Mental health and substance abuse issues or a combination of the two are the most common factors in use-of-force incidents for Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station deputies, Capt. Justin Diez said in a recent phone interview.
Diez shared insights on how and when the station uses force in response to questions about the recently updated Public Force Statistics Dashboard from the LASD’s 2025 Business Process Improvement Group and countywide dialogue about the department’s complaint process.
He praised local deputies’ de-escalation skills, as the dashboard reported the SCV station’s incidents were below the countywide average and significantly below the neighboring Antelope Valley stations.
SCV deputies had 3.49 incidents of force for every 100 arrests, which was below the L.A. County average of 5.88. The Lancaster station averaged 9.84 incidents per 100 arrests, Palmdale was 6.21.
Diez said that, without looking specifically at the numbers, he could confidently say, the “absolute, overwhelming majority, significant amount of our force every year again, involves those three categories, take-downs, resisted handcuffing and control holds,” he said.
Diez also credited the department’s Mental Evaluation Teams with helping to address challenging calls where those factors are involved. The MET units are a resource Sheriff Robert Luna has sought to expand with his last two budget requests to the Board of Supervisors, according to LASD records.
The department did not respond to a request for comment regarding concerns about the handling of complaints. When asked about the process, Diez said at the station level the review process for complaints is “pretty rigorous.”
Countywide concerns
The use of force is a topic that’s been a focus of the Civilian Oversight Commission, which was created in 2014 by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors in response to calls for more transparency and accountability.
Looking at how the LASD responds to its complaint process was the focus of the commission’s December meeting.
Sheriff Robert Luna has expressed much more interest in adopting reforms from the Civilian Oversight Commission than Sheriff Alex Villanueva did, Inspector General Max Huntsman said during the Civilian Oversight Commission meeting in December.
But he mentioned lingering problems with how the department was handling complaints and internal investigations, and said some of the issues might need new solutions.
“The reason I point that out is that I think the bully pulpit only goes so far,” Huntsman said Dec. 19. “And our inability to do anything real is a very serious problem. The correction to what’s going on needs to come externally.”
The commission noted these challenges when it decided to create an Ad Hoc Complaints Committee at that meeting to review LASD’s procedure for addressing complaints, which has been the target of heavy criticism by reform advocates.
“Now, we haven’t heard from everybody. There may be some satisfied people out there,” said Robert Bonner, chair of the oversight group, “but we’ve yet to hear from anybody who’s satisfied by the Sheriff’s Department’s investigation of external complaints.”
Ad Hoc Complaints Committee
Both state law and departmental policy have created major obstacles to reforming the LASD complaint process, said Huntsman, but addressing these challenges is a priority for the Civilian Oversight Commission.
Transparency remains a challenge for the department’s critics and overseers.
“By California law, almost everything about a complaint to the Sheriff’s Department — in addition to allowing the Sheriff’s Department to investigate itself, which I think is nuts — we also have a system whereby they don’t have to tell anybody how that went,” Huntsman added. In fact, if such information about a complaint is shared improperly, it can be considered a criminal violation under state law, he said, describing the state’s position as “very aggressive.”
Huntsman said his office has been enjoined, or legally forbidden, from investigating confidential deputy complaints by L.A. County Superior Court order that was sought by attorneys for the LASD deputy union, Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, when they began looking into deputy gangs.
The action essentially blocked both the commission and the inspector general from issuing subpoenas to look into the complaints.
“The Sheriff’s Department investigates its own, that’s the current case, that’s what it does, it is imperative that there be effective oversight and visibility into that process,” Bonner said, referring to how the complaints are handled.
Diez said at the SCV station, complaints are taken very seriously, and they are always taken on a recorded line to the watch commander.
While the state law makes such records inaccessible to the public, Diez said a complaint will stay with a deputy throughout their career.
“There’s a multitude of ways to submit a complaint and a very formal process,” he said. “Once that process gets started, the complaint gets an acknowledgement letter, the complaint’s investigated by at least a sergeant, oftentimes a lieutenant, and then the complainant gets a results letter. Regardless of the disposition of the complaint, it goes on the deputy’s personnel jacket, essentially, until they retire. It never comes off.”
Types of force
LASD policies and procedures identify five categories for use of force, with the first category, “pointed firearm at person,” not counted in its dashboard.
“Drawing from the holster, a slung rifle or shotgun, or displaying a firearm while pointing it in a low ready or other safe position, if not pointed at a person’s body, does not constitute a reportable PFP incident,” according to the LASD rules manual. A reportable incident involves a department member intentionally pointing a firearm at a person.
“Pointing a stunbag, taser, arwen, or other launcher or chemical irritant delivery system at a person does not constitute a PFP incident, as these are less-lethal force options and not firearms.”
In terms of how the Sheriff’s Department categorizes force, the four levels tracked are:
• Non-categorized force incidents: These involve any of the following where there is no injury or complaint of pain from the subject and no allegation of unreasonable force, including a person who resisted searching and handcuffing techniques; and/or resisted firm grip, control holds, come-alongs or control techniques.
Category 1 forces: These involve “takedowns,” and the use of pepper spray or “a PepperBall projectile, when a subject is not struck by the PepperBall projectile, and there is only discomfort that does not involve injury or lasting pain.”
Category 2 forces: These involve any face, head, or neck strikes or punches with hands or fists; any identifiable injury; and a complaint of pain that a medical evaluation later determines is attributable to an identifiable injury.
Category 3 forces: The most severe category involves all shootings in which a shot was intentionally fired at a person by a department member; any type of shooting by a department member that results in a person being hit; force resulting in admission to a hospital, serious bodily injury or death, as well as all face, head, or neck strikes with an impact weapon or other object; and all canine bites.
The department acknowledges some missing data in the dashboard, including complete suspect age data and suspect injury data, which was not collected until April 2024.
But the LASD data provides an overview of the type of incidents and the basic demographics for who is involved, as well as the rate of their occurrence.
SCV by the numbers
The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department reported the SCV Sheriff’s Station, the department’s largest contract, had the fifth-most use-of-force incidents of 22 patrol stations based on the recently published data dashboard.
Between January 2025 and February 2020, which is as far as the LASD data goes back, SCV deputies were involved in 629 incidents, which involved just over 1,600 people, including deputies and members of the public. The data does not release details of the incidents in the dashboard, and not every incident is listed.
For example, the dashboard doesn’t have an entry for the August 2020 incident on Soledad Canyon Road in front of Buffalo Wild Wings, where three teens were held at gunpoint during an assault investigation. They ultimately sued and received a combined settlement of $175,000.
In the SCV, by incident type, there were five in Category 3, the most serious. The rest were distributed somewhat evenly among the three other types: There were 203 in Category 2; there were 202 in Category 1; and 219 described as non-categorized incidents.
The data also indicates that 46.1% of deputies involved in use-of-force incidents were white; 45.8% were Hispanic; 2.5% were Asian-Pacific Islander; 1.9% were Black; 1.2% were Filipino; and 1.6% were unknown.
The deputies involved were about six times more likely to be male, with men involved in 85.6% of the incidents. Most of the deputies had at least five years on the job — 47.1% of incidents involved deputies with five to 10 years on the job; 12.4% had 10 to 15 years.
The data on suspect race indicated 37.2% were Hispanic; 35.8% were white; 14.2% were Black; 1.4% were Asian or Pacific-Islander; and 10.6% were either unknown or not recorded.
Diez said there are multiple “checks and balances” to make sure use-of-force incidents are reported properly.
“Now with body-worn cameras,” Diez said, “it’s very easy to tell if somebody used force or not.”
He also said that by the sheer volume of calls and interactions the station has, more than 40,000 in a year, including a significant number of calls involving mental health and substance abuse problems, he considered the station’s use-of-force numbers were “very, very minor.”
“So given that, the deputies are being very prudent, their de-escalation skills are excellent. They’re taking time to explain the reasons for detentions and arrests they’ve gone through,” Diez said. “They’re really good at trying to de-escalate situations and taking those extra few seconds to do so when it’s safe and appropriate.”
