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Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca announced his retirement Tuesday morning.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The news of Baca's decision to step down has stunned people inside and outside the Sheriff's Department. He was locked in a tough reelection battle amid several scandals that beset the department.

Baca, 71, told top officials in county government late Monday that he believes stepping down would help the department recover after several years of tumult and criticism, according to sources familiar with the conversations.

"I will go out on my terms," Baca said in a press conference Tuesday. "The reasons for doing so are so many, most personal and private."

Baca, much like Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was a high-profile sheriff elected to multiple terms but whose office had drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice for misconduct.

His continued popularity earned him the nickname of "Teflon Sheriff" from the L.A. Weekly, "because, after years of allegations of inmate abuse at the hands of his deputies, you keep electing him. Nothing seems to stick."

There are several issues that have plagued Baca's tenure as sheriff: civil rights violations, violence in the jails, and the hiring of officers with problems in their past.

The most recent issue involved a federal corruption probe. From CNN:

Eighteen current and former Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies were indicted as part of an FBI investigation into alleged civil rights abuses and corruption, federal prosecutors said Monday.

The two-year FBI investigated focused on allegations that sheriff's officials had fostered a culture in which deputies were permitted to beat and humiliate inmates and cover up misconduct at the nation's largest county jail.

Earlier in 2013 sheriff's deputies under his command were found in a separate federal probe to have racially profiled blacks and Latinos in the northern part of the county.

In 2011 he was also sued by immigrants rights groups after they claimed the Sheriff's Department used the Secure Communities program, in conjunction with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to target undocumented people who committed minor offenses for deportation.

But Baca, who was born in East L.A. to an undocumented Mexican mother, was also praised for reaching out to the city's Muslims after Sept. 11, 2001.