Zhoie Perez slouched against the holding cell wall in Men’s Central Jail and closed her eyes, hoping a guard would jolt her awake with the words she’d been waiting for: The bus is here! Time for court!
The 51-year-old just needed to make it back to court one more time so she could be sentenced and, she hoped, released. She’d been jailed months earlier, but since then had repeatedly missed hearings — usually, she was told, because the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department didn’t have enough buses.
Sometime after noon, another transgender woman in the holding tank asked a deputy whether a bus would come for them. The deputy told her no. Irate, the woman shrieked, shoved something in the holding cell toilet and started frantically flushing to flood the cell.
Perez stood up but slipped on the slick floor. Her head bounced off a bench. Everything went black. She didn’t make it to court.
Over the last seven years, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has routinely struggled to fulfill a core task of its eight jails: making sure inmates show up for their court dates. But that seemingly simple task has grown harder and harder, as the department’s bus fleet has steadily dwindled.
Mechanics work on Los Angeles County Sheriff’s buses outside the Men’s Central Jail.
On any given day, less than half of the department’s 82 buses are functional. Last year, that figure dipped below a dozen — nowhere near enough to handle the roughly 3,000 inmate transports the department needs to do each day. At one point, county supervisors said roughly a third of the people detained in the county jails were missing their court dates.
“Sometimes we’ll start the day and every single person is a miss-out,” Jorgie Zimring, a public defender in Glendale, told The Times. “And some days, the only way we’re getting two or three people to court is because the sheriffs at our branch are physically going to the jail and picking people up themselves.”
Attorneys worry that missed court dates can delay screenings for rehabilitation programs, lead to longer jail stays and leave defendants in the dark about the status of their cases, adding another layer of anxiety and stress to an already trying legal process.
At some courthouses, defense lawyers have started asking judges for extraction orders, which give deputies the power to violently drag inmates from their cells. It’s a potentially dangerous procedure typically reserved for recalcitrant inmates, but the signed orders mean those inmates often get top priority for transport.
This year the lack of buses became an even clearer safety issue when the Hughes fire broke out near the Castaic jail complex, spurring questions about whether the Sheriff’s Department was even capable of evacuating the facilities’ 4,700 inmates with so few working buses.
Part of the problem is that the existing buses are tough to repair, since many are so old that the parts are hard to find. But county data show the bigger issue is that, from 2018 until the end of 2024, the Sheriff’s Department didn’t get any new buses.
Every year for five budget cycles, the Sheriff’s Department asked the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for several million dollars to buy new buses. But when county leaders repeatedly approved far smaller vehicle budgets than the department requested, sheriff’s officials chose to spend that money on other needs — such as patrol cars and specialized transport vans.
“The Department continues to strive to provide the best possible transportation services despite these challenges,” the Sheriff’s Department told The Times in an emailed statement. “Both the Board and the CEO are very supportive and we will continue to collaborate closely until this transportation issue is fully resolved.”
Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose tenure stretched through four of those bus-less budget cycles, blamed county supervisors who he said “blocked” his administration’s ability to replace the aging vehicles.
A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy directs an inmate bus outside the Men’s Central Jail.
“We are supposed to purchase 5 new buses every year in order to maintain a functioning fleet of 82 buses for court transportation, interjail movement, statewide transportation, and the occasional special event involving mass arrests,” he told The Times in an email. “It dwindled down to 16 functioning buses, and the rest were being cannibalized in order to maintain a minimum level of functioning buses.”
In last year’s budget, supervisors finally greenlighted funding for 20 new buses, a little over half of which have been delivered. This year the department said it secured enough funding for at least 14 new buses, and next year’s budget includes a request for 11 more.
Supervisor Janice Hahn said she would support that $11.3-million ask for next year.
“New buses have to be a priority both for our Board and for the Sheriff,” she said.
The other supervisors either did not comment or did not respond to an emailed series of questions.
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Before the pandemic, deputies transported roughly 1.1 million people more than 2.8 million miles each year, according to data the department sent to county supervisors last year.
Those numbers dipped when COVID-19 hit, and the jail population plummeted. But by 2023 the department was back up to 700,000 transports a year, half a million of which took inmates to court.
Yet, by last summer, 39 of the department’s 82 high-security buses were well past the Federal Transportation Administration’s recommended lifespan — 12 years or 500,000 miles. And, as the aging vehicles broke down more often, they became harder to repair. Experienced large-bus mechanics were tough to find, and so were the antiquated parts they needed.
“The recurrent issue that continues to plague our fleet is the scarcity of the most basic maintenance components that are no longer mass-manufactured and need to be sourced nationwide or fabricated in-house,” Sheriff Robert Luna wrote county supervisors in July. “Regardless of who is repairing the Department’s bus fleet, they can only do so much because of the bus fleet’s age, mileage and scarce parts availability, evidenced by at least seven buses being inoperable for well over 12 months while awaiting components.”
A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s inmate bus outside the Men’s Central Jail.
But replacing the buses proved even more difficult — and expensive — than fixing them. Jails can’t just buy buses off the lot; they need to include the spending in their budget request, go through the bidding process, wait for the vehicles to be delivered and add security features needed to transport inmates.
Between 2000 and 2018, sheriff’s officials bought an average of 4.5 new buses per year, according to department data.
Then in 2018, the department’s requested budget included a line asking for $3.4 million to buy three eco-friendly buses and four other specialized vehicles. That ask was part of a larger request for vehicles and transportation equipment purchases.
The department’s vehicle and transportation request topped $23.6 million that year, but the final budget supervisors approved included only an estimated $11.7 million.
The department did not use any of that money to buy new buses. And officials only spent a small fraction — $2.35 million — on vehicles and transportation equipment.
The following year, the department asked for two buses. The final budget included only an estimated $8.3 million for vehicles and transportation equipment — far less than the department’s $57-million ask.
Again, the department did not use any of that money to buy new buses.
That pattern continued for several more years. According to Villaneuva, the problem was that county supervisors blocked bus purchases by “unlawfully” meddling with funds they’d already appropriated.
“State law and case law both state the board has no say in the budget once it’s allocated to the LASD,” he told The Times in an email, “but the board simply ignored the law to sabotage my operations — and now the chickens have come home to roost.”
It is not clear whether that was a reference to the board’s 2019 vote to freeze some spending after the department racked up a $63-million net deficit, and Villanueva did not respond to an emailed request for clarification.
Hahn said she couldn’t make sense of the former sheriff’s accusation.
“I have no comment, as I am not even sure what that means,” she told The Times in an email.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s buses are lined up at the Men’s Central Jail.
It wasn’t until after Villanueva left office that the department once again began receiving new buses, when the board approved using special funds to buy 20 as part of the 2023-24 budget cycle.
The first arrived last year, a couple of weeks before Christmas. The last is expected to arrive in July. Then in December, the next 14 buses are expected to begin arriving, at a pace of one every two weeks.
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Until she was charged with two felonies in 2024, Perez said she’d never been in jail for more than a few hours. A self-described “1st Amendment auditor,” Perez was filming outside the Van Nuys Courthouse when she got into a dispute with a district attorney’s investigator. She was ultimately charged with battery against an officer and criminal threats. Though she maintains her innocence, she was convicted at trial.
The first time she expected to go in for sentencing, Perez said, she got up at 3:30 a.m. to wait in a holding cell for more than 8 hours before learning there would be no bus.
“Not having enough working buses is a county problem, NOT an inmate issue,” she wrote afterward on an inmate grievance form, a copy of which she shared with The Times. “Preventing me from adjudicating my case is ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’”
The Sheriff’s Department said it is investigating her allegations.
A couple of weeks later Perez found herself back in the same holding tank, surrounded by inmates desperate to get to court.
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The bus shortage has become exasperating for everyone involved. Several inmates recounted the frustration of repeatedly missing court dates, sometimes more than half a dozen times.
“It’s a nightmare,” said Christopher Simpson, who was in jail with Perez last year. “Every time they canceled, it was a month before I got rescheduled to go back.”
Erica Lewis, a long-haul truck driver in Texas, said she spent hundreds of dollars to drive to Los Angeles for her son’s sentencing, only to learn the Sheriff’s Department didn’t have enough buses to take him to court.
“I came from across the country, and they didn’t have transportation to get him there,” she said. “It makes you feel powerless.”
Several defense lawyers and one veteran L.A. County judge — who spoke on the condition of anonymity because court conduct rules generally bar judges from granting interviews — said they’ve seen attorneys take the extraordinary step of requesting an “extraction order” to ensure their clients are brought to court on time.
“The lawyers are doing that routinely. The lawyers ask the court to sign an extraction order and they indicate that it will facilitate the presence of the clients,” the judge said. “They’re saying it with a wink and a nod; they’re trying anything necessary to get the client into court.”
The Sheriff’s Department confirmed it had seen a “slight uptick” in extraction orders over the last year but said that trend is beginning to reverse course.
In addition to the legal ramifications, the lack of buses could have safety implications for incarcerated people. When the Hughes fire broke out on Jan. 22 roughly five miles from the Castaic jails, attorneys, advocates and inmates’ families questioned whether the Sheriff’s Department could move everyone to safety with its dwindling fleet.
“They don’t have enough buses to take people to court,” Melissa Camacho, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said at the time. “They certainly don’t have enough buses to move them all at once for an evacuation.”
Ultimately sheriff’s officials decided not to evacuate — though they borrowed several dozen buses just in case. The flames stopped less than a mile from the jails.
Two months later, Camacho said she still worries about how things might have turned out if the winds had been a little stronger.
“It’s just luck that the fire started after the hurricane-force winds had passed,” she said. “We can hope that the wind doesn’t blow like that again but someday it might — and we’re still not prepared for that day.”
As the department waits for its new buses to arrive, officials are looking for other solutions. Last year, county supervisors raised the possibility of using Metro buses, and court officials tried exploring the idea of doing remote video arraignments from inside the jails — but neither plan worked out.
Early this year, court officials ordered all early disposition hearings to be moved from the main criminal courthouse to the Bauchet Street courtroom near the downtown jails, according to court spokesman Rob Oftring Jr.
“The move is designed to alleviate transportation issues by ensuring these cases are heard adjacent to Men’s Central Jail, not requiring bus transportation,” Oftring said in an email.
The department has also sought to ease its transport woes by buying more Ford E350 vans. Nine of the 14-passenger vehicles are expected to arrive next month, and the department said it has secured funding for 23 more after that.
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A few minutes after she blacked out, Perez woke up face-down in a pool of blood-streaked toilet water.
“It looked like a shark attack,” said Alexander Halvorson, who was in the same holding tank waiting to go to court that day.
Other inmates yelled for help, and eventually Perez was taken to a hospital where medical records show she got two staples in her head.
It wasn’t until mid-November she finally made it back to court. After a short hearing, she was sentenced to eight months, with time served.
She was released the next day.