The Settlement Bill Nobody Is Managing — Inside Los Angeles County's Sheriff Litigation Tab

THE NAVARRO REPORT - Last month, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $12.5 million settlement over the 2021 fatal shooting of David Ordaz Jr., a 34-year-old father of three killed by sheriff's deputies who had been called to his East Los Angeles home during a mental health crisis. According to reporting on the vote, county attorneys recommended the payment and the board approved it without discussion. The county admitted no wrongdoing.

The lack of discussion is not itself scandalous — settlements move on consent calendars every week. What deserves scrutiny is what the vote represents: one more entry in a ledger large enough to demand a management response, not merely a legal one.

Consider the scale. In fiscal year 2024-25, the county spent $112 million defending the Sheriff's Department against legal claims and lawsuits — nearly half of the $229 million it spent on legal defense countywide, according to the Los Angeles Times. That figure rose by more than $12 million from the prior year. A May 2026 report by UCLA's Million Dollar Hoods project found that the Sheriff's and Probation departments together cost the county more than $1 billion in litigation expenses — settlements, judgments and legal fees — over a twelve-year period.

The individual cases are substantial on their own. Recent payouts include $25 million for an autistic man shot in his home by deputies, $17.2 million after a crash involving a speeding deputy, and $7 million for a shooting that left a man paralyzed. In March, supervisors approved $4.9 million to settle four lawsuits stemming from collisions with patrol cars. One of those cases, reported by LAist, involved a deputy who reversed a few feet and struck another vehicle at five to ten miles per hour; it settled for $1.5 million.

Here is the question a financial controller asks: who owns this cost? A recurring liability of this size normally has an owner — a manager whose budget absorbs it, whose variance report explains it, and whose corrective plan is reviewed by someone with authority to act. The public record does not establish that Los Angeles County operates this way. Settlements arrive one at a time, voted on individually, while the aggregate is reconstructed after the fact by reporters and university researchers. When the total is learned from a newspaper rather than the department that generated it, the control environment has a gap.

That gap has consequences beyond the Sheriff's Department. The county is operating under a roughly $50.3 billion budget while absorbing federal funding cuts and an estimated $2 billion in wildfire recovery costs from the January 2025 fires. It has also committed to drain its reserve fund and issue 25-year bonds to help cover a separate $4 billion settlement for decades of sexual abuse inside its juvenile detention facilities. A county that has already spent its cushion on one surprise has less room for the next. Liabilities that arrive as surprises get financed with reserves and debt — meaning residents carry the cost twice: once for the harm, again for the borrowing.

Four practical controls would close much of the gap.

First, publish a single annual liability report, broken out by department, cause and dollar amount, so residents can see the trend without filing a public records request.

Second, put each department's own claims cost in its annual budget presentation, whether or not the money physically flows through that department's books. What leadership is measured on, leadership tends to manage.

Third, require a short root-cause and corrective-action memo before the board votes on any settlement above a set threshold — $1 million, for example. If a payment is worth $12.5 million, it is worth ten minutes of explicit public discussion.

Fourth, target the categories that are both preventable and measurable. Vehicle collisions are the clearest example in this record: a crash caused by driving practices is a training and supervision matter with a price tag attached, and prices can be managed down.

None of this presumes bad faith by deputies who work in dangerous conditions, or that every case was avoidable. Nor does it diminish the human cost behind the largest checks — families lost people. Accountability for the money is not a substitute for accountability for conduct. But it is the piece the Board of Supervisors can control directly from its own dais, and right now, nothing in the public record shows it is being controlled at all.

Supervisors will vote on more settlements in the months ahead. Before the next one, residents deserve the same question any board of directors puts to an executive team: what is the running total, what is driving it, and who is accountable for bringing it down? Right now, getting that answer takes a records request and a newspaper. It shouldn't.

(Jose E. Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and founder of The Navarro Report, a public finance and government accountability publication based in San Diego, California.)