The Death Toll No One Wants to Own: San Diego’s Jail Oversight Meltdown

Sherriff Kelly Martinez and Supervisor Montgomery Steppe side by side. Montgomery Steppe's photo was taken by Zoë Meyers/inewsource

by San Diego Monitor News Staff

The conflict between San Diego County Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe and Sheriff Kelly Martinez isn’t just another political disagreement—it’s a reckoning over what happens behind locked doors, where lives are lost and accountability often vanishes into bureaucracy.

Montgomery Steppe, a lawyer by training and a civil-rights advocate by instinct, has made jail reform the cornerstone of her tenure on the Board of Supervisors. Her mission is simple to state and hard to execute: fewer deaths, more oversight. For months, she’s pushed for a stronger civilian review process, one that could finally pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the Sheriff’s Department’s jails. She has framed the issue as moral as much as administrative—if people die in county custody, the county itself bears responsibility.

The statistics give her case weight. Between 2006 and 2020, San Diego County led California in jail deaths. The pace accelerated again in recent years, even as inmate populations declined. There were 19 deaths in 2022, 13 in 2023, and nine in 2024. Some were overdoses, others suicides, others from medical neglect that families still call unexplained. Each death became another data point, but also another story without closure. Her solution was to empower the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board—known by its bureaucratic shorthand, CLERB—with the ability to investigate anyone involved in a jail death. Not just deputies, but contractors, nurses, physicians, and probation officers. Under Montgomery Steppe’s measure, CLERB would have to investigate every death, even those labeled “natural causes,” and issue findings within a year. The goal was to bring sunlight to corners where oversight rarely reached.

Sheriff Martinez, a veteran law-enforcement leader who rose through the ranks and now commands one of the largest county jail systems in the state, sees the problem differently. She agrees the death toll is unacceptable, but argues the solution lies inside the institution, not above it. Her approach centers on prevention: better medical screening, more frequent wellness checks, mental-health support, and reducing contraband that leads to overdoses. She says the county must strengthen care and staffing rather than multiply watchdogs. In private conversations and public statements, Martinez has described her frustration with what she views as a politicization of jail oversight. She believes that expanding CLERB’s authority without clear rules risks duplication, confusion, and finger-pointing. Her department, she argues, already reports data and investigates incidents internally and through external agencies. Her message is that reform must be deliberate, not reactionary—a house rebuilt brick by brick, not torn down overnight. For Montgomery Steppe, that caution sounds like complacency. For Martinez, the supervisor’s push sounds like interference. The divide between them is as much philosophical as procedural: one is building oversight; the other is defending operational command. Both insist they want to save lives, yet they stand on opposite sides of the same equation.

Behind their disagreement is a deeper question about power in San Diego County. The Sheriff is elected and answers directly to the voters. The Board of Supervisors controls the budget and policy. Oversight, in theory, sits between them. But when lives are lost inside facilities run by one and funded by the other, the boundary between accountability and authority blurs. The public, meanwhile, sees two elected officials clashing while families mourn. Parents of the deceased speak at board meetings holding photographs; jail staff speak quietly about exhaustion, understaffing, and fear of being blamed.

Martinez has said the jail system is improving. The number of deaths, while still too high, is trending downward. She points to new technology to detect drugs, partnerships with health agencies, and better training for deputies. Montgomery Steppe counters that progress without accountability is fragile—that without independent scrutiny, improvement can vanish when leadership changes or headlines fade. The truth, somewhere between their positions, is more complicated. Oversight cannot resurrect the dead, but it can reveal patterns. Operational reform cannot undo decades of neglect, but it can prevent the next tragedy. The question facing San Diego County is whether these two forms of reform—structural and operational—can coexist, or whether politics will once again bury the issue under competing agendas.

In this moment, Montgomery Steppe and Martinez represent the two halves of public trust. One demands transparency; the other promises competence. Both know that failure, if it comes, will not be abstract. It will arrive as another late-night call, another grieving family, another life lost in a system that was supposed to hold people safely until justice took its course.

And so, the fight continues—between oversight and operation, between reform and restraint, between two leaders whose conflict may finally determine whether San Diego’s jails remain a place of quiet crisis or become a test of whether accountability can exist behind locked doors.