Former Los Angeles County Probation Department Chief Adolfo Gonzales, who was fired last March amid widespread dysfunction at the agency's juvenile facilities, alleges in a lawsuit that he was fired for informing state regulators about serious staff shortages.
Gonzales' two-year, one-month tenure was marked by near-constant controversies. But in a lawsuit filed last month, he argued that county supervisors decided to fire him only after he was frank with Board of State and Community Corrections inspectors about the agency's staffing crisis.
The board, known as BSCC, has the power to close juvenile detention centers if inspections reveal conditions do not meet state standards.
“Gonzales candidly informed BSCC inspectors of staffing shortages in the Probation Department that resulted in a lack of compliance with various regulations and mandates of the state of California,” the lawsuit says. “As a result of Gonzales' reporting to BSCC, the county fired him.”
The state board declined to comment. Mira Hashmall, outside counsel for Los Angeles County, called the lawsuit baseless.
“The Probation Department suffered from a lack of leadership under Adolfo Gonzales, which is why his employment was terminated,” he wrote in a statement to the Times. “He is not a whistleblower.”
Under Gonzales' leadership, the struggling agency lurched from one problem to another. There were more lockdowns, more fights and less staff to deal with them. The officers said they were too scared by the violence inside youth centers to come to work. The young men were also traumatized, forced to urinate in their locked rooms because there was no one around to let them out.
Gonzales' attorney, Michael Conger, said his client's account of personnel problems heavily influenced a Jan. 13, 2023, report. report from state inspectors, who found, among other deficiencies, that the county's two youth centers were dangerously understaffed. Months later, the board would close both rooms after the county repeatedly failed to improve conditions.
Conger said it was Gonzales' “candid” description of personnel problems that led to his firing two months later.
However, the state inspection was not the only embarrassment Gonzales' agency suffered in the months before his firing. On February 11, 2023, The Times reported that Gonzales overruled an internal disciplinary board's recommendation to fire an officer who had violently restrained a 17-year-old boy. After the Times report, the majority of the Board of Supervisors called for Gonzales to resign.
Gonzales' attorney said this was not what drew the board's ire.
“We don't believe that had anything to do with it,” he said. “That was no problem. “They weren’t mad about it.”
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Records show the county spent more than $900,000 on Gonzales during his time with the department.
When he left, Gonzales had received $927,000 in compensation, according to county salary data. It's unclear whether that figure includes other benefits Gonzales was entitled to under his employment agreement with the county, which promised relocation costs and severance pay.
Under his employment agreement, reviewed by The Times, Gonzales was entitled to receive up to $25,000 to move from San Diego, where he worked for five years running the county's Probation Department.
Records show he also received $172,521, equivalent to six months' salary, in severance pay after his dismissal.
The board replaced Gonzales with Guillermo Viera Rosa, promising a new chapter for the long-troubled agency. But so far, his tenure has been plagued by the same personnel crisis that plagued his predecessor.
A report released Thursday by the county Inspector General's Office found that “dangerously low staffing levels” had contributed to the chaotic Nov. 4 escape of a youth from Los Padrinos juvenile facility. After several teenagers attacked a staff member, one briefly escaped to a neighboring golf course.
At the time of the incident, only one staff member, who had never before been assigned to juvenile facilities, had been in the unit with 14 youths, the report's authors found. The report notes that the staffing level violates state law, which requires the agency to maintain a ratio of one staff member to 10 youth.
That day, the Probation Department had scheduled 100 staff members to work at the facility, the minimum required to operate.
Sixty of them did not appear.
