An intake at Monterey County Jail can take anywhere from an hour to eight hours, according to a report by the Monterey County Civil Grand Jury released on May 7. On busy days, the queue of vehicles holding inmates waiting to be booked can be down the street, according to the report.
Booking is a multi-step process, including photographing and fingerprinting the individual and conducting a medical screening. In addition, inmates must be processed twice, first by the police agency then at the jail, since data entry systems don’t communicate with each other, according to the report.
“We all really have to make sure we’re doing everything absolutely correctly, otherwise we know we’re going to get sued, so it tends to slow the whole process down,” King City Police Chief Robert Masterson says.
Doing it slowly also has impacts, the grand jury found. “This can affect emergency response and routine public safety coverage, as well as increase overtime costs. Extended wait times also affect arrestees, who remain in vehicles or holding areas until booking is completed,” the report states.
Long waits reduce officer availability for patrolling the streets while they wait in line.
Police chiefs in South County cities say booking can keep an officer away for hours at a time. To make the process faster, King City and Greenfield police regularly take arrestees to Mee Memorial Hospital for medical screening and clearance.
In Greenfield, 5 to 10 percent of the police department’s overtime budget is spent on booking arrestees.
“I’ve had reports from my officers that say they spent up to six hours in the jail,” Masterson says. KCPD’s average staffing is two to three people per shift; taking a suspect to Salinas means the agency will be one officer down for at least half a shift.
Masterson is sympathetic to the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office in working to comply with its obligations, including those required by a class-action settlement agreement concerning health care at the jail.
“There’s a lot of liability for the Sheriff’s Department in receiving inmates, and they want to make sure they’re doing it right,” Masterson says, noting the process has changed a lot since the time he started working 40 years ago.
Soledad Police Chief Patrick Valenzuela has been on the job for under a year, after working in a more populated area in Maricopa County in Arizona. “My officers there got to the process a lot quicker than they do here,” Valenzuela says. In Arizona, he says, officers from the Sheriff’s Department might meet halfway to pick up arrestees.
Fourteen law enforcement agencies, including California Highway Patrol, book suspects at Monterey County Jail, and they have to transport them to Salinas where the jail is located.
In January, the jail switched its health care provider from Wellpath to Correctional Healthcare Partners, which has increased staffing. Since then, the booking process has two nurses instead of one on staff during daytime and has increased its intake stations to accelerate the process.
“The booking times are getting better,” says Greenfield Police Chief Guillermo Mixer, noting the queue has dropped from eight hours to the three-to-five-hour range. “I haven’t had an eight-hour wait in a few months.”
The civil grand jury recommended developing a guide on standard booking procedure and a comparative analysis between the current and former health care providers, as well as streamlining data collection among law enforcement agencies (or an analysis of why this is infeasible).
Mixer says several police departments and the sheriff have already talked about a streamlined data system. “It would make everybody’s job so much easier, because we can input all the information here at once,” he says.
The Sheriff’s Office is reviewing the report and declined to be interviewed, but will produce a written response to the report.