An auditing firm has concluded that Santa Clara County sheriff's use of tear gas in the jails is appropriate and they said they were impressed with the deputies' calm demeanor and patience in trying to get incarcerated people to comply with orders before deploying the military-grade chemical agent on them.
submitted this week to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, who will discuss the matter on Tuesday morning.
the auditors noted. "Sixteen deputies articulated and documented sufficient rationale to meet the policy’s required thresholds in the cases we reviewed." The report, authored by Michael Gennaco, Teresa Magula and Julie Ruhlin, was requested by Supervisor Susan Ellenberg, who convinced her colleagues to halt all military purchases until the elected leaders could determine if the use of tear gas in the jails was OK and if all de-escalation techniques were employed first.
"What's really disturbing is this report says that they're using tear gas to extract people from cells or to forcibly medicate seriously mentally ill people," said Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. "Tear gas used in prisons is often just only for those very extreme situations, like there's a hundred people rioting at the prison sort of situation.
And in more than half the cases – 11 out of 17 – deputies deployed a second round of chemical agents because they didn't work the first time. In five of these 11, deputies deployed pepper spray too, after the tear gas didn't work.
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