A new Inspector General report found safety checks were stronger when supervisors were watching, raising questions about whether Los Angeles County’s jail safeguards work when no one is.
When someone is held in a Los Angeles County jail, routine safety checks are supposed to be one of the most basic safeguards in the system.
Deputies are required to check on people in custody at regular intervals, look for signs of life or distress and document what they see. Depending on the housing classification, checks can be required every 15, 30 or 60 minutes.
But a new report from the Los Angeles County Office of Inspector General raises a more fundamental question:
Do those safeguards work the same way when nobody is watching?
The OIG found that deputies at Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers Correctional Facility performed safety checks to an “exemplary” standard when facility leadership was present. But when investigators reviewed surveillance footage from periods before and after those observations, the quality of the checks dropped.
That finding matters because a safety procedure is only a safeguard if it works consistently—not only when supervisors are standing nearby.
The Los Angeles County Office of Inspector General’s report reviewed safety checks in the context of 253 people who died in Los Angeles County jails between January 2020 and December 2025. The OIG identified quality and/or timeliness concerns involving safety checks in approximately 40% of those deaths.
That does not mean deficient safety checks caused 40% of the deaths. The report does not make that finding.
Instead, it exposes a problem with the system designed to detect whether people in custody are being properly monitored.
What is a jail safety check supposed to do?
A safety check is more than walking past a cell and marking a box.
California regulations and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department policies require deputies to directly observe people in custody and look for signs of life and distress. Depending on the housing assignment, checks must occur at specified intervals.
The checks are also supposed to be documented electronically.
That makes the procedure an important early-warning system. A person who is unconscious, seriously injured, experiencing a medical emergency or otherwise in distress may need intervention before the situation becomes fatal.
The county has already acknowledged the importance of monitoring these checks. The Sheriff’s Department maintains public information about its in-custody deaths and says each death receives multiple levels of internal and external review, including notification to the OIG.
The question raised by the new OIG report is whether the monitoring system is catching failures before they become emergencies—or simply documenting that a check was recorded.
The Inspector General found a gap between watching and not watching
The OIG’s observations are striking because the problem was not simply that deputies did not know what they were supposed to do.
When leadership was present, investigators observed exemplary practices.
At Twin Towers, deputies took several seconds to look into cells and used flashlights to help elicit responses from people in custody. But when investigators reviewed surveillance footage from periods when leadership was not present, deputies were more likely to move quickly through the area without performing the same level of observation.
At Men’s Central Jail, the OIG also identified instances in which deputies did not follow the required route through housing areas.
That distinction led the OIG to conclude that additional training alone may not solve the problem.
If employees know the procedure and perform it properly when they know they are being observed, the larger issue becomes supervision, accountability and whether the system can verify compliance in real time.
The problem reaches the supervisors, too
The report raises another uncomfortable question: Who checks the people doing the checking?
The OIG found that supervisory audits did not always use standardized criteria for determining whether a safety check was adequate.
In some cases, supervisors considered checks acceptable even though the OIG later found that required elements had not been completed.
That creates a potential accountability gap.
A deputy can fail to perform an adequate safety check. A supervisor can then review the record and determine that the check was acceptable. If the supervisory review itself is inconsistent, the system may record compliance without necessarily establishing that a meaningful safety check occurred.
The OIG recommended stronger and more standardized auditing, greater accountability for staff and supervisors, improved technology, staggered checks and other measures designed to make the process harder to bypass.
Los Angeles County was already promising reforms
The OIG’s findings arrive after county officials had already ordered changes to jail safety practices.
In March, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a plan authored by Supervisor Janice Hahn that called for improved and randomized safety checks with greater supervisor oversight, increased use and reliability of cameras, better screening and additional measures intended to reduce deaths in custody.
The county has also been using electronic systems to document and review safety checks.
Those changes matter. They show that officials are not ignoring the problem.
But they also establish the standard by which the reforms should ultimately be judged:
Do they make safety checks more consistent when supervisors are not physically present?
That is harder to answer than whether a new policy has been issued or a new technology has been installed.
For readers trying to understand the broader question of how people enter and remain in Los Angeles County custody, Parriva has also examined how Los Angeles County’s zero-bail policy changed the pretrial system. That context matters because many people held in county jails are awaiting court proceedings rather than serving a sentence.
The death numbers provide the context, but not the causation
The broader jail-death numbers make the oversight question difficult to ignore.
The Sheriff’s Department’s public dashboard lists 27 in-custody deaths in 2026 through Sept. 2. The county recorded 45 deaths in its jails during 2025, according to the March accountability plan.
But those numbers should not be treated as evidence that inadequate safety checks caused those deaths.
Deaths in custody have many possible causes, including illness, suicide, drug toxicity, accidents and other circumstances. The cause of death for some recent cases remains pending.
The OIG’s finding is narrower—and in some ways more useful:
The system responsible for conducting and monitoring safety checks has demonstrated weaknesses that require correction.
Why this matters to Latino families
There is also a clear reason Latino communities should pay attention to how Los Angeles County’s jail system is monitored.
The Vera Institute of Justice reported in July that 147 people had died in Los Angeles County jails since the beginning of 2023. Vera said 43% of those who died were identified by the Sheriff’s Department as Hispanic, while 62% were held pretrial.
That statistic comes from a different period and dataset than the OIG’s analysis of 253 deaths from 2020 through 2025. It therefore cannot be used to say that 43% of the deaths flagged by the OIG involved Latino people.
But it does provide important context: Latino people make up a substantial share of those who have died in the county jail system in recent years.
For families whose loved ones are in custody, the basic expectation is not complicated.
If someone is sick, injured, unconscious or in distress, someone should notice.
And if a safety check is supposed to happen, families should be able to trust that it means an actual observation—not simply a recorded event.
The unanswered question
Los Angeles County now has more technology, more oversight and new promises to improve jail safety.
The Inspector General’s report shows why those reforms need another test.
Not whether deputies can perform a proper safety check when the boss is standing beside them.
Not whether a computer records that a check occurred.
And not simply whether a policy exists on paper.
The real test is whether the safeguard works when nobody is watching.
For a person in custody, that may be the moment when the safeguard matters most.
