Sonoma Valley police adds community resource officer

The Sonoma Police Department has hired a community resource officer, largely to help address situations that arise on and near Sonoma Valley Unified School District campuses.

Ed Esponda is serving in the position. He was an officer in the Petaluma Police Department for 24 years before joining the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. A few months later, he was assigned to the Sonoma Police Department, which he has served for four years.

“Deputy Esponda has seven years of prior experience working as a law enforcement officer at Petaluma City Schools,” said Chief Brandon Cutting of the Sonoma Police Department, who announced Esponda’s appointment at the school district’s board of trustees meeting on Thursday, Jan. 11. “It is that experience and his enjoyment of working with youth that benefit Sonoma.”

Troy Knox, president of the Sonoma Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees, added, “We welcome the addition of the new community resource officer, who will be able to respond swiftly to school sites when deemed necessary. The governing board is fortunate to have a strong, collaborative relationship with our police department.”

Cutting said that previously, school-related incidents requiring law enforcement response were handled by patrol deputies within the department’s “minimum staffing.”

“Those deputies needed to complete a call and get to the next priority call as soon as reasonable,” Cutting said. “Now, the CRO can spend the needed time on each situation so we can assure a more consistent and appropriate law enforcement response as the students and staff deserve.”

This, in turn, will free traffic safety deputies to divert their attention from the school and give attention to other issues of concern to the community, such as speeding vehicles and drivers not obeying traffic laws at intersections, he said.

“The Sonoma Police Department has been working hard to improve these things, and we can do a better job now that we have the ability to focus our traffic safety deputies on them,” Cutting said. “Having the ability to free our traffic safety experts from school safety issues allows us to give both concerns the attention they deserve.”

The community resource officer will respond primarily to calls for service at Sonoma Valley and Creekside high schools as well as Adele Harrison and Altimira middle schools. Cutting said that patrol officers will handle emergent and urgent calls for service on elementary school campuses, where incidents are very different from those on high school and middle school campuses.

The Sonoma Police Department will supervise the community resource officer, who will work out of the station at 175 First St. W. The city of Sonoma will pay 75% of the position’s salary, and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office will pay 25% of it.

Cutting said that the community resource officer will not be involved with school discipline and will have a different role than school resource officers, which the police department provided previously for Sonoma Valley Unified School District.

The school resource officers generated controversy in the community, with some students and parents claiming they created an overly intense law enforcement environment on campuses and profiled specific ethnic groups. Others felt they helped to create safer campus environments for students and staff members.

“We completely understand that there are members of the community that have concerns with law enforcement in regard to bias-based policing,” Cutting said. “We do not ignore this, nor do we discount the concerns.”

He said that law enforcement officers aim to ensure that people in the Sonoma Valley community do not need to fear them.

“It is easy for me to say how amazing the deputies of the Sonoma Police Department and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office are, but it is truly through exposure to those deputies that each person in the Sonoma area finds the truth in those words,” Cutting said. “We know we won’t make everyone happy with every call, but we hope that everyone finds we were fair, reasonable, compassionate and honest at the end of an interaction with Sonoma law enforcement.”

He said that over time, having Esponda available to schools and nearby residents will help to ensure safe environments and build trust.

“We at the Sonoma Police Department feel that the schools of the Sonoma Valley School District are safe, but as we are dealing with youth growing up, situations will occur that law enforcement will have to become engaged with,” Cutting said. “Having a deputy assigned to respond and address those situations will provide a better outcome for students who get caught up in them.”

Reach the reporter, Dan Johnson, at daniel.johnson@sonomanews.com.