A lieutenant at the Palmdale station announced this week that he will challenge Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna in the primary election, becoming the first opposition candidate in a race more than a year away.
At a campaign kick-off event Wednesday in Santa Clarita, Lt. Oscar Martinez promised to bring strong leadership to the largest sheriff’s department in country, along with a focus on modernizing the agency and supporting deputies.
“Today, I am putting my career and everything that I’ve worked for on the line, not for personal gain but for my partners in law enforcement as well as for the future of public safety in our communities,” he told attendees. “Radical agendas have taken [over] our schools, many of our city governments, our county board, our state leadership and sadly they are now dismantling law enforcement from within.”
A U.S. Marine combat veteran who’s been with the department for 16 years, Martinez is a registered Republican — though he told The Times he didn’t think that would matter, even in a deeply blue place such as Los Angeles.
“This is a nonpartisan race, and I’m running to protect the citizens of this county,” he said in an interview. “No politics, just public safety.”
Born in the Dominican Republic, Martinez immigrated to the East Coast in his youth and spent eight years in the U.S. Marines, serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. He settled in the Los Angeles area in 2006 and joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department two years later. Since then, he said, he’s worked in the jails, been a chief’s executive aide, served as spokesman under the last administration and currently is watch commander at the Palmdale sheriff’s station.
He said he decided to run for office after other deputies and community members encouraged him to, particularly in the wake of a controversial incident that ended with the federal conviction this year of a Lancaster sheriff’s deputy who was found guilty of using excessive force.
“Deputies had just had enough — they don’t feel supported,” he said. “You have deputies out there worried they’re going to get fired for putting handcuffs a little too tight on a suspect.”
Key issues he wants to tackle include defending the 2nd Amendment, finding more resources to support veterans in the department and preventing the release of violent criminals, according to his campaign website.
On social media and in his interview with The Times, Martinez stressed his interest in pushing the state to change its immigration enforcement approach, saying he would lobby for tweaks to a law that prevents local law enforcement agencies from holding people in jail for extra time solely for immigration agents to pick them up.
“After they do their time as of now, we have to release them into the general population, and I believe that is wrong,” he said. “We need to have a working relationship with ICE.”
Martinez talked about the need to modernize the department’s out-of-date systems — such as its failing dispatch system and inoperable buses — but he also stressed the need for fiscal responsibility, particularly when it comes to resource allocation.
Given the years-long staffing shortage, he said, deputies should not be diverted away from contract cities to staff specialized teams such as the Mental Evaluation Team. He advocated scaling back that team, which is trained to respond to calls involving people having mental health crises, until the department’s staffing levels improve.
One topic that has haunted L.A. County sheriffs for the decades is the stream of allegations about tattooed internal gangs running amok at certain stations. Some sheriffs have denied their existence, but Martinez acknowledged that exclusionary groups exist in the department. He said he does not have tattoos.
“Every institution the size of our agency has cliques,” he said. “I belong to the Marine Corps. There’s cliques there. I guarantee if I go to IBM there there’s cliques there.”
He said the problem stemmed from a lack of leadership and that by providing strong leadership and vision he would eliminate the need for deputies to joint the controversial groups.
Challenging an elected sheriff can be a difficult task. According to Jessica Pishko, author of “The Highest Law in the Land,” incumbents win reelection roughly 90% of the time.
In Los Angeles County, only two sheriffs have been voted out of office in the last century: In 2018, Villanueva ousted Jim McDonnell, who is now the Los Angeles police chief. In 2022, Luna — a former Long Beach police chief — came out of retirement to best Villanueva. During the campaign, Luna positioned himself as the calm antidote to what he described as the “dysfunction and chaos” of his opponent.
Since taking office, he’s faced many of the problems that bedeviled prior sheriffs: poor jail conditions, sprawling consent decrees, allegations about deputy gangs and persistent staffing woes. But he’s also made good on promises to provide more even-keeled leadership and repair fractured relationships with other county leaders.
Last year, amid speculation to the contrary, he told The Times that 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 his record of keeping communities safe and bringing stability to the department.
“Since becoming Sheriff, violent crime has fallen every year in the areas patrolled by LASD, and 2024 saw the fewest number of homicides in the past five years,” he said. “In addition, uses of force have decreased, and our reforms, including our Office of Constitutional Policing and policy banning law enforcement gangs, have increased public trust in the Department.”
