Column: Can a nice guy like Robert Luna lead as L.A. County sheriff?
If you just beat the incumbent to become the next sheriff of Los Angeles County, you deserve a celebratory margarita, you know?
That’s what I suggested to Robert Luna when we sat down on the patio of Lola’s Mexican Cuisine in Long Beach’s Retro Row for a late lunch the day before Thanksgiving. His wife Celines and campaign strategist Jeff Millman joined us. Customers and pedestrians stopped to congratulate L.A. County’s new head lawman. He took in the love with fist bumps, handshakes and a smile as wide as he is tall.
“I must’ve shaken a thousand hands today,” Luna exclaimed as we looked over the menu.
Dressed in sneakers, slacks and a dark blue Hurley sweater over a long-sleeved shirt, Luna had the look of someone who was ready to relax but knew that rest was far, far away.
Earlier that day, he had volunteered at the Los Angeles Mission’s annual Thanksgiving lunch, then attended a barbecue fundraiser at the Norwalk Sheriff‘s Station for recruits injured when a car plowed into them while they were on a morning jog.
The retired Long Beach police chief easily beat incumbent Sheriff Alex Villanueva in this year’s general election by 61% to 39%. Luna’s reward: a scandal-plagued department.
He inherits multiple lawsuits alleging horrific conditions in a jail system still under a federal consent decree. A former sheriff, Lee Baca, completed a stint in federal prison this year for corruption charges. An uproar over deputy gangs has sparked nationwide attention. And he succeeds Villanueva, who won in 2018 promising to bring a progressive approach to the largest sheriff’s department in the country but instead ushered in a reign of favoritism, paranoia, vendettas and political punishment straight out of “Game of Thrones.”
So howzabout that toast, Sheriff Luna?
Robert Luna, the retired police chief of Long Beach, will be Los Angeles County’s next sheriff after incumbent Alex Villanueva conceded Tuesday.
“I almost never drink,” he replied. “When you’re in law enforcement, you’re always on call. Imagine if I had to show up to a scene, or speak to other officers, and I have alcohol on my breath. It’s like, ¡híjole!”
“Maybe on vacation,” said Celines, a retired FBI analyst.
How did you celebrate your win, then?
“My first feeling was to go back to my neighborhood in East L.A.”
“I call it the East L.A. tour,” Celines replied with a knowing chuckle. Every six months or so, Luna takes her and their two adult children to see where he’s from. The one-bedroom apartment where he shared a bunk bed with his sister. The nopales that his mom harvested to sell and to feed to the family. Where his relatives are buried. Where he went to school.
“Where his mom sat while he was in the classroom, crying for her,” Celines teased, the way only a wife of 22 years can.
“We didn’t have to share that part,” Luna sheepishly shot back. Then he got serious.
“I will never let people tell me, ‘Hey, you’re going to become the sheriff. You’re going to become a celebrity. You’re not going to talk to people.’ And it’s like, ‘No, you don’t understand who I am.’ Fundamentally, I always take myself back to that kid who was looking through the fence at the cops or the deputies in uniform.”
If the child is the father of man, as William Wordsworth wrote long ago, then L.A. County is about to experience a master class in that cliché, courtesy of Luna. He’s billing himself as a lifelong law enforcement officer who doesn’t just know that many people are suspicious of his department — he knows why, because he’s lived it.
“There were times where I think came so close to” ending up on the wrong side of the law, he said while forking through his mole poblano. “I’ve sat around at Christmas events with family, some of them who’ve been in L.A. County jail, some of them who are gang members. And I grew up in that environment. That’s what made me a better police officer — trying to understand all sides.”
He thinks a magnanimous, worldly approach is what Los Angeles County needs right now. But that’s not what members of his new department or leftist activists want.
Luna drew attacks from liberals and conservatives when protests in downtown Long Beach after George Floyd’s murder resulted in vandalism and accusations of police brutality against activists and journalists. During their only debate, Villanueva mocked Luna as a “puppet” who wasn’t able or willing to stand up for himself. When Luna announced his candidacy for sheriff in May, local Black Lives Matter members shouted “Shame.”
Luna nevertheless won. So did a ballot measure allowing the Board of Supervisors to remove a sitting sheriff, which was inspired by Villanueva’s disastrous four years but will apply to Luna and future sheriffs.
L.A County Sheriff’s Department insiders I spoke to, who didn’t want to go on the record, said they think Luna is a nice guy who won’t survive his new job due to its sheer scope — about 18,000 employees and a $3-billion budget, compared with the Long Beach Police Department’s 1,200 employees and $262 million in Luna’s last year — and its cutthroat, toxic politics.
“He has a strong moral compass, and he’s going to need that,” said Jim McDonnell, who was Luna’s predecessor as Long Beach police chief and served one term as sheriff. “He’s going to have to realize how to work with those that raise their hands, and those who don’t.”
McDonnell knows what he’s talking about — he faced a similar task cleaning up the Sheriff’s Department after Baca’s tenure. Activists and deputies alike opposed his reforms, and he lost to Villanueva in 2018.
Robert Luna, the former Long Beach police chief, is running to unseat Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, promising calm, not bluster, reform, not scandal.
Luna speaks deliberately yet freely. His penchant for plain-spoken anecdotes and his earnest outlook, delivered in a calm, deep voice laced with an East L.A. accent, gives him the air of a high school football coach used to dealing with defiant kids. He’s not just the polar opposite of Villanueva, who never missed an opportunity to insult opponents — he’s a completely different universe.
When I asked him about the Dudley Do-Right charge during our two-hour conversation, he didn’t flinch.
“I’ve gone through a lot in my life, which has taught me to be very resilient,” Luna said, finishing off his Mexican Coke. “And although I will come off as a person who will always give you an opportunity, I’ve had enough people hurt me during my lifetime, where I’m also very cautious.”
He now has a chance to confront one of his biggest bullies: the Los Angeles County Sheriff‘s Department.
On the campaign trail, Luna repeatedly mentioned how deputies harassed him for no cause as a teen in Santa Fe Springs. Prior to his run, he said, the last time he visited Men’s Central Jail was to see a cousin who “got mistreated” there.
“When I go into a meeting and people talk about racial profiling,” he said, “for me it’s like, I was that kid that got jacked up and sitting on a curb going, ‘What did I do?’ And a deputy saying, ‘Shut your mouth.’”
Luna told me that L.A. County deputies nearly soured him on becoming a cop.
In elementary school, a deputy’s classroom visit got him interested in law enforcement, which he saw as protecting the public from bad people. In high school, he asked a deputy how to start his career.
Don’t bother, the deputy replied.
Undeterred, Luna then went to the Norwalk station for an interview with a lieutenant to become a sheriff’s explorer.
“I’m really trying to be as straight-up appropriate as I can,” Luna remembered. “First thing I notice, he’s got his boots on the desk. So the whole time I’m talking to him, I’m looking at the bottom of his boots. And we’re sitting there talking, and the whole time I’m talking to him, he’s twirling a pencil like this.”
Luna grabbed a straw and mimicked the lieutenant.
“Almost like, ‘You know what? I’m bigger and better than you. You don’t mean crap.’ That’s the way he made me feel. And he never encouraged me to sign up. It was almost like he was discouraging me. And I remember walking out of there, Gustavo, feeling like, ‘Man, maybe this wasn’t meant for me.’
“That’s why I didn’t become a sheriff [deputy],” he concluded. “That one guy.”
Luna’s negative encounters with the Sheriff’s Department didn’t deter his law enforcement dreams. He tried one more time by approaching a police officer during a career day at Long Beach City College. That officer encouraged him to apply to the Long Beach Police Department, where Luna spent 36 years, rising through the ranks and becoming its first Latino chief.
“How do you get people that maybe don’t trust the police to start trusting the police?” he said. “Honestly, as simple as it sounds, it’s individual relationships, individual contacts. If you have a cop who walks by here and you say, ‘Hello’ to him and he doesn’t acknowledge you? You’re like, ‘Oh, they’re all like that.’”
El sheriff brought up the Norwalk fundraiser he had attended earlier in the day, which drew law enforcement and the public, to confirm his point. Before he left, he approached the station’s captain.
“I’m hoping you guys are taking a video and photographs to show all the members of the department how much love and support is actually out here,” Luna told the captain. “And that makes the officers feel good, like, ‘Hey, I’m out here, I have the support,’ as opposed to that feeling of ‘Everyone hates me out here. I gotta watch my back, everyone’s out to get me.’ That is not true. It’s not true whatsoever.”
His belief that the public supports law enforcement is such that as Long Beach police chief, he arranged a meeting between Black Lives Matter activists and members of his department. The cops didn’t want to do it.
“They’re just going to yell at us,” Luna said they told him. “They don’t want to fix anything. They just want to call us names. But I told them, ‘What if this could be productive? What if we could be one of the first cities that actually could say we actually are trying to work things out?’”
Things didn’t end up working out with the activists in Long Beach. But that’s not stopping Luna from trying the same strategy again — a topic for Part 2 of my sit-down with the new sheriff, coming Saturday.
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