Former Cloverdale police chief Stephen Cramer dies after battle with cancer

Stephen Cramer was not the typical cop, his colleagues, family and friends say.

Cramer, the former chief of police in Cloverdale, died Sunday at 57, following an eight-year battle with throat cancer. He spent more than 20 years in law enforcement, first as a police officer in Sonoma, before moving to Cloverdale in 2005 and rising to chief in September 2015, the post he held until December 2018.

Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick remembers Cramer's impressive public acts, from arranging special opening-night screenings of several Star Wars movies for Cloverdale city employees and their friends and families, to consistently showing up in uniform at the seasonal Friday night farmer's market to shake hands and let the community know he was there for them.

Cramer's wife Tami remembers the quieter, more intimate things. As a sergeant in the Cloverdale police department, Cramer made friends with a local homeless man and twice a week would take him a large Subway sandwich with chips and water. He wasn't one to boast of his own acts of kindness, and he never told Tami about the homeless man. She just saw him buy the sandwich when she went on a ride-along one night with her husband.

She also remembers her husband as a man dedicated to his family, with seven children and nine grandkids, helping them with homework and coaching the kids' sports teams. His passion for helping young people extended well beyond his own family, she said. As a football coach at Sonoma Valley High School, Cramer had a deep concern for the well-being of the kids under his watch.

When several young men he had coached found themselves facing expulsion, Cramer showed up at their expulsion hearing and vowed to take personal responsibility for the teenagers. Afterwards, he insisted the boys come to practices to help him coach, to keep them occupied and out of trouble. A large number of young people he had coached came to visit him at the hospital in his final days. Cramer had changed some of their lives in ways even Tami didn't previously know.

Cloverdale Mayor Melanie Bagby saw how Cramer's generosity led him to take on issues that affected the entire community. When Trump won the election, she said, Cramer became the first Sonoma County police chief to publicly make clear he would continue community policing and not allow his force to be drawn into immigration enforcement. Before that, when Cloverdale's city counsel put forward a utility tax measure that would help the city battle recession, Cramer devoted his personal time to ensuring the measure passed. It allowed the city to hire an additional police officer and support local businesses, among other things. Nobody expected Cramer to take responsibility for helping the measure pass, Bagby said. He wasn't even chief of police at the time.

Teresa Hegarty, a community service officer with the Cloverdale police, said Cramer balanced an intense focus while on the job with a lighthearted fondness for joking around. He was the kind of guy who would pay for your coffee without telling you, so when you went to pick it up the barista would tell you it was already taken care of, Hegarty said.

Jeff Weaver, former police chief in Sebastopol, first met Cramer decades before he became Clovedale police chief, when he was a Sonoma police officer. Weaver remembers him as a polymath. Cramer held a law degree from Empire Law School, two separate master's degrees from Saint Mary's and University of San Francisco and an undergraduate degree from USF, three of which he earned while battling cancer.

His kindness extended into his professional life, leading him to form collaborative bonds between Cloverdale and nearly every police agency in the county, bonds that hadn't existed before Cramer took over the chief's job, Weaver said.

After a medical leave in which an operation left Cramer in need of an electronic voice box to speak, Tami remembers that his return to work and ability to still communicate with his officers was one of his proudest moments.

Weaver remembers the first time he saw Cramer after he started speaking with the voice box. He walked up to Weaver and picked right up where he left off, upbeat and positive and excited to be on the job. He had a huge smile on his face.

A funeral service for Cramer will be held at the Luther Burbank Center at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 15, followed by a reception at Father Roberts Hall in Sonoma.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Beale at 707-521-5205 or andrew.beale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @iambeale.