PUBLISHED 5/21/08 ----

The theft of 20 guns from the Kern County Sheriff’s Department property room by a part-time employee demands a hard look at the Sheriff’s policies, procedures and available technology related to security.

Sheriff Donny Youngblood is justifiably furious and mortified that an “extra help” employee, 18-year-old Edgard Luis Nava, has been taken into custody in the wake of revelations that 20 handguns have disappeared from storage over the past six weeks.

The Sheriff’s Department learned of the apparent breach only after the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arrested a Kern County man May 14 for possession of a concealed weapon — a handgun that was traced back to the Kern County Sheriff’s Department as having been previously confiscated. Talk about embarrassing.

What’s an 18-year-old man, hired off the street, doing with ongoing access to seized guns?

Should “temps” has access to drugs and firearms? Sworn officers have better things to do than serve as filing clerks for confiscated contraband, but hiring standards ought to be toughened to require proven work histories.

This isn’t the first such breach of the property room. A kilo of cocaine, worth between $15,000 and $22,000, went missing in 2001 and was never found.

The Sheriff’s Department should consider wider use of cameras, metal detectors, access restrictions in certain areas of the property room and random, occasional, end-of-shift wand-scans.

Meanwhile, find the missing guns. Sheriff’s officials have located four. In the grand scheme of things, 16 missing guns is hardly significant — not in a country in which there are millions of black market weapons floating around. (The FBI reports that an average of 274,000 firearms were stolen each year from 1985 to 1994 — and that’s only the thefts that were reported.)

But it’s the principle of the thing — and the liability. A violent crime committed with one of the guns stolen from the Sheriff’s Department puts Kern County taxpayers at risk.

Nava was hired through a program intended to get young people interested in law enforcement careers. That sounds like a worthwhile program, but let’s find other work for them to do.