By Tracey Kaplan
East Bay Times
SAN JOSE — In a remarkable political shift, Santa Clara County’s jail guards Thursday elected a woman for the first time to head their scandal-tainted union, replacing the former president who was placed on administrative leave last year for exchanging racist text messages with a group of other guards.
Sgt. Amy Le, 48, also will be the first Vietnamese-American to lead the county’s Correctional Peace Officers’ Association (CPOA) when she takes office June 1. She won the two-year term Thursday with 54 percent of the vote in a race against two male guards.
The last president, Sgt. Lance Scimeca, stepped down from his leadership position after this newspaper revealed some of his texts, which included slurs against blacks, Jews and Vietnamese.
Le escaped by boat from Vietnam with her family in 1979 when she was 11 years old. She said she spent a year “locked up” in a refugee camp in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, before emigrating to the United States.
“I’m excited to represent our 746 members,” Le said in a phone interview. “We really care about what we do. It takes a special person to be a jail guard. Not all guards are bad or evil. Unfortunately, that is overlooked because of some bad apples.
“I am looking forward to improving the working conditions for the correctional officers and the living conditions for the inmates.”
Twenty percent of the guards are women and only about one-third of the jailers are white. The guards also rejected all the incumbents, meaning Le will be joined by a new treasurer, vice president and secretary.
Le, who has a mentally ill son, brings a special understanding to behavioral health problems at a time when the department has come under fire for its treatment of mentally ill inmates. In late August, mentally ill inmate Michael Tyree was beaten to death. Three jail guards have been charged with murder in the slaying and with assault on another inmate.
Last year, she turned down an offer by the sheriff’s administration to fill in as a lieutenant. The offer came after she was appointed to the blue-ribbon jail-improvement commission.
“I feel the correctional officers now have a voice with my election,” she said.
She also is a drug counselor and has a master’s in leadership from Mountain State University. In her spare time, she volunteers teaching a variety of classes, including for new drug counselors and young teens.
In other jail news Thursday, the finance and government operations committee of the county Board of Supervisors began its review of recommendations by the jail-improvement commission. One of the committee’s goals is to post an online public matrix, showing the outcome of the many recommendations by the commission, the National Institute of Corrections and others.
The commission last month submitted its final recommendations to the Board of Supervisors, which sent it to the finance committee. The supervisors had appointed the advisory commission after Tyree’s death.
Supervisor Joe Simitian, who chairs the committee, spoke in favor of initially focusing on the top two priorities of the commission, which were for the supervisors to appoint an inspector-general to provide independent oversight of the jails, and to seize more control over the jails from Sheriff Laurie Smith. The majority of the commission had called for “new leadership,” blaming Smith for problems ranging from excessive force to a broken inmate grievance and complaint system.
However, Smith has defended her supervision of the jails, which she took over in 2010 from a once-separate Department of Correction that had been overseen by the supervisors. Smith has submitted her own reform plan and has taken other steps to demonstrate her support of reforms.
By the end of Thursday’s meeting, it was unclear whether the committee would actually delve deeply into the leadership question, despite Simitian’s support for complying with the commission’s recommendation to at least consider it. Supervisor Cindy Chavez appeared Thursday to be far less enthusiastic than Simitian about the idea.
The committee plans to eventually review all 176 of the commission’s recommendations. It may also review hundreds of other suggestions by a county consultant, the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Corrections and others. In addition, at least two inmate-rights groups have sued the county, demanding it improve jail conditions.
Simitian and Chavez agreed that over the next few months the committee will study different approaches to independent oversight, from San Jose’s independent police auditor to Los Angeles County’s more far-reaching inspector-general model.
To address the leadership issue, Simitian also has requested a report about the local jails’ long and convoluted history. However, even if the Board of Supervisors ends up wanting to assume more control over the jails, legal impediments may prevent it from doing so, Simitian has said.
Among them, voters in 2012 approved an amendment to the county’s charter, moving the county’s once-separate Department of Correction under Smith’s control as part of a cost-cutting move. That department had been run under the control of the Board of Supervisors by more than seven different directors over the years, during which the current long-standing problems festered.
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