Quality of life in the jail has also improved. Guards got radios. Staffers set up for a bookless-library program for incarcerated parents to use with their children. Families will soon be able to visit inmates via video screens, and they can now make appointments in advance to cut down on wait times that sometimes stretch to eight hours, Reyes said.

Manuel Longoria, the second in command at the facility, said “technology, without a doubt” has created the most important changes. The county has spent $14 million dollars on hand-held and worn devices and two new patrol stations. He said response times have been cut from 13 to 10 minutes and hopes for more improvements. Body cameras have also “had a great impact,” Longoria said. “We’ve been able to cut down on complaints on deputies. We have been able to document incidents to provide evidence in court in DWIs.” The response from his team so far has been mixed. “Traffic deputies do like it. Some welcome it,” he said. “Some are a little hesitant because they have not tried them.”

In the midst of this push toward efficiency, the office has faced harsh critics who cite a decline in morale due to mandatory overtime for jail guards. Ahead of the November 1 elections, a deputies’ association has called for a no-confidence vote in the sheriff, citing long workday hours for officers. Pamerleau has said she added 49 new detention officers in 2015, bringing the total to 869, and requested $500,000 from the county to pay for overtime that year. When she came onboard in January 2013, she said, “We were running 15 and 16,000 hours of mandatory OT a month.” By the end of that year, the hours were down to about 7,000 per month. Her opponents, she told one newspaper, “just don’t have the data.”

There have also been public revelations of unlawful conduct among officers in the last two years. One deputy was arrested for credit-card abuse and theft after charging nearly $3,000 to an inmate’s card without consent. Another was arrested for driving while intoxicated. One was charged with sexually assaulting a female inmate. A total of 14 detention officers were arrested in 2015. Twelve were terminated and two have not had a court hearing yet, according to the sheriff’s office.

Despite the setbacks, the office is in the final stages of a complete update to its digital fingerprinting and facial-identification systems. In the past, officers would have recorded an incident in a Word document or a handwritten report. “Nothing went into a relational database from which we could do data analysis,” Pamerleau said. “These incident reports, in triplicate, were piled up on the corner of a desk and had to be taken from the patrol substation on the south side of the county to our central records here.” This caused unreasonable delays: An automobile accident report for an insurance claim would take as much as three weeks to process. If the criminal-investigation division was working on a case, or if patrol deputies saw a suspicious vehicle at the scene of a crime, they had no ability to check existing records while out in the field.