Sheriff-Coroner No Longer
Besides Jail Transparency, Public At-Large Expected to Benefit from Enhanced Public Health Information
BY JIM FORBES
Publisher
As a Son of the South, anthropologist Nick Shapiro expected his migration west to Southern California would offer a more modern landscape for his professional pursuits, examining the conditions of incarceration.
“I was surprised that the conditions of jailing (in California), not being as different to the conditions in Georgia, Louisiana, and maybe Oklahoma.”
Dr. Nicholas Shapiro is a medical anthropologist and the Director of the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA. What and what? Simplified, medical anthropology studies cultural, economic, and political impacts on public health. And the UCLA lab he directs describes its mission as “… advancing research at the intersection of environment, health, and mass incarceration.”
“I was shocked to find out that 90% of the people that live under the sheriff-coroner system, a sort of outdated, medieval” system, live in California.
More definitions. Coroners and medical examiners oversee autopsies when required for deaths that warrant one. Medical Examiners are physicians specializing in pathology. Coroners are elected officials, most often lay people. Forty-eight of California’s fifty-eight counties, including Riverside, designate the county sheriff as the coroner.
California is one of only four states with that style of arrangement; Hawaii, Montana, and Nevada are the others. Thus, 90% of Americans who live under the system are Californians.
In recent years, inmate deaths in Riverside County jails have attracted national, statewide, and local scrutiny in reports that have pinpointed the county jails as having among the highest incidents of deaths in the state and nation during differently defined periods over the past dozen years. Deaths that are investigated by the sheriff, who is the coroner. Just as they are in 47 other counties in the state.
Shapiro is one voice in a large chorus singing the same tune: “It’s very clear that there’s a conflict of interest,” when a coroner investigates deaths in jails administered by the same sheriff.
Efforts to separate the coroner from the sheriff were rejected for a second time this year by the Riverside Board of Supervisors. A state bill to separate the positions statewide failed in 2022.
That all changed dramatically last week, when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 1379, authored by IE State Senator Sabrina Cervantes (D-31), which targeted Riverside County exclusively.
“When an individual dies in custody in a Riverside County jail, their family and the public deserve transparency,” Cervantes explained in a statement. “We owe the families the truth; we owe our communities accountability; and we owe county taxpayers a system they can trust.”
By July of next year, the law requires the county to have an independent medical examiner in place, a medical doctor who is also a pathologist.
While much of the debate has understandably focused on county jails, Dr. Shapiro predicts that county residents are about to experience the modernity he expected when he came to California.
Only “1% of the people who die in the county, who get an autopsy, are in custody.”
Ahead, Dr. Shapiro believes, are more accurate and better-defined causes of death county-wide that will enable public health, law enforcement, and elected officials to identify trends and respond more accurately to citizens’ needs.
For instance, according to a 2022 study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “drug overdose deaths occurring in coroner counties were almost four times more likely to be unclassified compared to medical examiner counties,” and as a result “medical examiner counties are improving identification of opioids in drug overdoses faster than coroner counties.”
“Then we can’t do protective measures,” Shapiro points out. “We can’t deploy Narcan, we can’t understand if there’s a new, you know, lab drug that’s hitting, you know, different parts of the county.”
In 2024, NIH reported similar discrepancies with suicides, concluding. “If all coroners-only states adopted a state medical examiner, suicide reporting would increase by 2243-3100 deaths in the United States annually.”
Information is gold when accurate. “It was medical examiner data that led to child safety seats. That first discovered West Nile Virus. That led to understanding of CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) in concussions. And so, these are really important public health institutions,” Shapiro pointed out.
“It’s in the public interest to have a modernized system for determining deaths where professional forensic pathologists are independent of political pressure. And that’s when science is at its best, when it’s fully independent.”
For More Law and Disorder News Visit www.zapinin.com
