Orange County Sheriff’s Department officials drew tongue-lashings from members of the Board of Supervisors Tuesday for a scandal involving the improper recording of jail inmate phone calls to their attorneys and a training exercise mishap that led to a K-9 unit dog mauling a county employee.
Undersheriff Don Barnes surprised supervisors with a proposal to hire a firm to oversee Global Tel Link Corp., the vendor that provides phone services to jail inmates. Global Tel Link has been found by county officials to have breached its contract for the telephone services due to a snafu with the implementation of new software that dropped all but 72 of 1,300 attorneys’ phone numbers from a do-not-record list.
The issue has the potential of unraveling cases involving serious violent offenders, including the prosecution of triple-murder defendant Shazer Limas, who is charged with murdering his girlfriend and their two young children.
The issue came to light in the case against Joshua Waring, the son of a “Real Housewives of Orange County” cast member, who alleges his phone calls to his attorneys were recorded, as well as when he was representing himself legally on three counts of attempted murder.
Sheriff’s officials want to upgrade to a new wi-fi phone technology utilizing tablets, which complicates any attempts not to renew Global Tel Link’s annual $3.2 million contract, which is due to end in November. Barnes said it could take up to four months to prepare a request for proposals for phone services, requiring a “bridge” contract with any vendor for about nine months.
“If we transition to another vendor, it would be a short-term bridge and then the question is who would want that,” Barnes said, adding that at best “it would be a loss leader for them to hopefully get a longer contract with the board.”
Another complication is that the companies that provide the services have had similar or other significant issues, Supervisor Todd Spitzer said. One GTL competitor “had a lot of lawsuits against them because they promised rates and didn’t come through,” he said.
Spitzer is irked that GTL had similar problems with two other clients in Florida and didn’t notify its other customers. Spitzer wants assurances from GTL that the company will notify the county if it has any problems with other clients that must be corrected.
“I, too, share your concern with the breach,” Barnes told Spitzer. “I’m not trying to downplay that in any way. We were very disappointed with GTL, but that doesn’t change where we are today.”
Tests on the new tablet system have “been positive,” Barnes said.
The undersheriff wants to hire a consultant that is an “industry leader in oversight of this technology.” He added that the consultant could also help craft safeguards to red-flag issues for the county that GTL has with other clients.
Barnes indicated there may be a third GTL client that experienced a breach in the phone call services.
GTL Executive Vice President Darren Wallace told the supervisors that “the safety and security of our systems is a top priority” in light of this “regrettable lapse.”
Wallace said the improper recordings were due to “human error.”
“We corrected the mistake,” he said, adding the company is “revamping our entire platform to ensure going forward this will not happen again.”
The Board of Supervisors previously directed the Office of Independent Review to analyze how the scandal happened, but Supervisor Shawn Nelson took the occasion on Tuesday to reiterate his complaints about the OIR system.
“My complaints are the OIR is a stenographer after the fact,” Nelson said. “They provide zero intervention abilities … This is the umpteenth time we’ve been blindsided because … the office never functions the way it’s supposed to and it never will.”
Nelson said it was an “unpardonable sin” of the contractor that the attorneys’ phone numbers were dropped from a do-not-record list, but he also criticized sheriff’s officials for not auditing that list on its own. Nelson pointed out the State Bar has a list of all the licensed attorneys that could be checked against the do-not-record list.
“These people totally failed us and we didn’t do ourselves any favors,” Nelson said. “Some command staff person needed to oversee this contract.”
Barnes agreed.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said. But the undersheriff said his department “didn’t know the system wasn’t working properly.”
Barnes blamed lawyers for not bringing the issue to his department’s attention since the calls started with a boilerplate announcement that they were being recorded.
Barnes assured the supervisors that sheriff’s officials were engaged in “outreach” to defense attorneys to make sure calls from their clients were not being recorded.
The supervisors also voted to direct the Office of Independent Review to look into the circumstances of how a county employee was bit by a K-9 unit dog during a training exercise on Aug. 29 in a Public Works building in Santa Ana.
The employee was working late as sheriff’s deputies were doing the training exercise in his building, and when one of the dogs saw him, it pounced. The employee told Spitzer about it at a street fair in Orange over Labor Day weekend.
“He was obviously in a lot of pain,” Spitzer said. “When I heard it, I was in shock.”
Spitzer said he is “one of the biggest sponsors of the K9 program,” but a gaffe such as this gives opponents ammunition to end it.
“My motivation is to make sure this never happens again … and that we put protections in place to protect our employees,” Spitzer said.
Nelson lashed out at sheriff’s officials for not clearing the building properly before conducting the exercise.
“How do we continually get in these situations?” Nelson said. “It sounds like no one else is thinking.”
Nelson said sheriff’s officials at least could have posted notices throughout the building in advance. He faulted sheriff’s officials for not having a policy on how to inform employees of such an exercise.
“We wouldn’t fire down-range in a place we could expect people to be unless we put a bunch of notices up,” Nelson said. “Wouldn’t it be obvious we’d start with, `Beware, next week, beware today, please be advised at 6:30 p.m. you have to be clear of this building.”’
Nelson added, “It’s not like a lion escaped from the zoo. Your agency needs to hold people accountable. This is ridiculous, and I’m sorry I’m ranting, but I hope you appreciate my frustration… Who’s responsible for this, who let this happen?”
Sheriff’s Capt. Jason Park replied, “It’s my division and I’m held accountable, my staff is being held accountable.”
Park added that he and his co-workers were “heartbroken” over the dog attack.
“We’re taking this very seriously and as much as we’d like to prevent it, we can’t go back in time and change it, but we can invest all this energy to prevent it from happening again, creating the safest possible training,” Park said.
The department has suspended any drills or exercises in any county buildings other than its own, Park said.