An attempt at compromise between the Marin County Sheriff’s Office and proponents of civilian oversight was set aside last week by county supervisors, after public speakers decried the proposal for a community working group as ineffectual and inadequate.
“This is one of the first times I feel like we’ve been heard,” Stinson Beach activist Tara Evans said.
Supervisors Katie Rice and Damon Connolly had suggested the working group, which was supported by Sheriff Robert Doyle and undersheriff, Jamie Scardina. The group would have consisted of 15 to 20 residents who would meet regularly with the sheriff’s office to provide feedback on issues of community importance. Yet it would have lacked the transparency requirements and subpoena power afforded to independent oversight committees under Assembly Bill 1185.
That law, passed in 2019, allows counties to authorize a civilian oversight committee or an independent inspector general’s office that can investigate incidents involving law enforcement. The bill explicitly empowers these investigations to subpoena documents when necessary.
Activists have been mounting calls for an oversight committee since A.B. 1185 passed, arguing that it would be a powerful tool to address racial profiling, jail conditions and local collaboration with immigration enforcement.
Marin has a record of unequal policing, with a disproportionate number of traffic stops involving people of color. In the 4,158 traffic stops conducted by deputies last year, 53 percent of the drivers were white, 22 percent were Hispanic or Latino and 17 percent were Black, according to data from the sheriff’s office’s Racial Identity and Profiling Act dashboard, which was created in 2020 and updated this week. Marin’s racial makeup is 85 percent white, 16 percent Latino and less than 3 percent Black.
Lisa Bennett, co-chair of ICE Out of Marin, said although the community working group was not a bad suggestion, it would not have replaced an oversight committee. “We are looking for systemic change in an oppressive system, which has a massive imbalance of power in the hands of law enforcement,” Ms. Bennett said at last Tuesday’s hearing on the proposal.
San Rafael activist Cesar Lagleva delivered an impassioned plea for an oversight committee. “I’m willing to risk my health and life for the tool of justice that many residents in this county have been waiting for, particularly the BIPOC and poor residents of Marin County, to obtain your key to the door of 1185,” he said.
Mr. Lagleva told the supervisors he had been a victim of police brutality as a younger man, and he singled out Supervisor Rice, asking how she could reconcile her support for people with mental illness with her sheriff’s working group proposal. He said such a group would do nothing to repair the trauma that residents have experienced at the hands of law enforcement.
Ms. Evans called the proposal “nothing more than window dressing.” She cited Marin’s status as the most segregated county in the Bay Area and among the most unequal counties in the state. The community working group would be “another white Marin moderate attempt at selling performative equity so that this board may appear like it is engaged in improving the plight of Marin’s Black, Latinx, Indigenous and poor,” she said.
Ms. Evans, Ms. Bennett and Mr. Lagleva are plaintiffs in a pending American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over the sheriff’s office sharing data automatic license plate readers with other law enforcement agencies, including with a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The practice, which the A.C.L.U. alleges violates California law, underscores the need for a true oversight committee, Ms. Evans told the Light.
“If we had a sheriff’s oversight committee with subpoena power, perhaps the sheriff may not have surveilled people and shared that information illegally,” she said.
A.B. 1185 became law more than a year ago, and at a forum hosted by the county’s Human Rights Commission last June, supervisors and Sheriff Doyle heard broad support for civilian oversight. In an October letter, the commission urged supervisors to establish an oversight committee.
“Our recommendation is not intended as criticism of the incumbent sheriff or of his department,” commission chairs Matt White and Helen Castillo wrote. “Rather, we perceive the need for transparency and review of all local law enforcement policies and procedures, including those of the sheriff’s office.”
Sheriff Doyle, who will be replaced by Undersheriff Scardina this year, voiced his opposition to oversight at the June forum, and last week reiterated his opposition, arguing that A.B. 1185 would not give activists what they want. “The intent of 1185 was not to micromanage the sheriff and not to oversee the sheriff,” he said. He called the community working group a “good compromise.”
Undersheriff Scardina debated the importance of subpoena power on Tuesday. “If we can legally give you documents that we possess, we will give you those documents,” he said. “There’s no need to have a subpoena.”
Ms. Evans countered that she and other activists understand that neither an oversight committee nor an inspector general would have the power to tell the sheriff’s office how to do its job. But she said subpoena power gives a committee “enough teeth to be able to know what’s happening when somebody dies in the Marin County Jail or somebody is shot in Marin City.”
Several activists who spoke were frustrated that Supervisor Dennis Rodoni initially provided the wrong date for the meeting, telling them it would take place on Feb. 8, not a week earlier. But they later applauded him as the strongest voice on the board in favor of oversight.
Supervisor Rice said she felt the proposed community working group would be a “positive start,” and she had concerns that a body established under A.B. 1185 could antagonize the sheriff’s office.
Supervisors Rodoni, Connolly and Stephanie Moulton-Peters supported returning to the drawing board for an oversight committee while allowing the sheriff’s office to move forward with the community working group. Yet county staff rejected that option, saying it could create confusion and redundancy.
County administrator Matthew Hymel said county staff will return to supervisors with a new plan within six months.