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For a decade, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has been writing about the excesses of a criminal justice system that punishes people so harshly that it ruins salvageable lives. As this view has come into vogue, it’s arguably led to a reshaping of criminal justice that goes too far, to the point that some crimes in California now seem to be acts without consequence. But our basic view — that people can have second acts to their lives — that their mistakes, criminal or not, shouldn’t always be held in perpetuity against them — remains unshaken.
Which brings us to former San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore, who resigned in February 2022 after 13 years on the job in response to steadily increasing outrage over disproportionate numbers of inmate deaths in county jails. The editorial board has no desire to relitigate these circumstances or go after Gore yet again for his years of depicting his critics as not knowing what they’re talking about.
But San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s decision to nominate Gore to serve on the city’s Ethics Commission and return him to public life requires such a rehash — especially given how one of Gore’s final significant acts as sheriff reflected the 180-degree opposite of repentance. It came in early 2022 in response to an as-yet-unpublicized state audit that confirmed and added damning new details to years of reporting by the U-T Watchdog team about prisoners being significantly more likely to die in San Diego County jails than in other large counties in the state. The audit concluded that problems stemming from indifferent management and from failing to take basic steps to improve inmate safety were so severe that nothing less than a new state law was needed to force our local Sheriff’s Department to do the right thing. Think about the damning implications of that assertion.
In response, on Jan. 14, 2022, Gore sent a letter to Elaine Howle — who had just retired after 21 years as California’s state auditor — that accused her office of lacking professionalism and adequate expertise to make informed judgments on his department. Gore then offered himself as an expert on auditing, telling Howle — a state official revered like few others in the Capitol, someone selected as one of 2012’s “Public Officials of the Year” by Governing magazine — that she had failed to meet established “government auditing standards.”
But should it matter that the San Diego mayor’s nominee to serve on the city’s ethics board lambasted perhaps the most respected state official of this century for being biased, clueless and incompetent — and just last year? No, says the Mayor’s Office, which argues that Gore has the required perspective and qualifications to handle the limited tasks of the ethics post. After being provided the hyperlink to the document with Gore’s remarks — and being told the editorial board considers this relevant to Gore’s suitability to serve as an ethics commissioner — here’s what an aide wrote: “That’s almost comically stretching to make past jail operations relevant.”
In other words, depicting critics of the selection as not knowing what they’re talking about. And the critics of Gore’s department as well — starting with state Senate President Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, and Assemblymember Akilah Weber, D-La Mesa.
Gloria is absolutely right to want to get vacancies filled on the Ethics Commission as soon as possible. But his choice of Gore isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s off the wall. That is, unless it’s seen as one more example of Gloria’s recent attempts to shore up relationships with powerful law enforcement interests who feel demonized by many California Democrats since events in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, changed the national policing debate.
This will no doubt be ridiculed as a “comic stretch” by some in the mayor’s orbit. But as an explanation of his actions, it makes Gloria look much better than what he would have us believe: that he thought a sheriff with so much baggage that it would clog an airport carousel was just the person to be an arbiter of ethical conduct in City Hall.
Will a majority of the City Council pretend to agree and then confirm Gore? Stay tuned.
