Supervisors move to curb pepper spray use in San Diego County juvenile halls

San Diego County supervisors voted Tuesday to explore phasing out pepper spray in local juvenile detention facilities, citing concerns that probation officers use the chemical agent instead of trying to de-escalate conflicts.

Pepper spray — also known as OC spray, because it’s derived from the chili-pepper extract oleoresin capsicum — is banned in most U.S. juvenile detention systems. Youth advocates say it can cause serious physical and psychological harm and is used disproportionately on youth of color and those with developmental disabilities and mental illness.

The vote comes as California Attorney General Rob Bonta conducts a civil-rights investigation into San Diego’s juvenile detention facilities.

Board Vice Chair Monica Montgomery Steppe put forward the proposal to create a subcommittee to explore ending the use of pepper spray in the facilities within two years.

She also wants the subcommittee to make recommendations on other possible ways to improve conditions in youth detention facilities and report back publicly to the Board of Supervisors.

“We need transparency and, above all, we need a culture that prioritizes healing and not punishment,” she said.

The subcommittee will be chaired by Montgomery Steppe and include Supervisor Paloma Aguirre.

Montgomery Steppe said it was a response to not only the state probe but also years of complaints about conditions in county youth facilities.

“This item was born out of a lot of anecdotal evidence that I heard from advocates, parents — but then it was also backed up by reports that the county was receiving, and then an investigation launched in May by the (California) Department of Justice,” she said.

“I’ve spoken to our constituents, including the parents of detained youth who worry about their children, who feel helpless to do anything about it and sometimes feel scared to speak up in fear of retaliation of what may happen to their kids,” she said.

Montgomery Steppe underscored her concern about the chemical agent’s potency — pepper spray is measured in Scoville units, the same scale generally used to denote the relative heat of different chili peppers.

“However, the heat of the law enforcement-issued OC spray is over 1,000 times more powerful than that heat from a jalapeño pepper, and significantly more powerful than commercially available mace sprays,” she said.

Since 2017, the Probation Department has contracted with the Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators (CJJA) for training and technical assistance. Montgomery Steppe said findings made by CJJA have rarely reached the board.

The vote directed Chief Probation Officer Tamika Nelson to respond within 60 days with a strategy to phase out pepper spray, reduce use-of-force incidents and curb the use of room confinement, which involves youth being placed in a locked room for several hours or longer.

“Youth are also often placed under room confinement during staff breaks and shift changes,” Montgomery Steppe wrote in a board letter. “The use of room confinement by probation officers has been a subject of investigation in recent years, and despite probation’s agreement to improve their practices, it does not appear there is much progress in this area.”

During a public comment period, parents of children and teens incarcerated in juvenile detention said officers often let fights happen instead of trying to first mediate conflict. One parent said some probation officers encourage fights.

Several probation officers who spoke, however, told the board that pepper spray was a last-resort tool — and that its complete elimination would worsen the risks to staff and youth.

“We respectfully request that the focus be on reducing OC use, not eliminating it,” said Jennifer Fox, president of the San Diego County Probation Officers Association. “It is a last-resort tool, used only after every effort at de-escalation fails (and) the only remaining response is to go hands on.”

She said probation officers share Montgomery Steppe’s goal of improving safety in juvenile halls and urged the board to provide the department with more resources.

“Lasting change requires more than just eliminating a tool,” she said. “It requires adequate staffing, ongoing training, meaningful programs for our youth and clear measurements of success. We are not resistant to change.”

Chloe Hodge, a member of the East Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility parents council, said the Probation Department needed to hire more mental health clinicians — she said she’d heard there was only one mental health clinician at East Mesa and that kids were being given crossword puzzles in lieu of therapy.

“I do believe it will benefit the community and reduce the rates of recidivism even more if they are given therapy and rehabilitation,” she said.

Supervisor Joel Anderson said he supported a ban on pepper spray but reminded his colleagues that the population of San Diego juvenile halls is different from what it was in the past.

In 2023, California closed down its Department of Juvenile Justice. Now, youth who’ve committed more serious crimes serve their sentences in local detention.

Young adults whose cases originated in juvenile court can remain in a youth facility until they turn 25 years old.

“We could be talking about a guy who’s 6’2″, 280 pounds and 25 years old,” Anderson said. “I want to make sure that we don’t come to conclusions on the use (of pepper spray) without best practices.”

Anderson voted in support of Montgomery Steppe’s proposal after adding an amendment to include probation officers on the subcommittee.

The San Diego County Probation Department has long wrestled with when and how to use pepper spray on youth in custody.

In 2014, Youth Law Center and a coalition of civil rights organizations filed a 34-page complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, arguing that probation officers routinely used pepper spray to subdue youth who were suicidal, medically vulnerable and as young as 12.

A 2016 report by Disability Rights California found that San Diego juvenile halls had “an atmosphere of violence and intimidation” and an over-reliance on pepper spray and physical force to bring youth under control.

And the San Diego County Juvenile Justice Commission, which conducts annual reviews of local youth detention facilities, has repeatedly urged the Probation Department evaluate how staff uses pepper spray.

“The number of OC incidents should be decreasing, not remaining steady,” commissioners wrote in their 2024 East Mesa inspection report.

Winding down pepper-spray use could prove complicated.

In an email obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune through a public records request, Probation Department Division Chief Brandon Abriel told officers that they could carry larger pepper spray canisters to address a “rise in sophistication, criminal history and violence level of the youth we currently serve.”

Officers had been banned from carrying the larger canisters, known as MK-9s — and colloquially referred to as “Big Berthas” — in 2016, “to reduce the amount of overspray as well as the total amount of OC being used in our institutions,” then-Deputy Chief Probation Officer Scott Huizar wrote in a January 2017 memo.

Abriel told officers that larger canisters, while primarily for outdoor use, “may be appropriate to use… indoors” if smaller canisters or physical intervention don’t work. He stressed that they “MUST be used properly” and fully justified in reports.