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A Palmdale Station aide this week announced that he will challenge Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna in the first round of elections and become the first opposition candidate in a race that has been more than a year away.
At the campaign kickoff event in Santa Clarita on Wednesday, Oscar Martinez Inter-S promised to bring strong leadership to the nation’s largest sheriff’s department and focus on modernizing agents and supporting deputies.
“Today, I put my career and everything I was working on, not for my career and for my personal interests, but for my law enforcement partners and for the future of public safety in my community,” he told attendees. “A radical agenda takes it [over] Our schools, many of our city government, county boards, state leaders, and sadly, they are currently dismantling law enforcement from within. ”
Martinez, a US Marine Corps veteran who has been in the division for 16 years, is a registered Republican, but spoke at a time when even deep, blue places like Los Angeles don’t think it’s important.
“This is a nonpartisan race and I run to protect the citizens of this county,” he said in an interview. “There’s no politics. Just public safety.”
Born in the Dominican Republic, Martinez moved to the East Coast as a young man, spent eight years in the US Marines, serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. He settled in the Los Angeles area in 2006 and joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office two years later. Since then he has worked in the prison, Chief Executive Aide, and spokesman under the last administration, and is now the watch commander at Palmdale Sheriff’s Station.
He said he decided to take office after other deputies and community members encouraged him, especially after a controversial case that ended with this year’s federal conviction of Sheriff Lancaster, who was found to have committed a crime of using excessive force.
“The lawmakers were just enough – they don’t feel support,” he said. “I’m worried that I’ll be fired for handcuffing the suspect too much.”
Important issues he wants to tackle include advocating for the second amendment, finding more resources to support veterans in the department, and preventing the release of violent offenders, according to his campaign website.
In an interview with the Times with the Social Media, Martinez said he was keen to push the state to change its immigration enforcement approach and would lobby to fine-tune the laws that would prevent local law enforcement from staying in prison just to pick up immigration agents.
“After they have their time for now, we have to release them to the general population, and I believe it’s wrong,” he said. “We need to have a collaborative relationship with the ice.”
Martinez spoke about the need to modernize outdated systems in the department, such as disruption systems and inoperable buses, but also emphasized the need for financial responsibility, particularly when it comes to resource allocation.
Given the long-standing staffing shortage, lawmakers said they should not divert from contract cities to specialised staff teams such as mental assessment teams. He advocated a scale-back for that team. The team is trained to answer calls involving people in mental health crisis until the department’s staffing levels improve.
One topic that has been bothered by LA County Sheriffs for decades is the flow of allegations about tattooed internal gangs running AMOK at certain stations. While some sheriffs have denied their existence, Martinez has admitted that there is an exclusive group in the department. He said he had no tattoos.
“Every agency of the size of our agency has a creek,” he said. “I belong to the Marines. There’s a creek there. If you go to IBM there, I guarantee there’s a creek there.”
He said the issue stems from a lack of leadership and by providing strong leadership and vision, it eliminates the need for lawmakers to collaborate controversial groups.
Challenging an elected sheriff can be a challenging task. According to Jessica Pisico, author of “The Best Law on the Land,” the incumbent has won reelection of about 90% of the time.
In Los Angeles County, only two sheriffs resigned from their duties in the last century. In 2018, Villanueva expelled Jim McDonnell, now the Chief of Los Angeles Police. In 2022, Luna, a former Long Beach police chief, escaped from her retirement to Best Villanueva. During the campaign, Luna positioned herself as a gentle antidote to what he described as “dysfunction and confusion” on her opponent.
Since taking office, he has faced many problems hiding in the former sheriff. The bad situation at the prison, vast consent orders, allegations about the deputy gang, and the struggles of pssifentent. But he has also built a promise to provide more uniform leadership and repair fragmentary relationships with leaders in other counties.
Last year, amid opposition speculation, he told the Times he would “absolutely” run for reelection. As of Friday morning, the county registrar’s site listed him and Martinez as the only candidates in the race.
In a statement Friday, Luna touted records that keeps the community safe and brings stability to the department.
“Since becoming a sheriff, violent crime has declined every year in areas patrolled by LASD, and in 2024 I saw the least murder in the last five years,” he said. “In addition, our reforms, including the constitutional police and the anti-policy board of law enforcement gangs, have increased public confidence in the sector.”
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