This story appeared in the Antelope Valley Press April
20, 2001.
By DENNIS ANDERSON
Valley Press Editor
LOS ANGELES - Like a game of Clue, hints laid out all over the Monterey Park headquarters office of Sheriff Leroy D. Baca indicate that he's not your usual suspect.
Not if you're looking for a conventional law enforcement chief to lead the nation's biggest sheriff's department.
The first tip-off is the absence of police bric-a-brac, the sort that adorns many chiefs' offices.
The kind of badges and plaques that decorated the same corner office when it was inhabited by Baca's predecessor - the late Sheriff Sherman Block - simply are not there.
Instead, in Baca's sanctum, a pair of jade-colored vases offset the desk near a Chinese character scroll that promotes "long, happy life" next to a statue of the Buddha and bookshelves lined with copies of the Bible, the Koran and other sacred teachings.
The only testament to the kind of down-home, straightforward, gung-ho spirit that marks many peace officers is the red, white and blue acoustic guitar gaudily inscribed with Buck Owens' outsized signature.
The sheriff earned a doctorate in public administration, but he's a big country fan, too. Always has been. Particularly of the old-fashioned twangy variety delivered by Buck Owens, the six-string saint of Bakersfield.
A study in contrasts, the sheriff.
More than halfway through his first term, Baca embodies the colliding traits of up-from-the-ranks lawman, introspective scholar, man of action, systems analyst, visionary reformer, politician, professor. He's a sometime target of controversy and a seeker of social harmony.
"Indeed, yes," Baca said. "All of that. Guilty as charged."
Baca, 58, leads the nation's largest sheriff's department, with more than 15,000 civilian and sworn personnel. The department polices 41 contract cities - Lancaster and Palmdale among them - and about 75% of the 4,000 square miles that make up the County of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles deputies patrol an area inhabited by roughly 2.7 million people. On any given day, about 19,000 of those people are locked up in the nine jails the Sheriff's Department runs.
Baca wants to enforce the law in a dramatically different way. He says he wants nothing less than to improve peoples' lives by changing the culture of the Sheriff's Department.
The sheriff wants to do more than enforce the law. He says he wants to create the conditions for civil peace.
"How we accomplish a better society is through creating better people," he said. "One of the underlying tenets of Confucianism is to create better government through better people."
Baca says he learns as much from his deputies as he has to teach them.
Confucius
Not so many chiefs cite the Chinese philosopher Confucius these days. Or any other time, for that matter.
Rail thin from running eight miles every morning, with a proud head, smooth as a monk's, Baca in a way resembles some of the Eastern ascetics whose work he admires.
But with such unconventional approaches, Baca is attempting to change law enforcement's culture itself in the nation's most populous county.
He's engaging in ahead-of-the-curve proposals such as aggressively applying drug treatment before prisoners are released, sponsoring youth intervention programs run by Marine Corps D.I.s like the ones who trained him at Camp Pendleton years ago and inviting expert civil rights attorneys to engage in department oversight.
"Arrests are not the only way to reduce crime," he said. "You have to have creative leadership."
Baca wants a 400-bed community drug treatment center and points out that the voters are ahead of him, approving a proposition in the last election to opt for treatment of first-time drug offenders rather than criminal punishment.
"The drug war is a two-front war," he said. "You have the drug traffic front and the treatment front.
"If you do not treat the drug problem in jail, where are they going to be? They're going to be back in jail."
Few of these overtures win Baca the love of hard-core law enforcement traditionalists who view police work as arresting the bad guys and keeping them off the streets. There were deputies who voted for Block even after Block died just before Election Day.
Baca, however, contends such deputies are fewer in number as he recruits more new sworn personnel - 2,000 since his election, 500 of them women. In a progressive fashion, the department will change, Baca contends.
"Persistence is my kind of toughness," he said. "I'm not into
the dogmatic stereotype. The dogmatic cop thing is becoming a thing of the past.
What people want are leaders."
Core values
To create that kind of leadership, Baca emphasizes his core values, a series of ethical precepts that get repeated like a mantra and just as often.
"As a leader in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, I commit myself to honorably perform my duties ... with respect for the dignity of all people, integrity to do right and fight wrongs, wisdom to apply common sense and fairness in all I do ... and courage to stand against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and bigotry in all its forms."
That's the values statement, repeated with the cadence of the Boy Scout motto. Yet, even the sheriff parted company with the Boy Scouts of America over their policy against gays in Scouting.
Baca initially indicated the department might sever ties with Scouting, but ultimately agreed to disagree. Balance was achieved. As the Japanese would say, Wa: Harmony.
"We've kept our relationship. The Boy Scouts know I object strongly to their policy. I believe you can change the course of an organization over time."
Change in his own organization will come from embracing new ways, new techniques, new values.
"A lot of that hard-nosed cop stuff comes from what I call `locker room' talk," Baca observed. "I encourage new deputies not to take too much from that kind of locker room talk. Not to listen to a deputy who tells them, `You may have thought you learned it in the academy, but this is how it is in the streets. Let me tell you how it is.'
"I urge them not to abandon their core values. ... I urge them to keep the ideals they learn in the academy."
Holding on to the core values Baca espouses can prevent the kind of meltdowns nearby departments have experienced in recent years, such as the Riverside Police Department's shooting of a black woman who was asleep in her car or the Rampart corruption scandal that has plagued LAPD.
"If my deputies fire 100 rounds into somebody who's holding a toothpick in their hand, that's my fault because I failed to train them."
That means being open to oversight, Baca contends.
"If you say you want reform but you don't want any others to participate, then you don't really want reform," Baca said. "My deputies will be the ultimate defenders of civil rights."
Loyalty - and compassion - for the underdog likely result from Baca's childhood in East Los Angeles. Raised by his grandparents, he shared a room with a mentally handicapped uncle.
Baca jokes that the Japanese kids in his neighborhood understood his surname, Baca, to mean "stupid" in Japanese. Was he really teased as "stupid Leroy?"
Such teasing, and getting past it, gave Baca a certain immunity to casual cruelty and the kind of public criticism that comes with public visibility.
"If you grow up knowing what humiliation is, no one can humiliate you," he said, grinning. "You have more tools to deal with people who have a personality problem."
So, Baca faces the anonymous department critics with the confidence of his convictions.
"The validity of my message is that deputies will accept civil rights attorneys to oversee our internal affairs," he said. "That shows we have nothing to hide.
"We have to put our egos aside. Is the sheriff or the chief of police so important that no one else can share in how we operate?"