Los Angeles County probation officials claim the loss of 750 officers from their field offices is creating frustration, long court delays and a lack of oversight for thousands of convicted criminals in the region.
Roughly 250 of the officers were temporarily reassigned in March to the county’s troubled, understaffed juvenile halls as part of a desperate — but ultimately successful — gambit to stave off the state’s impending shutdown of its two largest facilities. Simultaneously, the Probation Department sent home approximately 500 other field officers who could not work in the juvenile halls due to medical restrictions, though it would have been possible for them to perform the office work they did previously, according to the Los Angeles County Deputy Probation Officers Union.
As a result, staff members in the dwindled field offices are now struggling to supervise thousands of probationers and to keep up with prior workloads, union officials say. Probationers say they can’t reach the officers overseeing them, while judges grow frustrated with impediments caused by missing reports routinely produced by probation’s staff.
“Field DPOs are responsible for supervising tens of thousands of probationers in L.A. County neighborhoods,” said Stacy Ford, president of the probation officers union. “The forced reassignment is having an impact on community safety as probationers on community release are simply not being supervised as required.”
The hundreds of officers — responsible for performing compliance checks, monitoring for drug use and ensuring school attendance — are no longer performing their regular duties, according to Ford. A typical field probation officer supervises about 70 probationers, he said.
Other employees have fallen behind on a variety of reports used every day in criminal cases. Those include 3,000 monthly reports utilized by judges to evaluate criminal histories, assess probation violations, determine sentencing conditions and…
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