Who can run for sheriff? New bill seeks to open up field to those without law enforcement experience

A new bill in the state Senate would allow candidates without law enforcement experience to run for sheriff for the first time in more than three decades, a change its sponsor says would increase accountability and accelerate reforms.

SB 271, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, would remove the requirement that candidates have active or previous law enforcement officer certification to run for sheriff.

The bill is intended to boost the responsiveness among the state’s sheriffs, who are rarely challenged in county races because of a lack of eligible candidates from diverse backgrounds, Wiener said.

It was inspired by sheriffs who have ignored public calls for reform within their departments and who continue to cooperate with immigration officials in contempt of California laws that prohibit such activity, as well as those who have failed to enforce public health orders related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Wiener said.

Wiener pointed to Sonoma County’s Sheriff, Mark Essick, who last summer announced his deputies would no longer enforce the public health order, as an example.

Essick, who said frustrations over and a lack of information about the county’s decision to limit businesses and social activity drove him to make the decision, reversed course days later after talks with county leaders led to a commitment on both sides to a more transparent process regarding the health orders.

In November, Sonoma County voters passed a measure to boost the powers and funding of the county’s independent law enforcement watchdog, indicating broad support for greater civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Office locally.

“The ultimate form of accountability for an elected official is to know that someone can come up and run against you, make an issue of your decisions and potentially defeat you in an election,” Wiener said. “If a broad cross section of the community is able to run against you, you might be more mindful.”

A spokesman for Sen. Bill Dodd of Napa on Friday said the senator had not yet taken a position on the proposed legislation. Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, was not available for comment on Friday.

Essick, who was elected to the sheriff’s seat in 2018 in the county’s first contested sheriff’s race in more than a quarter century, said he did not completely oppose the proposed legislation, but he was concerned that the bill imposed no prerequisites on candidates seeking to run for the county’s top law enforcement position.

He said he has leaned on his own 26-year experience within the Sheriff’s Office — in which he’s patrolled several parts of the county and on multiple occasions has come face-to-face with armed suspects and people experiencing mental health issues, sometimes all at the same time― to make important decisions about the agency’s policies, budget and resource allocation during his two years as sheriff.

“It’s not an academic conversation for me,” Essick said of making policy decisions as the county’s sheriff. “It’s something that I have actually done and … we need that experience.”

But Wiener said there were other types of experiences that could bring value to county sheriff’s offices outside of law enforcement.

San Francisco’s longest tenured sheriff, Mike Hennessey, was proof of that, serving 32 years in office after his election in 1980, Wiener said.

He was the last civilian sheriff in the state before the enactment of a 1989 law that required candidates to have active or prior law enforcement officer certification. That law made an exception that allowed Hennessey to continue serving as sheriff.

“It’s about whether we trust the voters to decide who should be the sheriff,” Wiener said.

Essick noted that Hennessey, a prisoner rights attorney prior to his tenure as sheriff, at least had some related expertise given his work as a lawyer.

Hennessey’s role as sheriff was unique because the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office’s does not operate a patrol division, a responsibility that falls on the city’s police department instead, Essick said.

Essick declined to declare whether he intended to make another run for the sheriff’s seat at the end of his four-year term in 2022, saying his focus was on his current term.

In response to comments about his defiance of the public health orders last summer, Essick said his comments eventually did lead to greater access about the data that was driving shelter-in-place decisions.

“I got shut out of meetings and I said what I said,” Essick said. “What I got out of it (was) to be included from that point forward.”

Questions about Essick’s office’s commitment to enforcing the public health order surfaced again recently when a sheriff’s deputy and county code enforcement officials filed conflicting reports about what they saw when they each visited the same service at Spring Hills Church in Fulton.

The church was fined $100 for health order violations over its indoor church service attended by more than 100 people, but the deputy who visited said he saw only an outdoor service attended by about 15 people who all were wearing masks. The discrepancy has prompted an internal affairs investigation into the deputy.

Jerry Threet, the chair of the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights and the county’s former independent law enforcement watchdog, said commissioners on Tuesday voted to back SB 271 as part of the group’s mission to support local and state legislation that advances human rights.

Threet said there’s an appetite for reform within the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, though he didn’t believe those changes were likely to come easily if only candidates with law enforcement backgrounds are allowed to run for sheriff.

A wider field of candidates to choose from would inherently aid in the democratic process, he added.

“What it does is change the conversation to what are the real needs of the Sheriff’s Office and what the Sheriff’s Office can provide to the public,” Threet said. “You have other people who are running for the office that are making that conversation different.”

Karlene Navarro, the current independent law enforcement auditor, did not respond to phone requests for comment Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

D’mitra Smith, a former Human Rights Commission chair, said the proposed legislation would help address a trend seen in Sonoma County and elsewhere in the state, in which sheriff’s incumbents and department-picked candidates face little to no opposition.

Backing from deputy unions, departing sheriff’s and other high-ranking officials within sheriff’s departments around a specific candidate can play a role in that trend by narrowing down the list of candidates that make it before voters well before the election.

“I keep coming up with the word dynasty,” Smith said of the selection process. “It’s a very insular process of who is put forward and it’s time to open that up.”

A handful of other states including Illinois, Arizona, New Mexico and Delaware allow people without law enforcement experience to run for sheriff, said Catie Stewart, who works in Wiener’s office.

Sonoma County Deputy Sheriff’s Association President Mike Vail declined to comment for this story, as did Damian Evans, the president of the Sonoma County Law Enforcement Association, which represents deputies and sergeants who work in the county’s two jails, dispatchers and other Sheriff’s Office employees.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets.