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.

The embezzlement investigation sent Holzworth to a state prison in Tehachapi and his wife to the Sonoma County Jail for her role as an accessory to the crime, leaving behind their teenage daughter.

Holzworth’s arrest also roiled the department. It changed procedures, bought new machines and pushed through a “stressful time,” Brownlee said.

“I was on duty when Jeff was arrested,” Brownlee said last week during an interview at the station. “On a personal level, he was trusted by this department, he was a friend; it was a betrayal.”

Brownlee said that under McCaffrey, the department has made significant changes, such as boosting officers’ training with firearms and more aggressively patrolling the neighborhood around the school.

“The Holzworth thing, that was terrible,” Roberts said. “That was dealt with and now he’s in jail and now his wife is in jail. It is a sad thing for those individuals. We have replaced the machines, we have better controls.”

McCaffrey said the fact that Holzworth was able to get away with stealing from the school for so long underscored a lack of “accountability and discipline.”

“He was allowed to operate within the police department, he wasn’t expected to follow chain of command, his chief at the time wasn’t given the authority to run the department,” McCaffrey said.

Roberts said the department didn’t have a culture that included regular reviews of its procedures to make sure they should be followed and determine if any updates are needed.

After longtime police chief Terry Stewart retired in 2010 after 34 years, the college brought in a former chief from Yuba Community College, Christopher Wilkinson, to take his place.

Wilkinson resigned after six months. In his resignation email, Wilkinson said he had been hired as a “change agent” but the college “decided to go in a different direction, and there appears to be some incompatibility of management styles.”

The next year, several very drunk SRJC police cadets were caught on video during what’s called a “wet lab” training exercise that reportedly sent one person to the hospital. The exercise involves having individuals consume specific amounts of alcohol while others observe the effects of various levels of intoxication.

Palla, who was interim police chief at SRJC at the time, said the training “was not a sanctioned event. It did go astray, and immediate steps were taken to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Roberts said alcohol is not allowed on campus and police supervisors weren’t properly notified about the training exercise. He declined to say whether any staff were disciplined as a result.

“Let’s just say for all the folks who were involved it was made abundantly clear this was not to happen again,” Roberts said.

The 2012 video didn’t surface and garner public scrutiny until December, when it was published by SRJC’s student newspaper, the Oak Leaf.

Also last year, the school was embroiled in a dispute with two police dispatchers and a community service officer. The trio filed sexual harassment complaints after they inadvertently observed child pornography on a USB thumb drive.

McCaffrey and Roberts said the portable drive contained images related to a 2013 arrest of a man caught on a campus computer viewing the illegal pornographic material. Another staff member had used a personal thumb drive to copy material for the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office.

Former dispatcher Vanessa Spaeth, who was eventually transferred to another department, described during an interview last fall an atmosphere of intimidation and harassment. She did not respond to several messages over the past month asking to speak with her again, and her attorney also did not return calls.

An outside investigator hired at the request of SRJC President Frank Chong to review the thumb drive incident made specific recommendations about evidence handling. The Board of Trustees unanimously dismissed the harassment claims in October, stating that they were filed too late and lacked merit.

However, the incident highlighted the police department’s lax procedures involving evidence. McCaffrey said that was swiftly addressed.

“Was there some mishandling of some evidence? Yes there was, but was it intentional? No,” Roberts said. “I don’t think anyone had intent to cause harm or do anything wrong.”

Spaeth has since filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that alleges she was transferred to another college department as a form of retaliation for filing a sexual harassment complaint. Santa Rosa attorney Gail Flatt said in an interview last fall that Spaeth was one of five police district personnel who had filed complaints.

“Is everyone happy in the department? I think that most are now,” Roberts said. “A lot of folks would truly love to move on, but we seem to keep revisiting the same issues. Hillary Clinton is tired of hearing about Benghazi.”

Roberts said that he believes the search for a chief is in part hampered by the fact that SRJC cannot offer a competitive salary to lure top candidates.

McCaffrey’s last day on the job was March 27, and he was sworn in as a captain with the Novato Police Department the following Monday. He received an annual salary of $133,000 plus $47,000 in benefits at SRJC. In Novato, his annual salary is $169,303 and his benefits total $61,878 yearly, city officials said.

Recently, two officers worked behind a locked door on a search warrant request at the police district’s offices in the Christine Pedroncelli Center at the corner of Elliot Avenue and Armory Drive. Earlier that day, they arrested a man caught taking cellphone photographs of people changing in a men’s locker room.

Last month, district police officers were the first on the scene of a stabbing at a Mendocino Avenue parking lot that involved two suspected gang members who reportedly attacked a student whose opening car door accidentally hit their vehicle.

Brownlee, the interim chief, said the campus police district is a full-fledged 24/7 police department with a professional, capable staff that has over the past several years identified “areas of improvement” and begun addressing them.

“The rank structure is in place. In the past there was difficulty with information flowing up, reaching supervisors,” Brownlee said. “Now we have really clarified those lines.”

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