By Jose Navarro, MBA | The Navarro Report | LA County Affairs
Los Angeles — Ten years of the county’s own litigation reports tell a story its Board of Supervisors has never had to answer for directly: Los Angeles County has paid out somewhere between $131 million and $340 million a year defending and settling lawsuits, and the trend line is not improving. It is worsening. For most of the past decade the county’s annual litigation bill hovered in a narrow band of $131 million to $148 million — call it the cost of doing business for a county of ten million people. Then came fiscal year 2022-23, when the bill hit $340.2 million, more than double the prior year, and the county has not fully returned to its old baseline since.
Divide those totals by the number of residents actually paying for them, and the picture sharpens further. For most of the decade, litigation costs ran $13 to $15 per county resident per year. In FY22-23, that figure jumped to $35 per resident — even as the county’s population was shrinking by roughly 300,000 people. Fewer taxpayers, footing a dramatically larger bill. Two years later, the number still sits at $22 to $23 per resident, roughly 60% above the pre-2022 norm, with no indication the county has found a way back down.
What Made 2022-23 a Catastrophe
The spike wasn’t one bad year of bad luck; it was the arrival, in a single fiscal year, of liabilities the county had been accumulating for over a decade. The single largest driver was the final approach to resolving the Amador case — a 2010 class-action lawsuit over strip-search practices in the county’s women’s jails, where deputies routinely forced female inmates to expose themselves in mass searches. The court-approved $53 million settlement, covering 87,937 women searched more than 421,000 times between 2008 and 2015, landed its costliest installments in this window, pushing Sheriff’s Department litigation spending alone to $150.5 million that year — the highest of any department in any year of the decade. Judgments and settlements county-wide hit $257.4 million, versus a four-year average of roughly $136 million. General Liability expenses alone spiked to $151.7 million, nearly five times the following year’s total, driven substantially by a $39.8 million swing in Department of Children and Family Services cases.
County officials have since acknowledged what outside experts said at the time: nobody was doing the analysis a private company would insist on after a $150 million liability year. UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz, who studies police misconduct litigation, put it plainly when the numbers came out — what internal review is the county doing to figure out which stations get sued most, and for what, so the same fact pattern doesn’t repeat at the same cost the following year? Three years later, the honest answer is: apparently not enough.
The Pattern Repeats at Every Scale
The Sheriff’s and Probation departments alone have cost the county more than $1 billion in litigation over twelve years, according to a UCLA “Million Dollar Hoods” analysis released this spring — settlements, judgments, and legal fees tied overwhelmingly to excessive force, jail conditions, and facility abuse. That billion-dollar tally isn’t an abstraction; it shows up in the county’s own year-by-year numbers as a recurring top line item, not an occasional spike. In FY24-25 alone, the Sheriff’s Department accounted for $112 million of the county’s total $229 million legal bill — practically half, in a single department, in a single year.
The same dynamic plays out at the facility level. At Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, the county agreed to pay $2.7 million to a teenager beaten in staged “gladiator fights” that a state grand jury says were facilitated by 30 probation officers, now facing criminal charges including child endangerment. More than 140 victims, ages 12 to 18, were involved. The facility remains under a court-ordered depopulation plan and a pending federal receivership hearing this August — meaning the county’s exposure on this single set of facts is almost certainly not finished.
And it isn’t only frontline departments generating the bill. County CEO Fesia Davenport received a $2 million settlement last August, approved in closed session and kept confidential until reporters uncovered it, after claiming a voter-approved measure making her job an elected position caused her emotional distress. A taxpayer lawsuit now argues the payout was an unconstitutional gift of public funds, since Davenport had no underlying legal claim against the county at all — a case that, whatever its outcome, illustrates how far outside classic tort liability the county’s settlement habits now extend.
The Case for Reform
None of this is an argument that the county should stop paying legitimate claims. Deputies who shoot unarmed men, probation officers who facilitate violence against children in their custody, and social workers who fail vulnerable kids create real harm, and real harm deserves real compensation. The case for tort reform here isn’t about denying valid claims — it’s about a county that has shown, year after year, that it lacks the internal mechanism to prevent the same expensive mistakes from recurring at the same handful of departments, and instead simply budgets for the next settlement as a cost of doing business.
A county that spent $1 billion over twelve years on Sheriff’s and Probation litigation, that let a CEO settle a manufactured grievance for $2 million behind closed doors, and that is still absorbing the fallout from mass strip searches uncovered fifteen years ago, does not have a legal exposure problem so much as an accountability problem. Reform proposals worth considering include capping non-economic damages in cases without physical injury, mandating a public post-settlement review process modeled on what private insurers require after major claims, and tying department budgets directly to their own litigation trend lines rather than treating settlement costs as an externality absorbed by the general fund. Until something changes the incentives, the county’s own decade of data suggests FY22-23 was not an aberration to be waited out — it was a preview of what happens when nobody is accountable for the trend line itself.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: I choose every topic, direct the research and framing, and edit and approve the final version of every piece under my byline. AI assists with drafting and research support under my direction.