Letters to the Editor: Democrats, there’s a lesson you should learn from Villanueva’s win in 2018
To the editor: I had to laugh when I read the article, “L.A. Democrats failed to mount united campaign against Sheriff Villanueva despite anger.”
The history of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is not pretty. Under former Sheriff Lee Baca, deputies were mistreating people in jails. The Justice Department actually came in and indicted people.
In 2014, the police chief of Long Beach, Jim McDonnell, was elected sheriff. Just about everybody, including members of the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Department of Justice I have spoken to, believe that McDonnell did a fantastic job at cleaning up the problems in the department and returning it to a highly respected organization.
However, he had one big problem: He had been a Republican. The horror — we can’t have someone who was a Republican in elected office in Los Angeles! So, the local Democratic Party got behind Alex Villanueva, and in 2018 he defeated McDonnell.
Without getting into whether or not Sheriff Villanueva should be re-elected, it is actually fun to see him now “thumbing his nose at the ‘woke left.’” There is a lesson here that people should learn, which is if someone is doing a really good job, maybe it doesn’t matter which party they belonged to.
Russ Lesser, Manhattan Beach
