Since November, the board that investigates allegations of misconduct by San Diego County sheriff’s deputies has found more than a dozen instances of deputies either failing to activate or muting their body-worn cameras.
For comparison, between January 2023 and October 2024, CLERB found only one such instance.
A letter from board leadership to Sheriff Kelly Martinez says that while of the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board, or CLERB, didn’t find any of the violations to be deliberate, repeated failures to follow camera policies risk undermining public trust.
“Whether in public interactions or in the detention setting, (body-worn camera) is the only direct view of arrests, searches, alleged peace officer misconduct, uses of force or deputy-involved shootings,” Executive Officer Brett Kalina wrote to Martinez.
Between November and April, CLERB found deputies violated body-worn camera policies 12 times — including by failing to activate cameras, muting audio without explanation or neglecting to document why a camera wasn’t activated. CLERB’s jurisdiction only covers complaints made against the Sheriff’s Office and Probation Department.
The 12 instances are just a snapshot of deputy interactions. CLERB investigations are largely complaint-driven — though the board also reviews all deaths in custody and incidents where a person suffers a serious injury due to actions by deputies.
There appear to have been more such cases since. CLERB, which meets monthly, also included one instance of a deputy not activating a camera in its May findings, and the board’s June agenda shows several more instances of deputies not activating cameras or muting cameras without explaining why.
A spokesperson for the San Diego Sheriff’s Office did not respond directly to issues raised in CLERB’s letter but said deputies are trained to activate the cameras according to department policy and that any violations are handled by supervisors.
“The Sheriff’s Office absolutely values transparency and strives to ensure we are always promoting public trust,” Lt. David Collins said via email.
A review of CLERB investigations by The San Diego Union-Tribune found that deputies had failed to activate their cameras during a range of encounters — from a routine traffic stop to several instances where a person being arrested or detained sustained a serious injury.
In nearly all of the cases, the additional footage likely would not have made a difference to CLERB’s investigation, because other deputies had activated their cameras and investigators were able to review that footage.
Only in one incident did a CLERB investigator flag the lack of body-camera footage as a problem.
In that case, a man incarcerated in a local jail filed a complaint with CLERB alleging that deputies damaged his personal property and mishandled legal documents during a cell search.
“In review of the jail surveillance video recordings and the deputies’ BWC recordings that were provided to CLERB, it was noted that not all deputies who participated in the module search either donned BWC or had them turned on. As such, it was unknown what the other deputies’ actions were when they entered (the man’s) jail cell,” the finding says.
San Diego sheriff’s deputies began wearing cameras in 2017, initially on patrol. But in recent years, the Sheriff’s Office has expanded their use into jails.
There, watchdogs say the technology is even more critical — CCTV systems in San Diego County jails don’t pick up audio, have blind spots and produce video that tends to be poor quality.
Paul Parker, who served as CLERB’s executive officer when body cameras were first rolled out, said the board initially gave deputies a grace period to learn the system.
“We understood it was a fairly new program and that there would be some growing pains as deputies got used to wearing BWCs,” he said. “At that time, we noted the issues in our reports and forwarded them to the department. But we also advised that we would eventually start sustaining findings after this learning period.”
Parker emphasized the value of body-worn camera footage for oversight, saying it brings clarity to investigations that might otherwise rely on one person’s word against another’s.
“It clears deputies far more often than it implicates them,” he said. “And it often shows actions taken above and beyond the expected level of service.”
