SAN JOSE — A civilian watchdog praised the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office under Robert Jonsen for its post-Laurie Smith shift toward accepting oversight in a new report, but serious safety and transparency issues — including a jail employee accused of smuggling drugs to an inmate in exchange for sex — continue to draw scrutiny.
The 2025 review by the county Office of Correction and Law Enforcement Monitoring, a role filled by the Southern California-based OIR Group, highlights both the progress the sheriff’s office has made under Jonsen while also pointing out issues that need attention such as pursuit and use-of-force reviews for deputies and gaps in jail oversight. The report is scheduled to be presented Tuesday to the Board of Supervisors.
The oversight firm is not shy about contrasting its findings with “the grudging and limited compliance of our early years under the prior Sheriff,” a reference to Smith, who served six terms leading the office before announcing her retirement then resigning in late 2022 amid a civil corruption trial, which led to her formal ouster just a few days before Jonsen was elected to succeed her.
Among the jury’s guilty verdicts was a finding that Smith and her administration stonewalled the OIR Group as the firm was working to establish the oversight structure and investigate a high-profile jail-injury case; that incident led to a $10 million county settlement for a former inmate who suffered traumatic head injuries while in a custody transport van.
The group called working with the office under Jonsen a “paradigm shift,” headlined by a “comprehensive information-sharing agreement” that the previous leadership resisted.
“It’s a night-and-day difference for sure,” Julie Ruhlin, an author of the OIR Group report, said in an interview.
Still, the group notes areas needing improvement, chief among them the county jails, which remain under a federal consent decree to improve conditions.
One of the report’s most serious findings describes how a civilian jail employee was accused of smuggling in drugs to an incarcerated woman “in exchange for sexual favors.” The employee was placed on leave, and a subsequent search of the employee’s work locker “revealed that this conduct was part of a prolonged pattern.”
The employee was criminally charged — the case was not publicized — and then fired by the sheriff’s office. But after the completion of the internal affairs investigation, the report states, an anonymous complaint submitted to the watchdog office alleged that “Sheriff’s Office leaders had been aware of complaints about this employee’s misconduct for more than a year but failed to act to protect his female victims.”
That spurred another internal affairs investigation. In a statement to this news organization, the sheriff’s office said that probe concluded that the latter claims were unfounded.
“Those allegations were thoroughly investigated and ultimately determined to be unsupported by any credible evidence,” the statement reads.
The report also draws attention to several fatal encounters to urge more accountability from the sheriff’s office. That included a deadly Saratoga car chase in November 2024 — addressed in the report because it was reviewed in 2025 — in which deputies tried to pull over a car for a minor infraction before realizing the driver was wearing a black hoodie and what looked like a ski mask covering his face, and that the passenger window was shattered.
Instead of stopping, the driver fled at speeds upward of 100 mph and briefly left deputies’ sight, then crashed into a fence. Two of the occupants, all minors, were still in the car, which was lying on its side; one died of their injuries. Two other minors who were in the car were later found in the vicinity of the wreck. The car was determined to have been stolen, but had not yet been reported as such.
Deputies involved in the chase and the ensuing administrative review did not sufficiently weigh the safety risks of the chase, the report found, especially considering the speeds and the number of occupants in the car, and whether the loss of sight of the vehicle should have prompted deputies to terminate their pursuit. Accordingly, OIR pressed the sheriff’s office to more consistently incorporate risk-versus-reward analysis in their pursuit practices.
The report also highlights a February 2025 inmate death from a gang beating that raised serious concerns about whether the victim was unnecessarily exposed to risk by attackers who mistook him for a rival. The OIR Group review discovered no evidence of misconduct by jail staff, but found that the killing should be a catalyst to shore up supervision, including staggering safety checks to increase the chances for intervention, and improving surveillance systems.
A fatal shooting in October in which two deputies killed a man described as behaving erratically while armed with a knife on a San Jose street was also evaluated in the report, but the focus was on the fact that the sheriff’s office did not release body-camera footage within the 45-day deadline required by state law, citing that they had not received any records requests for the video.
The report also chronicles improvements with jail staff intervening in opioid overdoses and the agency completing internal affairs investigations at double the rate of the previous year. Their primary recommendations from their evaluation of 2025 include increasing transparency and records disclosures, improving prevention of jail smuggling, and increasing consultation and communication with jail inmates over their conditions.
The Community Correction and Law Enforcement Monitoring committee, a group established to provide public input in the oversight process, endorsed the recommendations and also sought to hasten the adoption of new oversight review boards meant to more rapidly institute policy changes in the sheriff’s office in response to major events.
Ruhlin said she was heartened to see some of the recommendations, notably those pushing for more transparency, instituted shortly after the report was submitted, and Jonsen has voiced broad agreement with the report findings.
“Transparency has been and will remain a cornerstone of my commitment as sheriff,” Jonsen said in a statement. “We are committed to providing appropriate visibility into our actions while protecting the integrity of investigations as required by law, and we value the collaboration of our independent oversight partners as a critical component of maintaining public trust.”