A record high in jail deaths, lagging deputy misconduct probes and in-custody violence have tested federal monitors’ patience with Santa Clara County’s slow progress improving jail conditions.
This is where the work begins for police oversight specialist Alexa Daniels-Shpall.
Shpall started as the Santa Clara County Sheriff Office’s first-ever policy and compliance advisor on July 7. Sheriff Bob Jonsen formed the role this year to help the jails comply with two federal consent decrees — court-ordered performance improvement plans — forcing his office to fix slow medical care and make correctional facilities more livable for disabled people, among other obligations. But the jails’ federal monitors appointed to oversee the sheriff’s progress are losing patience, and threatening further legal action.
“It’s been six years now. There should have been more progress,” Don Specter, a federal monitor and former Prison Law Office executive director who helped win one of the consent decrees in 2018, told San José Spotlight.
Daniels-Shpall, who most recently served as a risk management director for the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., will help guide reform efforts internally and update policies to strengthen internal oversight. Jonsen said she’ll help prepare his office to monitor its own compliance. Her duties will include putting checks in place for this purpose.
Daniels-Shpall said she doesn’t expect to publish formal reports or recommendations.
“We have a lot of those from our monitors. My approach is more collaborative,” she told San José Spotlight. “I think it needs to be adaptive. It’s a new role. We don’t want to be pegged into something that turns out to not work. We need to be flexible.”
She refrained from assessing the jails’ most urgent needs after her first few weeks and said she’s still finding her footing and processing the landscape.
“My direction from the sheriff is that in the first couple of months I need to understand the landscape, dig into the consent decree requirements and meet all the players and stakeholders,” she said. “But at every meeting I’m learning more and putting the pieces together.”
Specter said Daniels-Shpall’s hiring is a positive step forward, but questions how long he’ll have to wait to see results. Health care is still substandard and slow to arrive for the incarcerated population — with harmful effects on jail patients, he said. He added some general population units in the jails still resemble solitary confinement due to a lack of custody staff.
The Office of Correction and Law Enforcement Monitoring, a separate sheriff oversight panel, has praised Jonsen’s commitment to reforming the office — going as far to say it’s now one of the most transparent in the state — after a much different relationship with Jonsen’s scandal-ridden predecessor, Laurie Smith.
But issues remain. Custody deaths hit a 20-year high last year. The oversight office has also called out a serious lag in probing deputy use of force against incarcerated people — an issue that fueled a series of controversial inmate beatings, costing the county tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements during the 2010s under Smith.
“We’ve let the county know about our belief that if things don’t change, we may have to invoke the authority of the court to force a change,” Specter said. “There’s not a set timeline on that, but a lot of progress should have already happened.”
In her earlier days, Daniels-Shpall steered national research on policing issues such as vehicle pursuits, facial recognition technology and mass casualty response for the Police Executive Research Forum. She also worked at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Office of the Inspector General, shaping transparency standards for the release of police video and use of force cases.
“My primary goal is to lead this agency out from under the consent decrees, and that remains a key operational priority,” Jonsen told San José Spotlight. “Alexa brings a fresh, well-informed perspective that will help us identify areas for improvement and build on the important work already underway. Her experience in police oversight and deep understanding of public policy provide valuable insight and expertise that will support our ongoing reform efforts.”
Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.
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