The Curious Case Against a Los Angeles Sheriff Watchdog

California Attorney General Rob Bonta stunned the Los Angeles political and criminal justice communities in April 2024 with his decision to prosecute Diana Teran, an advisor to then-District Attorney George Gascón, over her efforts to track cops with a history of misconduct. Bonta’s office has alleged that Teran committed felony violations of California hacking laws by accessing personnel records for deputies with a history of misconduct while working at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and then later “impermissibly” sharing those records with Gascón’s office after she took a job advising the DA on law enforcement accountability. 

Teran is being prosecuted under an obscure hacking statute, and both the case’s legal basis and its twists and turns can seem arcane and hard to follow. Teran’s lawyers argue that these were public records that stemmed from court cases, but the AG’s office has continued to defend the prosecution; in late December, just days before the trial was to begin, a state appeals court put it on ice and ordered Bonta to justify the charges. 

But even if the case against Teran goes away, her attorneys and advocates for police accountability argue that it has effectively criminalized her effort to comply with Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court case that mandates prosecutors disclose potentially exculpatory material to the defense—like a deputy’s history of lying or making racist statements. 

Because the case is ongoing, Teran referred Bolts to her lawyers for this story. One of Teran’s lawyers, Tony Brown, wrote Bolts in a statement that Teran is “being prosecuted for doing her job.” 

“This unprecedented case has had a devastating impact on the criminal justice system in California, nowhere more than in law enforcement oversight,” Brown added. 

Bonta’s office told Bolts that “the Teran case is not about Brady,” and insists it “will not have a chilling effect on transparency or a prosecutor’s ability to comply with Brady obligations.”

Sean Kennedy, a Loyola law professor who until very recently sat on the LASD’s civilian oversight commission, is skeptical. “This is the test case, I think, ” he told me. “It has already had an extremely damaging effect on the biggest sheriff’s department in America.”

The AG’s prosecution of Teran follows over a decade of political debate over accountability and oversight for LASD, which has an annual budget of $4 billion and oversees the world’s largest jail system—some 12,500 residents locked up on any given day. The case against Teran involves work conducted in the course of her official watchdog roles inside and outside the sheriff’s department, which has long been plagued by abuse, violence, and deputy gang scandals that cost the county $100 million a year in legal fees. 

For years, Teran’s job was to both prevent and identify this sort of misconduct, help determine the sheriff’s response, and seek to limit the downstream effect unethical deputies could have on criminal cases. This would bring her into direct conflict with local law enforcement unions and the brash, controversial former sheriff of LA County, Alex Villanueva, who have characterized her work as an attempt to infringe on deputies’ rights and damage their careers. 

It’s a telling look at how attempts to “police the police” can appear to law enforcement as an existential threat—even as officers enjoy the right to exhaustive administrative appeals, special rights against disclosure of their personnel records, and support from professional associations with deep coffers and a high degree of influence on local and state-level politics. 

Law enforcement officers “are entrusted with a badge and a gun, and they’re allowed to arrest, detain, use force and potentially even kill in the line of duty,” First Amendment Coalition legal director David Loy told me. But in California, he said, they benefit from “a much higher level of protection than any other public employee—even though they exercise potentially much more extreme power.” 

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The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has been under some degree of external monitoring since 1993, after a landmark report found “deeply disturbing evidence of excessive force and lax discipline” within the county’s jails. From 2001 to 2014, that oversight role was held by the county’s Office of Independent Review (OIR), led by former U.S. Attorney Mike Gennaco. The office hired Teran as a staff attorney in 2010, the beginning of her career pivot toward police accountability and oversight work that would continue up until the news of her criminal prosecution last year. 

OIR’s attempts at oversight were not without controversy. Gennaco told me that the deputies’ union, while not antagonistic, “certainly had this perception that, since we were in the accountability business, we were making it more complicated for their membership.”

Neal Tyler, a 41-year LASD veteran, told me that most deputies saw OIR attorneys like Gennaco and Teran as “a bunch of outsiders who had never done any police work.” 

Then-Sheriff Lee Baca defended OIR’s right to do its work, but he also elevated a second-in-command, Paul Tanaka, who belonged to one of the deputy gangs that wreaked havoc in the county jails. After an informant scandal erupted that would eventually send both men to federal prison, Jim McDonnell was elected as sheriff in 2014. As former chief of the Long Beach Police Department, McDonnell was a relative outsider to LASD. But he campaigned on a promise to clean house, and entered with a mandate for reform. (McDonnell, who is now the chief of LAPD, elected not to respond to a request for comment.) 

McDonnell introduced another layer of oversight for the sheriff’s department with the formalizing of a role called the Constitutional Policing Advisor to weigh in on policies like deputy discipline in addition to OIR. Miriam Krinsky, whom McDonnell hired as a special adviser, told me that his interest in overhauling discipline of sheriff’s deputies also came out of his work on a county citizen oversight commission on jail violence. In a 2012 report, the commission concluded that gaps in accountability had allowed abuse of inmates to continue essentially unabated since the scandals that sparked external monitoring in the 1990s. Krinsky, who had served as executive director of that citizen oversight commission, said that McDonnell seemed “particularly offended by what [he] saw as the destructive use of the badge.” 

Teran was doing a version of the CPA job starting in 2014, but her official appointment to the role McDonnell and Krinsky had formalized, in 2016, raised the hackles of some of the local law enforcement unions. The president of the LA County peace officers’ association, a LASD lieutenant, wrote that the association was “appalled that the Sheriff’s Department would so blatantly stomp on the rights of its employees” by creating the position without running it by the unions. The association “vows to fight this,” he wrote. 

Teran helped create a committee to evaluate the records of deputies who’d been responsible for multiple shootings and sometimes reassigned them, which became a particular source of ire for ALADS, the deputy sheriffs’ union. (Neither LASD or ALADS responded to multiple requests for comment for this article.)

Another major flashpoint was her work compiling a list of LASD employees with a history of misconduct in order to give the DA a heads up about which deputies’ testimony might be compromised, a continuation of work she had begun at OIR. But when McDonnell sought to turn over these names to the DA, the deputies’ union sued the department. It was the beginning of a bitter legal battle that went up to the state’s highest court.

Neal Tyler, who served as McDonnell’s executive officer, akin to an undersheriff, said Teran “became a lightning rod” because of these reforms, even as he stressed that the sheriff was the one responsible for implementing them.

For instance, the sheriff had implemented a zero-tolerance approach to certain categories of dishonesty, which resulted in a number of firings, a decision that was deeply unpopular with both LASD unions. Since part of Teran’s job was to weigh in on disciplinary matters, some people blamed her for these dismissals.

A 2017 newsletter from the deputies’ union sarcastically branded the CPAs “unControlled Punishment Administerers [sic]” and expressed alarm about what it perceived as the CPAs’ “unfettered access” to personnel records. The following year, a now defunct blog about LASD that billed itself as a site for “pissed-off deputies wanting a better LASD” ran a post devoted to Teran titled “The Badge Collector.” The author called her title “an Orwellian euphemism” and alleged that she, not McDonnell or Tyler, was really running the show. “She isn’t an advisor: Teran is calling the shots,” the author wrote.

Unlike the members of LA’s various external oversight efforts—OIR, the commission on jail violence, or the LASD civilian oversight commission, which the board of supervisors created in 2016—McDonnell was trying to reform the department from within. But to many in the rank and file, he was still an outsider. “He had never spent a day as a deputy sheriff,” Krinsky said. And if McDonnell was seen that way simply for spending the bulk of his career in a blue uniform rather than a khaki one, Teran, as a former prosecutor with no policing experience, was something much worse: a “civilian lawyer,” as contemporaneous union publications dismissively called her. 

She was also a woman. According to Tyler, a second, male CPA who was hired in 2016 never received the same level of scrutiny (that attorney declined to speak with me for this article). “I don’t know to what extent it’s because she’s an intelligent female,” he said. Much of the fixation on Teran had a misogynistic tinge: Sources told me that some deputies speculated that she enjoyed so much influence over Tyler because the two were having an affair. 

This slow-roiling conflict began to boil over when Alex Villanueva arrived on the scene in 2018.

Today, Villanueva is notorious throughout LA for his actions against a number of foes, but when he put forth his candidacy for sheriff in 2018, challenging the incumbent McDonnell, it was as a relative unknown, a LASD lieutenant who worked in one of the women’s jails. During his campaign, Villanueva won over the LA Democratic establishment with vows to stop cooperation with ICE and reduce the jail population. But he made his case to LASD rank-and-file by promising not progressive reforms but rather rollbacks of the reforms McDonnell had instituted—taking particular aim at his opponent’s changes to the disciplinary matrix and efforts to share the roster of deputies with a history of misconduct on their records with the DA, which he called a “fake list.”

“Sheriff McDonnell’s disciplinary reforms were not real reforms at all,” Villanueva told me. “They were an exercise in mass terminations with innocent deputies thrown to the wolves, all for political purposes.” 

For Villanueva, it was also personal. McDonnell had dismissed a friend of his, deputy sheriff Caren Carl Mandoyan, for allegedly lying about a domestic dispute—and Villanueva blamed Teran for the decision.

Buoyed by more than a million dollars in ALADS donations, Villanueva won his race. He quickly removed Teran and the other CPA from their positions, and also got rid of the multiple shooting review process that had been so controversial with the union.

Even before he took office, Villanueva began trying to rehire Mandoyan, who had volunteered on his campaign as his driver, and one of his first official acts was to reinstate the disgraced deputy. Weeks later, Villanueva was called to appear at a Board of Supervisors meeting to justify this decision. He used his speaking time to call attention to what he saw as McDonnell’s fraudulent and unfair disciplinary process. He also referenced an “unnamed third party” whom he said may have urged department executives to commit perjury in order to sustain meritless misconduct investigations. “We’ll pursue that, either here, locally, or through the state attorney general’s office,” he said. 

Villanueva confirmed to Bolts via email that he believed the “unnamed party” he was referencing in 2019 was Teran. He has since publicly accused Teran of suborning perjury in the Mandoyan case and others, and he echoed those allegations in his email.

Over the next several years, Villanueva embarked on a crusade against a series of targets working in oversight or accountability, including Max Huntsman, the head of the Office of the Inspector General, the county’s successor to OIR; Teran, who had by that time gone to work in Huntsman’s office; LA Times reporters who wrote critical stories of the sheriff and his deputies; the Board of Supervisors, who questioned his rehiring of fired deputies; and the chair of the county’s civilian oversight committee. In a highly uncharacteristic move that drew alarm and condemnation, he used his position as sheriff to initiate criminal investigations into these enemies, shopping the findings around to the California AG, the FBI, and the relevant U.S. Attorney, albeit with no success. 

In response to Bolts’ request for comment on this matter, Villanueva said, “100% of the public corruption cases initiated by my administration were driven by complaints received. This affected a small fraction of those with oversight roles. Having an oversight role does not shield anyone from accountability.”

During this time, LA County’s chief lawyer wrote to the California AG expressing dismay at the “intimidating, politically motivated” investigations, arguing that they were intended to help Villanueva flout oversight, and urging Bonta to take them out of Villanueva’s hands. Bonta agreed to review the investigation that involved Huntsman and Teran, and decided not to take it on. 

But then, in April 2024, the AG announced he was filing 11 felony charges against Teran. 

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During the waning months of Teran’s time as CPA, Bonta’s office alleges that she unlawfully accessed a large number of LASD deputy personnel records. Teran then went to work in 2021 as an advisor to Gascón, who had recently become the county’s DA. In that role, she helped maintain databases the office uses to track information about law enforcement officers that might disqualify them from testifying in a case—things like abuse of force, an internal investigation that deemed them guilty of lying, or other bad behavior. The AG alleges that she contributed to these databases using information gleaned from her prior access of those personnel records. Bonta’s office told Bolts that a prosecutor who had access to personnel records “through former employment…could not use or share that information elsewhere without having the law enforcement agency’s permission to do so.” 

This theory of prosecution appears to jibe with Villanueva’s view that the knowledge of deputy misconduct Teran developed by working at the department could only be legally disclosed with the department’s permission. A LASD detective who led Villanueva’s internal investigation into Teran testified recently to the civilian oversight commission, comparing her actions to “an engineer for Chrevrolet working for 20 years and then going to Ford and taking with him all the trade secrets…it’s almost copyrighted or proprietary, that information.”

In an amicus brief, the advocacy organization Fair and Just Prosecution calls this stance an “extreme position” that essentially leaves law enforcement to police itself. “Self-policing is not legitimate oversight,” the brief states. 

Villanueva responded to the charges against Teran with exultation, calling Bonta’s move “a vindication of my administration.” Brown, Teran’s lawyer, told Bolts that Bonta is “prosecuting a case based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the law: that judicial decisions of the Superior Court belong to the Sheriff’s Department.” However Bonta’s office says Villanueva’s earlier investigation and his prosecution are unconnected. 

“The charges in this case are based on Teran’s April 26, 2021, conduct at the LADA’s Office, not any prior conduct at the Sheriff’s Department,” Bonta’s office said in a statement to Bolts.

Teran’s defenders aren’t so sure. “I don’t think that the criminal case would exist but for that train that was put on its tracks and started running during Villanueva’s time,” said Krinsky, the former special adviser to McDonnell. (Krinsky is the founder of Fair and Just Prosecution and signed the organization’s amicus brief in her personal capacity.) 

Despite Bonta’s claims to the contrary, Huntsman said that the sheriff’s investigation of Teran “forms the basis of the Attorney General’s prosecution.” He noted that a deputy who played a key role in the LASD’s investigation of Teran also appears to be the AG’s star witness. 

“Ms. Teran seems to have been targeted by Villanueva first and then by the AG because she took Brady’s constitutional commandment seriously,” the Inspector General told me.

According to Kennedy, the former LASD civilian oversight commissioner, the AG’s decision to prosecute has already notably limited what records the sheriff’s department is willing to share with the civilian oversight committee. 

Recently, he said, Sheriff Luna refused to turn over documents in a case involving a trans man who was beaten by a deputy—despite the fact that the deputy in question had already pled guilty to civil rights violations in federal court. “After Bonta initiated this prosecution,” Kennedy said, “the sheriff started to say, ‘I can’t risk having my employees prosecuted for violating confidentiality the way that Diana Teran is being prosecuted.’” 

“And that is so rich,” Kennedy went on, “because the department itself lobbied heavily and engaged in strategies to get her prosecuted—and now they cite her prosecution as a justification for refusing to submit to meaningful oversight.”