As Santa Monica homeowners for the last quarter century, my family and I have watched as our beautiful, funky beach community has become increasingly out of reach for working families, immigrants, students and young professionals like we were when we first moved here. Private equity, a federal government bent on punishing poor people and terrorizing immigrants, and the threat of unregulated big tech surveillance are all contributing to what tech writer Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”: the process by which something that begins as beneficial to the public becomes little more than a profit center for investors.
That brings me to this year’s competitive election for three Santa Monica City Council seats. Candidate Doug Trussler is running in significant part on his business experience. Good—we need all kinds of professional and life experience in politics. But voters should also examine what that experience involved. Trussler co-founded private-equity firm Bison Capital and has served on the boards of numerous companies, including FinFit and Sentinel Offender Services. (SMDP)
At FinFit, where Bison invested millions, a 2025 South Carolina filing listed rates of 36% on unsecured loans and as high as 102% on certain open-end loans. FinFit calls itself an alternative to payday lending, but whatever the label, triple-digit interest is extraordinarily expensive credit—offered to workers borrowing when they are financially vulnerable.
More troubling to me is Sentinel Offender Services.
Bison invested in Sentinel in 2012, eventually taking control and owning more than 90% of the company, according to Trussler’s own recent account. Trussler says Bison initially lent Sentinel money to finance an acquisition, later took control in 2018 and ran the business for eight years before selling it in 2026.
That acquisition included G4S Justice Services, which had worked with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on electronic monitoring and case-management services. Sentinel itself operated in the controversial business of for-profit probation and electronic monitoring, including arrangements in which people under court supervision paid fees associated with their own monitoring.
Human Rights Watch documented the human consequences of that model. Among its examples was a homeless man convicted of stealing a $2 beer who sold blood plasma twice a week trying to pay Sentinel’s fees, accumulated more than $1,000 in debt and ultimately returned to jail.
Trussler offers an important defense. He says Bison inherited many of Sentinel’s problems, eventually eliminated most participant-paid monitoring, settled litigation and strengthened compliance. He says he is proud that Sentinel’s monitoring allowed hundreds of thousands of low-level offenders to avoid incarceration.
Electronic monitoring may indeed be preferable to incarceration. But that doesn’t resolve the question that troubles me: Why should keeping poor people out of jail be a profit center in the first place?
And the concerns didn’t simply disappear when Bison took control. In 2019, civil-rights, labor and criminal-justice organizations raised concerns directly with Trussler about the industry’s impact on low-income and minority communities. In 2024, 19 members of Congress—including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—sought answers from Trussler and others about fees and alleged abusive practices in electronic monitoring.
Trussler presents his experience turning around troubled businesses as an important qualification for City Council. His campaign says he has spent his career “turning around complex organizations, managing costs, holding systems accountable, and driving measurable results.”
Voters can decide how much weight to give that argument. But they should know the other side of the record as well.
These weren’t abstract investments. They involved workers taking out extraordinarily expensive loans and people caught in the criminal-justice system paying private companies as an alternative to incarceration.
We talk a lot in Santa Monica about standing with working people and protecting Black, Brown and immigrant communities. Trussler has made his business experience central to his case for City Council. That makes the businesses he chose to invest in—and who bore their costs—fair subjects for voters to examine.
There is such a thing as too high a cost for a community to bear just so investors can turn a profit and call it good business.
Sincerely,
Susan Sheu
Los Angeles County Democratic Party Recording Secretary