Despite aggressive recruitment drives and hefty five-figure bonuses, the critically understaffed Los Angeles County Probation Department is still losing hundreds of officers more each year than it can replace, according to data released by the department.
As of last week, the department had a 36% vacancy rate among its sworn positions — the roles requiring peace officer certification — or 2,408 positions filled out of the 3,752 budgeted.
In 2022, amid a hiring freeze, that vacancy rate was about half that amount. It has grown every year since then, even after the county ended the freeze and stepped up recruitment efforts by flooding billboards, bus stops and job fairs with advertisements for openings.
The constant short staffing over the last three years has led to the closure of two juvenile halls for unsafe conditions and has put the county’s only remaining juvenile hall, Los Padrinos, in the crosshairs of state regulators as well. Last week, the California Department of Justice asked a judge to turn over control to a court-appointed receiver, something that has never been done in California.
A hearing on the DOJ’s motion is set for Sept. 16. If approved, the receiver would independently oversee the department’s budget, policies, hiring and firing.
The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions about how a receiver might address the staffing shortages.
“It’s a culture within the department, it’s been that way as long as I’ve been with the county, but it has gotten worse,” Supervisor Kathryn Barger said at the board’s meeting Tuesday, July 29. “If it’s not fixed, I don’t care who comes into to run it, you’re going to have the same outcome.”
Recruitment efforts fall flat
Los Angeles County Probation’s recruitment efforts have fallen far short of matching attrition in the past three years. From 2022 to June this year, the department hired 358 new sworn officers, yet the total number of filled positions still decreased by 686 over that same period, according to data released by the department.
“There is constant evaluation on recruitment and retention, and while we face some unique challenges with existing staff, we also know that recruitment and retention issues are not solely impacting our department,” said Vicky Waters, the Probation Department’s spokesperson.
“Law enforcement departments nationwide are seeing similar trends. The job market is tough everywhere,” she said. “We focus our campaigns and events on targeting people who want to make a difference, and who want to have a meaningful career in law enforcement and public service.”
While law enforcement agencies are, indeed, struggling to hire across the country, the Probation Department’s vacancy rate is more than three times the average for a typical police department, according to a nationwide survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The department’s leadership says it doesn’t see “chasing recruitment strategies” as the solution to addressing the staffing crisis in the short term.
“It is unlikely that any hiring strategy is going to solve this problem in its entirety,” said Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa at the Board of Supervisors’ July 29 meeting. “There isn’t a massive pool of candidates who are able or willing to come work with us.”
Meanwhile, more and more of the department’s aging and demoralized workforce is retiring each year. Nearly 70% of the employees who left in 2024 either retired or transferred to another county department, records showed.
Compounding the staffing crisis, the people who do get hired aren’t sticking around. That same year, 67% of new hires quit within a year of graduating from the academy, and, so far, 2025 has seen a similar exodus.
Probation now wants to establish a field training program, pairing rookies with veterans much in the same way that police departments do, to ease new hires into working within the chaotic juvenile hall.
“Morale is low, our staff are exhausted, they don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel; they’re doing jobs they didn’t anticipate that they’d have to do, under appalling conditions,” Viera Rosa said during a July 24 meeting of the Probation Oversight Commission. “Our hiring strategy, at this point, the best it can do is keep up with attrition. It’s not going to fill those other positions.
“Having said that, that’s not the problem. The problem is that the number of staff we have on the books exceeds the number of staff I would need to run a facility,” he continued. “They’re unavailable to do this work for one reason or another.”
Call-outs, leaves plague department
More than half of the 816 employees at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall and at the county’s Secure Youth Treatment Facilities are on some type of leave, either intermittently or continuously, according to the county. Hundreds of field probation officers, who would typically handle traditional probation services for adults and juveniles, have been redirected to Los Padrinos to fill those gaps instead.
This has led to situations where new hires ended up on shifts with less experienced officers redeployed from the field.
“New hires have been thrown into an unstable and unsafe environment caused by chronic staffing shortages and management decisions,” said Stacy Ford, president of the L.A. County Deputy Probation Officers Union, in a statement. “Without experienced staff to train and support them, many quickly become overwhelmed and leave.”
On its website, union officials blamed the call-outs on “mandatory holdovers” that can result in officers working back-to-back shifts. The employees who call out are “too exhausted or overwhelmed to safely perform their duties after their shift,” the website states.
Viera Rosa, however, blamed employment protections offered by the county. Probation has taken “hundreds and hundreds of disciplinary actions” against employees they believe are taking advantage of the system and “barely made a dent” in the call-out culture, he said. From January to June of this year, an average of about 8% of the employees scheduled to work at Los Padrinos didn’t show up for work each month.
“I challenge you to find any other agency in which there is such a high percentage of employees not available to work, or another law enforcement agency where the behavior by employees is matched by the generosity of the civil service process,” Viera Rosa said at the oversight commission’s meeting. “This is unprecedented irresponsible behavior that has led us here and, at the core of this, is really the fact that we’re having to guess who and how many people will come to work.”
The Coalition of Probation Unions previously accused the county’s leadership of “union-busting rhetoric” for suggesting that employment agreements and civil service protections enable the staffing crisis. The unions indicated they would hold any receiver, if appointed, to “state law and the terms of our contract.”
Hiring pipeline
The hope after Viera Rosa’s own hiring in 2023 was that new recruits would be brought on quickly to bolster staffing following Los Padrinos’ reopening.
The department tried to streamline the process by reducing the amount of time between application and academy, a lengthy process that can keep applicants on the hook for more than a year. That turnaround time dropped from 434 days in 2022 to 289 days in 2024, though it has since begun to creep back up. Applicants must go through a LiveScan and a department-led background investigation, as well as psychological and medical examinations.
The redeployment of some of the background investigators to Los Padrinos contributed to the slowdowns, officials said.
The juvenile hall still failed a series of inspections last year and was ordered to close by the state in December 2024. However, the county has opted not to comply. The matter went to court, and a Superior Court judge ordered the county to implement a depopulation plan that would shift more than 100 youths out of Los Padrinos to other facilities. That plan has faced many roadblocks already and the population at Los Padrinos continues to climb.
Department black eyes
Meanwhile, the Probation Department has faced headline after headline about its failures. Probation officers have been arrested for allegedly staging fight clubs and for bringing drugs into a secure facility. There have been violent escape attempts that prompted police to show up in riot gear and massive multibillion-dollar settlements for sexual abuse.
The uncertainty around Los Padrinos and now the looming receivership has only added to current and prospective employees’ anxiety about the department’s future. A recent state bill, SB 357, would allow Board of Supervisors to shift control of the juvenile facilities away from the Probation Department completely and the supervisors have made it clear that’s exactly what they want to do.
Nearly 20,000 applications, 123 hires
Openings within the department have still drawn a high level of interest, though only fraction of those who applied succeeded in landing jobs.
Probation received nearly 20,000 applications for openings in 2024 and 2025 and has only hired 123 officers so far. Most of the applicants did not qualify for the peace officer positions, failed background checks, got other jobs during the nearly year long review process, or simply passed on the final offer, probation officials said. Others are waiting on background checks, or for the next academy to begin.
“There are some who expressed concerns with the department’s current state and the stability of their future employment,” said Deanna Carlisle, the human resources manager for the Probation Department, during the oversight commission’s July meeting.
The department has tried to nail down any qualified candidates it can find, to the point that it recently ran an academy program — which ideally might have a class of 30 or more — for just seven recruits.
Bonuses had little impact
Even five-figure bonuses weren’t enough of an incentive, however. The department attempted to lure officers from other probation and police departments with a $24,000 signing bonus for lateral transfers. Probation officials told the Board of Supervisors in July that no one bit.
Probation also offered up to $17,000 in bonuses for existing employees who worked 1,000 to 2,000 hours within the juvenile facilities during six-, nine- and 12-month periods in 2023 and 2024. Figures provided by the department indicated that 230 employees completed 1,000 hours by September 2023, and received a $3,500 bonus as a result, while 221 passed the 2,000-hour mark by the March 2024 deadline to qualify for a $10,000 bonus.
Employees could qualify for some or all of the three bonus periods. The department did not provide a figure for how many employees received the full amount.
Sheila Williams, the chief deputy over administrative services, told the Board of Supervisors during its July 29 meeting that the bonuses were not enough of an incentive to make a difference in staffing at the juvenile facilities.
“We did implement the program, however at the end of the day, we didn’t deem it successful because we still continued to struggle in terms of staffing with respect to the juvenile institutions,” Williams said.
Ford, the union president, called the bonuses a “patch, not a solution.”
“Once the bonuses expired, the underlying problems — burnout, unsafe conditions and lack of support — remained,” Ford said. “But the bottom line is that no amount of money will keep people in jobs where they feel unsafe and unsupported. The County must invest in experienced juvenile officers, restore incentives like emergency staffing rates, and use the state funds they’ve been holding to stabilize staffing. Until those fundamentals are addressed, turnover will continue and conditions will worsen.”
What happens next
The union and the county are currently negotiating a new contract. County officials already have rejected a union proposal asking for 20% higher pay rates and double overtime during emergency staffing shortages.
Still, Viera Rosa has suggested employees should be paid more because of the conditions inside the juvenile facilities, and should have a retirement system that matches the risks. That potentially signals his support for a safety retirement program that would allow officers to retire earlier, similar to police officers, and offer a more competitive package for prospective hires weighing whether to join probation or another law enforcement agency.
The average age of retirement from the Probation Department in the past three years was 61, according to figures provided in March. By comparison, the average retirement age for a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy was 53.
The department is trying other strategies now, too.
It is creating more civilian roles, with the goal of freeing up probation officers from certain paperwork and security duty. Probation is looking to establish a new position similar to a reserve sheriff’s deputy, which would allow retired probation officers to return on an as-needed basis, according to Viera Rosa.
For the probation chief, the most critical component is time. At the oversight commission’s meeting, he lamented that the county has had to constantly “pivot” in response to demands from oversight agencies.
“The manner in which we can get back on track requires lengthy correction, not 60 or 90 days, and every time we move, it sets us back from being able to do that,” he said.