The way Sacramento County handles situations involving the deaths of its deputies is surrounded by a certain silence. There is a settlement, a figure, and a line item that finally shows up in a public agenda, so it’s not precisely silent. However, the noise that would normally accompany a death at the hands of the government tends to be absorbed somewhere along the line, muffled by the machinery of consent calendars, mediation, and non-admission clauses, until what’s left is a check and a sentence about avoiding “future costs related to preparation and litigation.” In the McIntyre instance, a sheriff’s spokesperson said something that is about as near to an answer as the families typically receive.
When individuals in Sacramento discuss this pattern, Mikel McIntyre is the most frequently mentioned case, and it’s important to understand why. McIntyre, a 32-year-old former baseball prospect experiencing a mental health crisis, ended up hurling rocks at cops on the side of Highway 50 in Rancho Cordova in May 2017. One of the rocks gashed an officer’s head. He was hit by 28 shots by three deputies. Seven blows were delivered to him. He was fleeing when six of those bullets struck him in the back. Later, the county’s Inspector General described the amount of fire as “excessive, unnecessary, and put the community at risk,” pointing out that even if McIntyre had picked up another rock, he would have been far enough away to give officers time to think of less deadly options.
This is the point at which the two sides of the American accountability system, as they frequently do, pull in opposing directions. After reviewing the same shooting, the District Attorney’s office determined that the cops were justified because McIntyre posed a severe risk of death or serious injury. The county’s prosecutor describes the same 28 rounds and the same deceased guy, while the county’s civilian oversight board calls the shooting excessive and needless. The family’s wrongful-death lawsuit was resolved by the county for $1.725 million in January 2020. The statement that sticks out the most was made by his mother, Brigett McIntyre: “Money is like a cover up for what they did.” To me, he was invaluable.
It’s more of an observation about the structure of the system than an accusation that the procedures by which these cases are settled are practically geared to limit public reckoning. Seldom do significant civil rights lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office proceed directly to trial. They are sent to court-sponsored settlement conferences or private mediation, where county counsel and the family’s lawyers negotiate a sum of money behind closed doors. The county’s motivation is clear-cut and logical: litigation is costly, takes years, and bears the danger of a jury finding that is unpredictable. It is more predictable and less expensive to settle. The price is that the underlying facts are never presented in open court, where they would be heard by a jury and the public.
The silence becomes almost architectural when the Board of Supervisors gives its permission. The board must formally approve the settlement once a figure has been decided upon. The “consent calendar” is the part of a public meeting agenda where routine things are passed in a single block without discussion, without anybody reading the facts aloud, and without a supervisor needing to speak the deceased person’s name into a microphone. This is where these approvals are nearly always dropped. The same generic motion that authorizes a road-maintenance contract may be used to approve a payout of almost a million dollars for a shooting death. In technical terms, it is public, but in practical terms, it is invisible.
The last component is the non-admission provision, which is common practically everywhere, not only in Sacramento. It is almost typically stated in the agreements that the county does not acknowledge any wrongdoing or culpability. Legally speaking, that is commonplace; in every type of civil action, defendants consistently reach settlements without acknowledging liability. But in the specific context of a deputy-involved death, that clause does something corrosive. It lets the county pay out the civil claim while allowing the Sheriff’s Office to avoid any explicit acknowledgment of systemic failure. The lawsuit is settled by the money. It doesn’t resolve the question of whether anything was actually done wrong, or whether anything will change.
What families consistently say they want, and what they consistently don’t get, is the part that has nothing to do with money. They want the unredacted body-camera footage made public. The internal affairs files are what they seek. They want to know whether the officers faced any discipline, and they want, often, for those officers to be fired or for use-of-force training to change.
California’s transparency laws — SB 1421 and SB 16 — have forced more disclosure than existed a decade ago, and that’s real progress. But local agencies still routinely restrict the release of footage and records, citing active internal investigations or the parameters of those very statutes. Families and watchdog groups like the Sacramento Community Review Commission have frequently had to file Public Records Act requests just to learn the exact terms of a settlement or whether any discipline followed.
The McIntyre file itself only came out because the Sacramento Bee sued and threatened a second lawsuit, after which Sheriff Scott Jones released roughly 1,200 documents. That release happened to land in the days right after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, when public attention to police killings was at a national peak. The timing was coincidental, but it illustrated something: the transparency that did eventually arrive came through litigation and external pressure, not through the county volunteering it. The same sheriff, notably, had earlier retaliated against the Inspector General who wrote the critical report by locking him out of agency offices and the jail. That detail says a lot about the institutional appetite for the kind of accountability the families are asking for.
The Sherrano Stingley case, an in-custody death now litigated in federal court, will likely follow a recognizable arc — discovery, mediation, a negotiated number, a non-admission clause, a consent-calendar vote. Federal court adds some procedural friction and some additional disclosure, but the underlying logic of resolution rarely changes. There’s a sense, watching these cases move through the system over the years, that the process is working exactly as designed. The county manages its financial exposure. The families receive compensation. And the public record stays thin enough that the broader questions — about training, about the gap between the Inspector General and the DA, about whether anything actually changes after a person is shot seven times in the back — never quite get forced into the open.
