Chiefs struck deals to reinstate three fired deputies. The county tore them up
Three fired LA County sheriff’s deputies thought they had their jobs back. The county had other ideas.
In a decision filed on October 30, 2026, California’s Second District Court of Appeal ruled that department chiefs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department could not cut reinstatement deals with discharged deputies without the Board of Supervisors’ approval.
The dispute dates to around 2017. Each of the three deputies received a letter of intent to discharge them for alleged misconduct. After internal disciplinary hearings, all three were fired. All three appealed to the LA County Civil Service Commission.
Then came the settlements.
In 2019, while those appeals were still pending, each deputy struck a separate deal with a department chief. The terms purported to reduce the discipline already imposed and reinstate them. The deputies and their union, the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALADS), say the settlements followed the department’s own policy manual, including consultation with a constitutional policing adviser and undersheriff sign-off.
The county refused to honor them. According to the court record, the settlements were never approved by the Board of Supervisors. The deputies’ pleadings allege they were told that county counsel, the director of personnel, and the board had vetoed the deals.
ALADS and the three deputies sued in December 2019, seeking to enforce the settlements and a declaration that the county must honor discipline deals struck at the department level. The case churned through years of amended filings. In July 2025, the trial court threw out the case for good, ruling the deputies had never identified a legal basis for the department’s authority to settle discipline appeals on its own.
The Court of Appeal agreed - and rejected four separate arguments the deputies and ALADS had raised.
First, the court found that the sheriff’s power to hire, suspend, and fire employees does not implicitly include the power to settle discipline appeals. Allowing that, the court reasoned, would undermine the county’s civil service system, which deliberately splits authority among the sheriff, the director of personnel, and the commission to guard against favoritism and corruption. The court pointed to a telling episode: a prior sheriff had tried to reinstate a deputy fired under a previous sheriff’s watch - exactly the kind of risk the system is designed to prevent.
There was a dollar-and-cents problem too. If department officials could unilaterally reverse firings, they could commit the county to back-pay obligations - potentially well beyond the $20,000 cap that even county counsel cannot exceed without board approval.
Second, the court found that an internal department policy describing a process for chiefs to settle discipline appeals did not amount to a lawful grant of authority from the Board of Supervisors. The deputies argued that department management had negotiated the policy with ALADS under California’s public-sector collective bargaining law, making it binding on execution. The court disagreed: the deputies never showed those managers had the power to bind the county in the first place.
Third, ALADS argued a decades-long “past practice” of chiefs settling discipline appeals - allegedly dating to 1980 - made the arrangement binding. The court found ALADS never demonstrated that scrapping the practice triggered any obligation under collective bargaining law, because it never showed the change significantly affected wages, hours, or working conditions.
Fourth, a 2013 appellate decision involving a different ALADS settlement could not block the county from contesting these ones. That earlier case dealt with the department’s procedures for investigating officer-involved shootings - a different issue entirely.
The remaining claims failed too. The court held that a promise-based claim cannot override the public’s interest in ensuring only authorized officials take on liability for the county - a principle it had established in an earlier round of this same case.
For public-sector HR teams and union representatives, the decision draws a hard line: department-level managers who settle discipline appeals without governing-body authorization may be making promises their employer is not bound to keep.
The decision is certified for publication. The Court of Appeal denied the writ petition and awarded costs to the County of Los Angeles.
