The San Diego County Sheriff's Department should expand the scope of officer-involved shooting investigations and interview witnesses even if they can't speak English, according to an independent audit released Monday.
The yearlong review was commissioned by the department after deputies fatally shot five Hispanic men in suburban Vista over as many months starting in March 2005, with three of the killings coming within days in unrelated incidents in late July and early August.
Earlier reviews by the San Diego district attorney's office and the state attorney general cleared the deputies of criminal liability in all five cases.
"The residents of Vista can feel more comfortable that the incidents which occurred over those five days in July and August 2005 were extraordinary occurrences and not a trend," said Sheriff Bill Kolender.
The shootings prompted outrage in this city of 94,000 people, 42 percent of them Hispanic. Critics accused deputies of targeting young Hispanic men.
Relations were tense even before the killings. The U.S. Justice Department investigated whether Hispanics were fairly represented on the City Council, though its 2003 probe proved inconclusive.
Last year, the city imposed tougher restrictions on employment of day laborers, who are largely Hispanic.
The sheriff's audit was performed by the Office of Independent Review, an independent contractor created by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to investigate officer-involved shootings.
The audit cited several investigations in which witnesses who couldn't speak English were not interviewed. In one case, detectives who did not speak Spanish failed to request follow-up interviews by bilingual deputies after canvassing one apartment building. In another case, a Border Patrol agent was asked to translate for a homicide detective.
Hispanics often fault the department for a dearth of Spanish-speaking deputies on patrol at the time of the 2005 shootings.
Deficiencies in the internal shooting review process were also detailed in the report, which described existing procedures as overly narrow and focused on meeting the specific requirements of the district attorney's office rather than on identifying broader trends or policy impacts after shootings.
Activists welcomed the report as a step toward greater transparency, but criticized it for failing to include public input. They also said it did not directly tackle allegations of racism in the department.
"We want the question raised as to whether force is being used in a disparate manner against Latinos - that's the pink elephant in the room no one wants to talk about," said Bill Flores, a former assistant San Diego County sheriff who now speaks on behalf of El Grupo, a Hispanic activist group. "We're not saying, hey, they're racist, but we're certainly saying that this merits an examination."
Auditors found that the San Diego sheriffs had fewer shooting incidents on average than other law enforcement agencies in California.
"This is not a rogue agency," said Michael Gennaco, an investigator for the office.
Gennaco's team nonetheless found gaps in the protocol for investigating shootings, culled from a review of 25 incidents from 2003 to 2005.
"Many of the issues we identified seemed to warrant more rigorous attention from the department than what they received," the report said.
The department has agreed to implement the majority of the report's recommendations on changes to protocol, said Undersheriff Bill Gore.
