Sonoma County law enforcement chaplains want to spread unique approach

With the word “chaplain” emblazoned on their shirts, volunteers appear at fatal car crashes and devastating house fires and stand alongside those in grief. They sit beside officers and deputies in patrol cars. They knock on doors prepared to deliver the worst news.

Law enforcement chaplains have traditionally been priests and pastors. But in Sonoma County, volunteers with the local Law Enforcement Chaplaincy Service collectively hold various beliefs and speak multiple languages. Local organizers this month launched an effort to spread the unique interfaith “Sonoma Model” nationwide.

Warren Hays, the chaplaincy service’s executive director, said they’ve learned since the program began in 1998 that religious faith isn’t the most important skill for a chaplain: It’s the ability to listen. While some chaplains, including Hays, are ordained ministers, many are not.

“We’re looking for chaplains as diverse as the culture and the officers we work with,” Hays said. “We help chaplains be quiet. It’s one of the most difficult things to do.”

Try listening to someone speak for five minutes without offering commentary or suggestions.

“If you walk in open-minded, it’s amazing what comes up just through silence,” Hays said. “Silence will open up the conversation.”

Sonoma County’s nonprofit chaplaincy program runs a dispatch service with operators answering the phones 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They only respond to calls from law enforcement officers. Their primary goal is to serve officers and deputies, which can be through counseling people working in law enforcement or by providing support for individuals and families involved in an investigation or death.

“The truth is, when you’re managing a hot event with a crime scene, trying to contain and protect evidence, trying to protect a perpetrator, and then the family shows up . . . You want to be compassionate and you also have a job to do,” said Dave Edmonds, a retired Sonoma County sheriff’s captain and board member of the local chaplaincy service. “The chaplains have changed the game for us.”

Edmonds, who is not a chaplain, is leading the effort to raise money to start a Law Enforcement Chaplaincy Foundation, which will support the local program and promote what they’re calling the “Sonoma Model.” They have so far raised about $3,000, with much bigger aspirations.

The effort has the support of Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane.

“What’s unique about this model is that it is non-sectarian, interfaith,” said Zane, who ran Sonoma County’s now-shuttered Hospital Chaplaincy Services and said she helped draft a proposal for the law enforcement chaplain program in the late 1990s. “We’d like to see it duplicated across the country.”

Most chaplain programs are staffed by ordained ministers. Many programs have evangelical goals.

The International Conference of Police Chaplains, an organization based in the Florida panhandle, states on its website that members must be an “ecclesiastically certified person” with five years’ experience in ministry.

The International Fellowship of Chaplains, based near Tampa, publishes a nine-point doctrinal statement on its website that starts with its members accepting “the whole Bible as the Word of God.” The Michigan-based American Police Chaplains Association’s tagline is “Linking cops with Christ.”

About 35 percent of Sonoma County residents are affiliated with a religious congregation, compared to about half of all Americans, according to a national Religious Congregations and Membership study done in 2010. The top four local religious congregations in Sonoma County are, in order, Catholic, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, evangelical protestant and Buddhist, according to the survey.

Sonoma County chaplains must complete a five-month program at the Santa Rosa Junior College police academy in Windsor. They tour the coroner’s office and learn about law enforcement practices and culture.

They participate in role-playing scenarios based on actual incidents and receive detailed feedback, said BreeAnn Crespan, a deputy senior chaplain who built the training curriculum.

Crespan said she is developing a three-day seminar that Sonoma County can offer to other communities on how to start a local program.

“We want to go wherever we’ve been requested and hand them a binder outlining exactly how to start a chaplaincy program, from gaining nonprofit status to establishing a board of directors to training volunteers,” Crespan said.

The local chaplaincy service budget is about $105,000 per year, which the nonprofit funds through donations. Currently, 55 volunteer chaplains are on call two days a month for 24-hour periods.

The group has just begun its effort to raise money to launch the foundation, which Edmonds estimated would require about $100,000 a year. The foundation will support the local chaplaincy program and provide its training model to other communities, he said.

More information about the Sonoma County-based Law Enforcement Chaplaincy Foundation is online at http://lecf.org. The group’s fundraising site can be found at http://bit.ly/1mJkUmG.

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 521-5220 or julie.johnson@press democrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.