On May 11, two custody deputies from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office were injured at a court holding facility on Anacapa Street in Santa Barbara, according to Todd Johnson, vice president of the Santa Barbara County Deputy Sheriff’s Association.
Johnson said the incident occurred when the two deputies were transporting an inmate for a court appearance. One deputy, a female, was kicked in the mouth while a male deputy had a ligament torn in his finger, Johnson said.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer Kelly Hoover confirmed the incident to the Sun.
Johnson is also a custody deputy who works as a watch commander at night and said the incident marks the 35th time since Jan. 1 that a custody deputy has been “assaulted” by an inmate. Hoover wasn’t able to confirm the statistics.
Many of the assaults Johnson said deputies are dealing with at the jail involve “gassing,” or when inmates spit on or throw feces or urine at the deputies. When this happens, deputies are required to get a blood draw to test for infectious diseases.
Incidents such as these are low in the Santa Barbara County Jail compared to Los Angeles County, Johnson said, but it’s still no consolation.
“I’d much rather be punched in the face than spit on or bodily fluids thrown on me,” Johnson told the Sun.
Incidents like these are a problem, Johnson said, because of jail crowding.
But that’s not the only problem deputies are facing. There’s also the issue of understaffing among the custody deputies, although Johnson isn’t sure if this is connected to the assaults.
In April, Sheriff Bill Brown expressed concern about a shortage of jail staff before the county Board of Supervisors and mandated that all deputies work overtime.
The jail must have at least five to seven deputies on duty per day on average in order to maintain minimum staffing levels, according to Johnson.
And that’s on top of the jail overcrowding. Johnson partly blames the passage of Proposition 47, or the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, in November 2014, when California voters approved the law that eliminated jail time for certain types of felonies.
The law was supposed to reduce jail populations, but Johnson said it only made it worse.
According to data gathered by the Sheriff’s Office, the average daily jail population dropped from 967 to 891 after the passage of the law. However, the population reached more than 1,000 in March.
One reason why Johnson said custody deputies have to work overtime is because the jail doesn’t have a labor contract with its employees.
At the April 11 budget hearings, Brown attributed the understaffing of employees to several reasons, including retirements, transfers, and “negative” news media coverage of a few cops, which he said turns off new recruits from entering the law enforcement profession.
“We can’t get young people to want to go into the academy,” Johnson said. “We have too few deputies to deal with the amount of inmates in the jail.”
A new, 376-bed jail is to be built in Santa Maria by May 2018. However, when bids opened up at the end of February, the lowest bid came in $11 million more than the estimated cost of the first phase of construction.
This article appears in May 19-26, 2016.