Sheriff Scott Jones fought the law and the law hasn’t won yet. Will a judge make him comply?
Do we have people in our midst who act above the law? Yes. At the head of that line is Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones.
As The Sacramento Bee’ s Rosalio Ahumada wrote this week, Jones is not complying with a 16-month old California law that “requires law enforcement agencies to release records involving cases of dishonesty, sexual assault or uses of force that killed or seriously injured citizens.”
The Bee and the Los Angeles Times have been in court for more than a year trying to get Jones to release records that he is bound by law to release. This process has already cost Sacramento County $165,000 in legal fees and yet there is no end in sight.
As Ahumada reported, Monday was the three-year anniversary of a particularly notorious fatal shooting carried out by Jones’ deputies.
On May 18, 2017, Mikel McIntyre, a 32-year-old Bay Area man visiting Sacramento, had an emotional breakdown that led to a confrontation with law enforcement. It ended with deputies gunning down McIntyre on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 50 as he ran away.
The McIntyre fatal shooting is exactly the kind of case that motivated former Gov. Jerry Brown to sign SB 1421 into law in September 2018. It went to effect on Jan. 1, 2019.
“Concealing crucial public safety matters such as officer violations of civilians’ rights, or inquiries into deadly use of force incidents, undercuts the public’s faith in the legitimacy of law enforcement, makes it harder for tens of thousands of hardworking peace officers to do their jobs, and endangers public safety,” wrote SB 1421 author Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.
Jones’ reaction to the McIntyre case has only proved how correct Skinner was.
Jones rejected criticism
Here was an emotionally disturbed man having a breakdown. His family was trying to get him help. When officers came upon him he was agitated and his family feared he was a danger to himself. He struggled with one officer and reports of the incident stated that McIntyre struck an officer in the head with a rock. McIntyre fled on foot.
Officers fired 28 rounds at McIntyre, hitting him seven times. Six of those shots hit him in the back. This was on a busy freeway in the late afternoon of a weekday. When confronted with constructive criticism of how his officers responded, what did Jones do?
He locked out his critic, barring him from sheriff’s headquarters. In this case, the critic was former Sacramento Police Chief Rick Braziel.
At the time of the McIntyre shooting, Braziel was the inspector general of Sacramento. It was his job to do deep dives on fatal shootings in the county, among other duties. In the summer of 2018, Braziel questioned the use of force used by deputies. He wrote that McIntyre had run far enough away from officers to stop being a fatal threat. He wrote that officers had enough people on the ground to arrest McIntyre without killing him.
To improve outcomes, Braziel wrote a series of recommendations for officers to consider the next time they drew a gun on a suspect. What’s wrong with trying to improve outcomes, right? Shouldn’t reducing fatal shootings be a goal?
Jones shut Braziel down, preventing him from doing his job until Braziel’s contract ran out. And he got away with it. And now, three years after McIntyre, he’s still concealing dashboard video of the incident – state law or no state law.
The county agreed to pay McIntyre’s family $1.7 million to settle a wrongful death suit. The officers in question have already been cleared of any wrongdoing by the office of Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.
Get the picture? There is no legal reason to continue to conceal video of McIntyre’s shooting and yet here we are, still waiting.
Judge should act
How long do we have to wait before Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Steven M. Gevercer sanctions Jones directly? Holds him contempt? If Jones wasn’t the sheriff and if he didn’t carry a badge, would he be allowed to ignore the law for this long?
Skinner’s reason for authoring SB 1421 was solid: People lose faith in institutions when officials wielding great power get away with ignoring the law. And Jones isn’t just ignoring it in the McIntyre case. As Ahumada reported: “(Jones) has only provided 41 files, and only six files are from incidents within the time period requested.”
“(Media attorney Karl Olson) wrote that the Sheriff’s Office response to these requests ‘can only be characterized as deliberate stonewalling.’”
Based on my personal experience of dealing with Jones for a decade, I see him as flouting this particular law because it requires him to turn over sensitive records to The Bee and the Los Angeles Times.
If there is one thing I’ve come to believe about our sheriff is that this gentleman becomes particularly ornery when two things happen:
One, when he gets taken to court. Because he’s a lawyer and he’ll be the first to tell you that he’s a lawyer and how dare you take him to court?
Two, when he gets questioned in any way about him or his department because his ego can’t take that.
He proved that when he lost his mind over Braziel’s recommendations. He proved that in 2018 when the state auditor criticized Jones for issuing concealed weapons permits “without collecting documentation that the licensing process adhered to its own standards.”
It was a slap on the wrist, a small story, and Jones made it a big story by releasing the state audit before the auditor did. At the time, Elaine Howle, the state auditor, urged Schubert to prosecute Jones
I wrote this in January 2018 and stand by it today: “If one thing is clear ... it’s that Jones willingly has become a partisan lightning rod like no other in the region. He has his beliefs and he won’t back down, no matter what. He sees private fights as public crusades and treats them as such.”
“I have to stand up for myself,” Jones said to me then.
This was my story in 2018 and I’m sticking to it: “The audit flap illustrates how Jones has conflated his job as sheriff with his political beliefs as a failed Republican congressional candidate and a local keeper of conservative values. They are one in the same now and really, this has not been good for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department or for Jones.”
Maybe Gevercer isn’t aware of this pattern of behavior with Jones? Maybe it’s time for the judge to treat Jones as he would anyone else?
