On January 8, 2026, Congress members Derek T. Tran and Sydney Kamlager-Dove sent a letter to Los Angeles County officials urging swift resolution of contract negotiations with the Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. The message was urgent and polished: staffing shortages at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are dire, morale is fraying, and the region is barreling toward global pressure tests, the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics, that demand a strong, well-resourced police force.
On the surface, it read like a long-overdue acknowledgment of reality. Dig one layer deeper and the letter collapses under the weight of its own contradictions – especially where Kamlager-Dove is concerned.
The hypocrisy begins with the cc line. Among those copied was Holly Mitchell, a Los Angeles County Supervisor whose record on policing stands in direct opposition to the letter’s central thesis. Mitchell has spent years championing policies that siphon funds away from law enforcement. She supported Measure J, the ballot measure mandating that ten percent of the county’s unrestricted general fund be redirected from public safety into alternative programs. Then-Sheriff Alex Villanueva warned, repeatedly, that the move would hollow out the department, worsen understaffing, and degrade response times. Those warnings weren’t theoretical. They describe the crisis Kamlager-Dove now claims to be alarmed by.
Mitchell’s influence didn’t stop at budget cuts. The Board of Supervisors advanced a 2022 charter amendment granting itself authority to remove an elected sheriff “for cause,” a direct assault on the independence of the office. That campaign of pressure and constraint defined Villanueva’s tenure and left the department weaker, not safer. It is precisely the environment that produced the attrition, recruitment failures, and morale collapse cited in the January letter.
This isn’t a casual political disagreement. It’s personal, and well documented. Kamlager-Dove began her career as Mitchell’s district director. She succeeded Mitchell in Sacramento, inheriting the same Assembly and Senate seats, and later ascended to Congress along the same political ladder. Kamlager-Dove has publicly referred to Mitchell as “family.” In early 2024, her leadership PAC donated $1,000 to Mitchell’s reelection campaign. Yet in this carefully crafted appeal for deputy funding, Kamlager-Dove offers no public challenge to Mitchell’s defunding record, only a quiet cc, as if proximity absolves contradiction.
Then there is the money.
Kamlager-Dove’s husband, Austin Dove, is a civil-rights attorney whose firm, Grace Legal Group, has built a lucrative practice suing the very sheriff’s department his wife now claims to champion. In 2025, Dove secured a $25 million settlement from Los Angeles County in the Isaias Cervantes case, one of the largest police-misconduct payouts in U.S. history. The settlement was approved by the Board of Supervisors, with Mitchell quietly seconding it. There was no public disclosure of her familial-political relationship to the plaintiff’s attorney.
That payout didn’t materialize in a vacuum. County funds drained into massive settlements are funds not spent on recruitment, retention, training, or equipment. They are dollars that directly exacerbate the staffing crisis Kamlager-Dove decries, while simultaneously enriching her household. The conflict is glaring, and it is impossible to square with calls for “dignity and respect” for deputies.
The pattern doesn’t end there. Dove has reportedly surfaced in other high-profile matters tied to LASD controversies, while Kamlager-Dove’s political spending has flowed, at notably convenient moments. toward figures connected to oversight and enforcement, including donations involving the family of Rob Bonta. Each piece alone might be brushed off as coincidence. Together, they form a picture of a closed loop where political alliances, legal action, and public funds circulate among the same insiders.
Which brings us back to the letter.
And while Sheriff Luna continues to play games with critical staffing data, obscuring just how dismal conditions inside the department have become in an effort to mask four years of failed leadership and a department in free fall, the real story of horrific working conditions is being told to The Current Report directly by deputies on the inside.
As county officials circulate polished dashboards and selective talking points, the internal numbers reveal a far darker reality, one the department itself can no longer hide. LASD is losing roughly twice as many deputies as it recruits, with approximately 200 recruits entering the pipeline each year while more than 400 deputies retire or walk out. This is not a temporary shortage, it is a structural collapse, with more than 3,300 sworn positions vacant, slots the department cannot fill at any pace that keeps up with attrition. Deputies are still leaving at a rate of nearly 20 per week, either quitting outright or lateraling to agencies that do not grind their workforce into dust. Entire stations are now operating in crisis mode, Marina del Rey Station, for example, has been reduced to just 18 deputies total to cover all three shifts for an entire week. Mandatory overtime has spiraled out of control, with deputies routinely required to work 88 extra hours per month on top of regular shifts, after the county quietly raised the overtime cap to 120 hours instead of fixing staffing. Institutional knowledge is being hollowed out in real time, and without immediate course correction, the department many officials now claim to support may not even survive intact through the 2028 Olympics. These are the true numbers, confirmed through active deputy communications, not the whitewashed statistics being pushed through official LASD channels.
LA County needs a strong sheriff’s department, particularly with the world about to descend on Los Angeles for the World Cup and the olympics that will surely strain every public safety resource. But credibility matters. You cannot decry understaffing while empowering defunders. You cannot mourn morale while your household profits from dismantling the institution you claim to support. And you cannot posture as a defender of law enforcement while refusing to confront the closest architect of its decline.
This letter isn’t an olive branch. It’s a PR stunt stripped of any accountability whatsoever, crafted for optics knowing the damage done to the largest, and most prestigious Sheriff’s Department in the country that has been in existence for over 175 years.
If Congresswoman Kamlager-Dove wants to be taken seriously on public safety, she should start where the damage began: the Board of Supervisors, and her closest ally on it she refers to as “family”.
Until then, the words in that letter will continue to ring hollow, echoing through the ongoing exodus from LASD, the unfilled deputy positions, and the empty patrol cars, all of it foreseeable, all of it avoidable, and all of it made inevitable by the same people now pretending to be alarmed.
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