Editorial:  Jerry Powers is out at the Los Angeles County Probation Department: Now what?

Los Angeles County Chief Probation Officer Jerry Powers was hired three years ago to steady a department racked by employee misbehavior, favoritism and mismanagement, so it’s more than a little ironic and disheartening that Powers, who stepped down Tuesday, was himself under investigation for promoting a woman with whom he is said to have had a personal relationship.

Despite his own scandal, Powers appears to have succeeded in improving the department to an extent, imposing a measure of employee discipline and earning the enmity of labor unions representing deputy probation officers, supervisors and staff. Labor put immense pressure on the county Board of Supervisors to oust Powers during most of his tenure. The board only occasionally offered him the backup he needed to successfully lead the world’s largest probation department.

It is actually two departments: a juvenile division with the mission to correct the behavior of youths charged with offenses and guide them toward productive adult lives, and an adult division that supervises convicted offenders in their communities in lieu of jail. The mission became more challenging just before Powers’ arrival because of the state program known as realignment, which made county probation departments the key players in a sweeping statewide effort to reform criminal justice. Under realignment, many ex-inmates who formerly reported to state parole agents are now supervised by county probation officers, who are expected to provide more rehabilitation and reentry support services than before. Powers was in the odd position of laying off a large number of his juvenile division officers due to budget pressure and declining juvenile caseloads just as he was staffing up his adult division because of realignment. That task was made more difficult by supervisors who were at best lukewarm on realignment and often receptive to employee complaints about the changes in their duties.

Powers’ job was also complicated by allegations and criminal charges against department employees, including improper sexual relations between probation officers and the juveniles they were supervising, staged fights between juveniles at probation camps, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages on camp premises and worker’s compensation fraud. The situation was so bad that the county sent sheriff’s deputies to supposedly injured probation employees’ homes to get them to return to work. Meanwhile, Probation Department employees racked up drunk driving arrests in numbers that rival the Sheriff’s Department’s eye-popping totals.

The department’s troubles attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which imposed a series of appropriate but costly mandates under a memorandum of agreement. The Board of Supervisors was divided, with some members urging Powers to do his best to fend off an even more costly consent decree, and others seeing such oversight as the only way the troubled department could break free of a dysfunctional culture that dated at least to the tenure of Richard Shumsky, a former probation union president whom the Board of Supervisors hired in 1998 in a bid for peace with the unions.

Since Shumsky’s departure in 2005, the county had been unable to keep a chief probation officer for more than a few years. Powers’ predecessor, Donald Blevins, was sharply criticized during his brief tenure for his time traveling outside the county. After forgoing a nationwide search, the supervisors hired Powers from the comparatively tiny probation department in Stanislaus County, and allowed him to commute weekly from his San Joaquin Valley home to Los Angeles.

Powers said he often joked to then-Sheriff Lee Baca that he was grateful for the Sheriff’s Department’s bad press over deputy misconduct because it kept attention off the Probation Department.

The difficulty of Powers’ task and the halting support from the Board of Supervisors in no way excuse him, if the allegations are accurate, for having an inappropriate relationship and making an improper promotion. These alleged actions, in fact, could easily unravel the standards that Powers sought to set; the county could not justify retaining him.

Nor did Powers put in place the degree of reform needed. He passionately articulated but could not completely instill the reform philosophy that drove realignment and is ascendant among juvenile justice and criminal justice thinkers and practitioners in other jurisdictions: to view probation officers mainly as social service workers who help mentor troubled individuals and guide them toward success in school and employment, rather than as law enforcement officers comparable to armed parole agents who serve warrants, make arrests and “violate” probationers — the law enforcement shorthand for catching people with dirty drug tests and other offenses and turning them over for prosecution.

The Board of Supervisors that hired Powers and kept him in place was far more skeptical of the reform mission than is the current board, with its two new members. And it seemed much more willing than does the current board to accept a chief probation officer such as Blevins or Powers with one foot in another county, and with a goal of merely keeping a lid on the place and avoiding future scandals.

Los Angeles County, because of its enormous population and its government’s enormous bureaucracy, is a challenging place, but that need not mean that it must hire the first person willing to take on a tough job like chief probation officer. The supervisors would be wise to appoint a solid interim leader and take their time conducting a thorough search for a replacement.

They should consider whether juvenile and adult probationers would be best served by a single department or one formally divided. They should demand a probation chief who can inspire the vast majority of probation officers who are dedicated to service. And they should be prepared to back up the new chief if labor resists the push for the highest standards of performance.

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