Four years ago, Paul Parker set out to fix some of California’s deadliest jails. San Diego County was paying out millions of dollars to families whose relatives died in jail, two jail medical staffers were facing criminal charges, and the sheriff in charge insisted nothing needed to change.
Everyone said the right things when Parker was appointed to take charge of the county Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board. He said he was excited. The review board’s chair welcomed his arrival. The board, formed in 1990, had just been given a bigger mandate and more power to investigate in-custody deaths at San Diego County jails.
But that hopeful honeymoon period quickly eroded. The San Diego County jails system set a record high of 18 deaths in 2021. A new sheriff took over in February 2022, and the jails matched its record total deaths again. The county jail’s death rate in 2023 was the third-highest on record, following only 2021 and 2022.
Last month, Parker quit.
“I spent three-and-a-half years banging my head against the wall,” Parker said. “Am I going to continue banging my head against the wall here for something I don’t think is going to change?”
Deaths in jails are a crisis in the state, reaching record numbers in several counties. But it’s the jail deaths in San Diego County that have been the focus of a state audit, the subject of massive protests and the inspiration for a law that seeks to curb sheriffs’ powers in jails.
San Diego County is one of the few counties in the state that grants civilians a review process for their sheriff’s department. Activists in other counties have pointed to San Diego as a model of what they hope to achieve.
Yet the San Diego County review board doesn’t have the power to force the sheriff’s department to make changes. It can only make recommendations to the county Board of Supervisors.
Parker’s resignation underscores both the limits of civilian oversight and the power of sheriffs to ignore them. For him, a former police officer and coroner, it no longer made sense to keep trying.
“There doesn’t seem to be a desire on the part of the county to fix things,” Parker said.
Parker proposed hiring an inspector general with subpoena power to investigate jail deaths. After two jail deputies were arrested last year and charged with drug offenses while on jail property, he proposed scanning jail employees for contraband.
The review board, which is appointed by county supervisors, refused to recommend hiring an inspector general. San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez rejected his scanner proposal in November 2023, citing her concerns about radiation exposure to the deputies from the scanners.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say body scanners similar to those found in airports release “thousands of times less” radiation energy than a cell phone.
Sheriff Martinez and her department declined to talk to CalMatters for this story. So did the San Diego County Sheriff’s Deputies’ Association, which represents sworn jail staff.
Martinez has been with the sheriff’s office since 1985 and was elected sheriff in 2022 after her predecessor, Bill Gore, resigned with a year left on his term — weeks before the release of a damning state audit on jail deaths.
At first, Parker was hopeful. While serving as acting sheriff in February 2022, and running for the job full time, Martinez said she would make all in-custody death reviews public.
But she reversed course once in office. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office only posts summaries of its in-custody deaths, with none of the supporting documents showing how it reached its conclusions.
In television interviews, Martinez has said she has made changes to improve jail safety. Martinez told KFMB-TV last year the jail system she oversees had better screening for mental health and medical histories than under her predecessor. In another interview, she said the department is focusing on searching incoming inmates and the mail for narcotics because officers believe they are the primary sources of drugs in jails.
San Diego County jail deaths, while still among the highest in the state, dropped from 19 in 2022 to 13 in 2023.
“We’ve been working really hard on improvements to our jails, and we’ve still got a lot to do,” Martinez told KFMB last year.
But in San Diego County, even getting the sheriff to appear at review board meetings has been a struggle.
“I just want to reiterate my request to have Sheriff Kelly Martinez attend our (board) meeting and explain why something as simplistic as just allowing the officers to go through a scan, which could alleviate our concerns, is such a problem,” said board chair Eileen Delaney in October. “This is my 10th request and I will continue to request it every meeting until, as an elected official, she feels comfortable coming here.”
At that same meeting, families of people who died in jail took turns expressing their frustration with the sheriff and her jails policy, especially her refusal to scan jail staff for drugs. Thirteen inmates died from drug overdoses in San Diego jails between 2021 and 2023.
One of them was Saxon Rodriguez, whose sister, Sabrina Weddle, has become a familiar face at review board meetings.
“The drugs are not just coming in through the inmates,” Weddle said at the board meeting. “We know that Kelly Martinez does not want to scan her employees. It shows the sheriffs can give two f—- about the lives that they’re taking care of.
“They get to do what they please, they get no reprimand. I just get a dead brother.”
Fentanyl, meth get into San Diego jail
One afternoon last fall, Weddle stalked the entrance of the main jail in downtown San Diego, lying in wait for the next person in green fatigues or medical gear to cross her path. A pair of San Diego County sheriff’s deputies approached and she began to shout. They looked down, up, anywhere but straight at her.
“You are all murderers!” she shouted. “You know the people who let him die. They should be the ones in jail.”
Her 22-year-old brother was a fentanyl user, and he died in jail of a fentanyl and methamphetamine overdose in July 2021.
The review board Parker led conducted its own investigation and faulted the entire jails system for failing to keep out the drugs that Rodriguez used to overdose. Further, the board found that 65 minutes and 28 seconds passed between checks on Rodriguez when California law mandates that jails check on inmates every 60 minutes.
“The investigation failed to confirm how the fentanyl and methamphetamine entered the detention facility, but it clearly did,” the board found in December 2022. “The evidence indicated that either sworn (sheriff’s department) personnel and/or non-sworn (sheriff’s department) personnel failed to prevent illicit drugs from entering the detention facility.”
How, Weddle asks, did her brother get fentanyl in jail, four days after he was admitted? Why did it take so long to reach him as he overdosed? Had medical staff responded five minutes sooner, would he still be alive? The cause has captivated her life. She brings along her 10-year-old son to protests.
Weddle, 30, said she believes the jail system killed her brother as much as the drugs did. She has no faith in the sheriff, the deputies who run the jails or the nurses and doctors who work inside the facility.
A bus of inmates pulled in front of the jail’s metal gate on the day of her protest.
“Get your mental checked!” Weddle shouted to them, advising them to ask the jail for a mental health evaluation. “Don’t let them just lock you down!”
Paul Parker’s abrupt resignation
For people protesting jail deaths in other counties, San Diego is a model to emulate.
“Other counties like San Diego County (have) a separate entity that does autopsies and death reviews,” said Luis Nolasco, a policy advocate for the ACLU of Southern California at an October protest in front of a Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting.
“It’s important that we all stand here and put pressure on (the Board of Supervisors) to start that here.”
But people who study jails and their management said Parker was always on a somewhat hopeless mission.
“The idea that a single person can in any meaningful way change the system beggars belief,” said Aaron Littman, deputy director of the UCLA Law Behind Bars Data Project. “I’m glad they exist. It’s going to be hard for that person to be very effective.”
Only one member of the five-person Board of Supervisors responded to calls or emails seeking comment for this story.
“It is heartbreaking and wrong that people continue to die in our jails, and so many families are suffering,” said Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer, who went on to note that the Board of Supervisors gave the civilian review board more power to investigate police use of force incidents by any member of law enforcement – though not the power to subpoena officers.
“Due to decades and decades of an old Republican Board underpaying workers, the County jails have been chronically short-staffed and lacking in adequate medical attention and supervision, contributing to deaths and other tragedies in our jails,” she wrote.
Parker held this job once before, for just a year in 2017, and left that time in frustration. When he quit this time, in March, he did so in a brief note to county supervisors in which he said that his time in the job had restored the “credibility and relevancy” of the civilian oversight board.
He doesn’t describe his resignation as a protest, but said he hopes walking away suddenly will call attention to deaths in San Diego County jails and his frustration at trying and failing to change jail regulations.
“I just don’t think I’m the right fit,” Parker said. “I might have pushed too hard.”
Parker said he would have considered staying if the county board of supervisors had forced the sheriff’s office to be “responsive, transparent, get deputies scanned,” or appointed someone with the power to do so.
“I would ask why not one supervisor reached out to me to discuss (the review board) and civilian oversight these past three and a half years,” Parker said. “Not one supervisor. Not once.”
Parker’s resignation was another blow to jail activists in a year that hasn’t been kind to their cause.
In February, a nurse and a doctor who worked in the San Diego County jails and were charged in connection with the death of a 24-year-old inmate went on trial. Both were charged with involuntary manslaughter. A jury acquitted the nurse, and a hung jury failed to give a verdict against the doctor. Prosecutors dismissed the charges.
Protests continue in San Diego against jail deaths. In February, for the third time in two years, the oversight board once again recommended the sheriff’s office scan deputies.
They haven’t gotten a response.
This article was originally published by CalMatters.
