SRJC police force in flux
Santa Rosa Junior College is searching for its third police chief in five years, following the abrupt departure of a former Sonoma County sheriff’s captain and a series of controversies that have dogged the department.
The force that serves the 27,000-student college has struggled to find its footing since its longtime founding police chief retired five years ago. Two chiefs have resigned, criticizing college management on the way out; an officer was sent to prison for embezzling parking fees; a video of drunk cadets surfaced; and a dispute involving dispatchers and others in the department played out in public.
A college official said the incidents involved bad individual decisions and do not represent the integrity of the entire department. The outgoing chief said the incidents highlighted the growing pains of a department that had embraced an informal culture more akin to other school departments than the paramilitary structure typical of a police force.
“The district would like to move on to the things we do right; let’s celebrate our accomplishments,” said Doug Roberts, vice president of business services. “Everything that has ever been mentioned about the police department has been investigated thoroughly and ad nauseam.”
Former Police Chief Matt McCaffrey said he left on good terms in March after two and a half years with the school, but “there were things that didn’t change as time changed” in the department, including what McCaffrey described as meddling by college management that prevented department supervisors from having needed authority to oversee operations. He said the people most resistant to change have since left the department.
“The department is in better shape than it’s ever been. The quality of the staff I’d hold up to any other department,” McCaffrey said. “I had concerns about how the department is overseen by management in the college, and I shared concerns from the time I got there to the time I left.”
The school is now exploring the possibility of contracting with an outside police agency, such as the City of Santa Rosa, to oversee its police department. It brought in veteran Bay Area police chief Joe Palla, a current councilman in Cloverdale, to study the department’s procedures and make a recommendation on whether to hire a new chief or contract that job out, Roberts said.
The interim chief is Robert T. Brownlee, a sergeant with?10 years at the department.
SRJC’s police district oversees a campus with about the same population as Windsor but with a student body mostly under age 30. In 2014, police received an average of 24 calls for service a day. Typical calls involved a locked door, missing bike, stolen computer or noncriminal student conduct matters.
That year, officers made?103 felony arrests and 276 misdemeanor arrests; they issued ?169 citations. Theft and vandalism are some of the most common crimes.
The department has eight officers, two sergeants and six positions each for dispatchers and community service officers, some of which are still being filled. There are also 20 cadets who are part of a paid police internship program, Roberts and Brownlee said.
Over the past five years, seven people have retired and 15 people have resigned, including two people who were transferred to other departments within SRJC and one officer who took a job with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. Roberts said some degree of turnover is common because the department is often where new officers launch their careers.
The annual budget is $3 million, the bulk of which comes from the school’s parking fund that is $2.4 million.
The police department had, over the years, developed a culture that lacked a strong chain-of-command hierarchy and had a loose adherence to policies, McCaffrey said. Interviews with Roberts as well as current and former police personnel supported that general view, although they also defended current department staff.
But it was that lax atmosphere that enabled the department’s longest-serving officer, Jeffrey Holzworth, to get away with squirreling away stacks of bills and coins from the school’s parking meter system for at least seven years, McCaffrey said. The theft was brought to McCaffrey’s attention less than a month after he took the chief job.
Holzworth, 53, had helped start the department as a newly minted cadet in 1984 and had worked as an SRJC police officer for 28 years when he was arrested at the end of his final shift in November 2012. Investigators were able to prove he siphoned nearly $300,000 in coins and bills over seven years, although police officials in court indicated the true loss may never be known.
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