Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Says Lack of Staffing to Blame for Concealed Carry Delays

In the wake of the announcement by Attorney General Pam Bondi that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has opened an investigation into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over its lengthy delays in processing concealed carry permit applications, department officials are claiming they’re doing the best they can while dealing with a lack of resources from the supervisors who set the agency’s budget. 

In a Los Angeles Times story detailing the DOJ’s probe, the LASD pointed to a “significant staffing crisis” as the reason for the delays, which in some cases have stretched on for over a year. 

The Sheriff’s Department issued a statement Thursday saying it respects and upholds the 2nd Amendment. The department said limited staff and a backlog of applications are to blame for the delays in permit approvals.

“We are committed to processing all Concealed Carry Weapons (CCW) applications in compliance with state and local laws to promote responsible gun ownership,” the statement said. “The Department is facing a significant staffing crisis, with only 14 personnel in our CCW Unit, yet we have successfully approved 15,000 CCW applications. Currently, we are diligently working through approximately 4,000 active cases, striving to meet this unfunded mandate.”

It may very well be the case that the L.A. County supervisors aren’t fully funding the CCW unit, but if that’s the case then the DOJ should have no problem identifying those lawmakers as part of the problem. But as the L.A. Times also reported on Friday, concealed carry applicants aren’t the only ones twiddling their thumbs because of inaction on the part of the sheriff’s department. 

Over the last seven years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has routinely struggled to fulfill a core task of its eight jails: making sure inmates show up for their court dates. But that seemingly simple task has grown harder and harder, as the department’s bus fleet has steadily dwindled. 

On any given day, less than half of the department’s 82 buses are functional. Last year, that figure dipped below a dozen — nowhere near enough to handle the roughly 3,000 inmate transports the department needs to do each day. At one point, county supervisors said roughly a third of the people detained in the county jails were missing their court dates.

Once again the sheriff’s department is pointing the finger at supervisors for not giving them enough money to replace the aging fleet, but the paper points out that the officials have chosen to use most of the money that has been budgeted for transportation on other vehicles. 

Every year for five budget cycles, the Sheriff’s Department asked the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for several million dollars to buy new buses. But when county leaders repeatedly approved far smaller vehicle budgets than the department requested, sheriff’s officials chose to spend that money on other needs — such as patrol cars and specialized transport vans.

Similarly, I suspect the department could reallocate resources to put more butts in the chairs at the CCW division, even if it means spending less money elsewhere. Under California law licensing authorities have 120 days to process applications, but in L.A. County it’s not uncommon for applicants to wait a year or more to hear back from the sheriff’s department. 

That alone is worthy of investigating by the DOJ, but the lengthy wait times are only part of the problem. The lawsuit filed by several individual plaintiffs and Second Amendment organizations also documented the high cost to carry that some departments are imposing on applicants. In the L.A. County community of La Verne, for instance, it takes more than $1,000 to comply with all of the requirements to submit an application, and other jurisdictions across the state are also imposing four-figure price tags on a carry permit. Bondi’s announcement didn’t mention any investigation into the excessive fees that are being charged by some jurisdictions, but hopefully that too will be a part of the probe. 

Meanwhile, gun control fans are, while not defending the LASD’s practices, accusing the Trump administration of using the abuses as red meat in a culture war fight. 

Jacob Charles, an associate professor of law at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law who studies the 2nd Amendment, said he had not seen a similar investigation before. This type of DOJ probe, which is classified as a pattern-or-practice investigation, typically focuses on police misconduct such as excessive use of force or racial bias.

The investigation struck him as “another culture war issue pitting red versus blue” amid a broader flurry of “partisan targeting” by the Trump administration of liberal jurisdictions and groups.

“This has to be seen in the context of Trump attacking law firms, universities, and cities, counties and states who don’t profess fealty to him personally and to his vision,” Charles said. “He’s not even pretending to be a president for all of America.”

Charles is one of those figures who likes to claim to be above the partisan fray while almost always finding fault with any pro-2A decision that comes from the courts, so I’m not surprised that he sees this as punishment for a lack of fealty to Trump. The truth is, however, that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental civil right, and it’s being abused in blue states like California the same way the right to vote was being abused by Democrats in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1950s and 60s. An investigation into the LASD’s practices isn’t just appropriate. I’d say it’s long overdue. Hopefully this is just the first of many investigations, because as I’ll be detailing in a post this weekend, there are plenty of other abuses around the country that should also capture the attention of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.