did declare that they would investigate the LASD for any wrongdoing, should it fall into the category of criminal law.
But, the sheriff’s move also comes from a copaganda-generated mythology about the link between victims and law enforcement, a tale that abolitionist thinkers have sought to dismantle over the past few years as reform after reform is block by the so-called “victims’ right movement.”
Sheriffs, like most law enforcement officers and prosecutors, argue that they are on the side of the “victims.”
But who is a victim? And what does it mean to be on their side?
I am not going to attempt here to present an in-depth history of the victims’ rights movement, as many others have done it better. But I do think it’s worth unpacking why an unpopular sheriff would find it convenient to ally himself with so-called advocates who are seeking to unseat an elected district attorney.
First, let’s be clear that the word “victim” is an empty vessel everyone can fill with their anxieties. It now applies to such a broad swath of people – everyone from politicians accused of sexual assault, to journalists who feel unappreciated, to men’s right activists, to the parents of schoolchildren who are exposed to “wokeness.”
In the police-o-sphere, the definition of “victim” tends to wobble along depending on where public sympathies are deemed to lie. Because victims can be anybody – retail chains, a man who got his ugly watch stolen, Lady Gaga’s dogs – the victim framing mostly serves to direct the view of the audience towards a person into whom we can pour our own fears and anxieties. As Aya Gruber points out, “victimhood narratives also confine the cause of harm to the offender” and away from other structural sources of harm. Then, through the course of a criminal investigation and prosecution, we can excise those feelings by blaming and punishing a specific individual, closing the loop so that we can go home and focus on other things. In Los Angeles at the present moment, the best victims are both dead and the most innocent – children and the elderly.
It’s not a surprise that one of the cases Sheriff Villanueva can’t stop talking about is the death of Gabriel Fernandez, an 8-year-old boy in Palmdale who was abused and, finally, killed in 2013. The use of the Fernandez case by Villanueva is a bit ironic because it was LASD deputies who dropped the ball. At least 9 deputies over a period of years were repeatedly called by school employees and other concerned adults about the abuse Gabriel suffered. In testimony related to the case, it was deputies who “screamed [at the caller] that a child being burned was not an emergency,” who decided that bruises were from a bike fall, and who closed their inquires into the boy’s whereabouts when they took as truth that the boy had moved to Texas.
The Fernandez case was unquestionably a horrible case. The deputies involved were supposedly punished internally but were not criminally charged. (The social workers were.) This case was also before Sheriff Villanueva’s time, but if he is so concerned about family violence, then why rehire men accused of domestic abuse? A suspicious person like myself might argue that law enforcement officials readily embrace victims’ rights because it deflects the attention from their poor police work.
Next, it’s clear who victims are not. Victims don’t seem to include people killed by police, according to law enforcement. Nor people who may then harm other people. Andres Guardado, just a teenager, was shot multiple times in the back by LASD deputies, but the sheriff hasn’t called him a victim. Instead, Sheriff Villanueva labels him “suspect” (per law enforcement protocol) and then refuses to participate in the inquest.
In an age where the role of the victim is to provide a place for the audience of watchers to insert their outrage, grief, and trauma, the institutional pallor that occurs when law enforcement officers are the perpetrators serves to confuse the spectator. There’s delay and reports and investigations. There’s confusion, not over who did the killing, but how or why or how bad was it, really. And, in some cases, the trauma ever gets reversed. The real victim is the agent who did the shooting because they are now saddled with trauma.
Another problem, as many scholars have noted, is that the typology of “victim” is flattened by the notion that all victims want the same thing or experience the harms in the same way. Law enforcement assume that the victims of crime want the harshest, toughest punishment possible. Victims who do NOT want the harshest punishment are sidelined or described as “pawns” of the reform movement.
And finally, let’s not forget that sheriffs and their deputies, like all law enforcement, are not required by law to protect, well, anyone. There is no legal requirement that law enforcement affirmatively protect people from harm. And, even when such requirements as written into the law (by, for example, arguing that police “must” enforce protective orders), the U.S. Supreme Court has said that those are just words to ignore. There’s no individual entitlement to protection by law enforcement. So all those words about protect and serve? It’s just promotional material.
I would go on to argue that in the case of sheriffs, siding with victims is plainly a move to get re-elected. In the case of Sheriff Villanueva, he’s already lost the entire criminal system reform community because he has failed to live up to any of his campaign promises. So, he has no choice but to join the other side. The enemies of his enemies are his friends, I guess?