Pretended to be a cop when he was 19 -now his credibility as a Santa Rosa police officer is being questioned

Santa Rosa Police Officer Tim Gooler pretended to be a police officer before he became one.

That was eight years ago when he was a 19-year-old enrolled in a police Explorer program for teens interested in law enforcement. According to court documents and a police report, Gooler created a fake government ID using the name and badge number of real CHP officers to gain administrator access to a website for aspiring police officers like him. He said he wanted to make the member-only website better.

The officer in charge of the site figured out the ID Gooler emailed him was fake and launched an investigation, the files said. Gooler was charged in 2012 with multiple misdemeanor crimes and pleaded no contest the next year to falsifying a government ID, according to court filings from the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office. Gooler attended college and got his record expunged in 2014. The next year he was hired by the Santa Rosa Police Department and sent to the training academy.

“It was clearly a mistake, and I should not have done that,” said Gooler, 26, who now drives a patrol car on the weekend graveyard shift.

“I owned up to it. It was certainly a learning experience,” he said in an interview this week.

The conviction didn’t bar him from becoming a police officer. But his actions - feigning to be a police officer by creating a fake CHP identification card - qualify as the type of conduct that the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office now says it should have been providing to defense attorneys in the 792 cases identified so far in which Gooler may have been a prosecution witness.

Prosecutors didn’t realize Gooler was the same person they tried as a 19-year-old man, and Santa Rosa Police Department officials didn’t believe they could lawfully provide the District Attorney’s Office with Gooler’s prior record because it occurred before he became a police officer.

So the disclosure of Gooler’s past didn’t happen for the first 3½ years of his law enforcement career, during which the rookie became known within his department for being a proactive officer with a lot of arrests. In 2017, Gooler booked 128 people on suspicion of drunken driving - a total that won him recognition from the Northern California chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Last year, Gooler was the first officer on the scene of an attempted robbery at a Santa Rosa armored truck facility. Gooler was confronted by a gunman - later identified as Milton Gamez-Fierro, a previously deported felon who tried to rob the same facility seven years before. Gooler shot and wounded Gamez-Fierro, who was eventually convicted of attempted robbery and is now serving an 18-year prison term.

Defendants remained in the dark about Gooler’s criminal history, which even expunged should have been disclosed to defense lawyers to comply with U.S. Supreme Court rulings governing potential police credibility issues.

His actions came to light in December, when a prosecutor preparing a subpoena requesting Gooler testify in a methamphetamine case found a document from the CHP’s 2011 investigation into Gooler. He alerted his supervisors.

According to a police report and court filings, Gooler pretended to be a Sacramento-area CHP officer named Tim Green in his correspondence with an actual CHP officer in order to gain administrator privileges to a closed website for police Explorer volunteers. Gooler had also pretended to be a patrolman in posts he wrote on the Explorer website, saying things like “if you know the vehicle code you can stop almost any car lol,” according to a court filing.

When confronted by the CHP officer, Gooler admitted to the lie and told investigators he was disappointed the officer “blew him off when he thought he was an Explorer, so he pretended to be an advisor to gain access,” the court filings state.

In a motion asking a judge to dismiss the 2017 methamphetamine case, Deputy Public Defender Justin Smock referred to other questionable conduct revealed in the CHP investigation, writing that Gooler “revealed he had been kicked out of the Civil Air Patrol in 2009 for integrity issues” when he was about 16 and was “spoken to” as an Explorer with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office because “he was posting law enforcement-related pictures on the internet.”

“Officer Gooler’s criminal history demonstrates that he lacks veracity and is a person who lies to get the result he wants,” Smock said in the motion, which argued that a judge evaluating whether Gooler acted lawfully when gathering evidence in the case had relied on the officer’s credibility without knowledge about his past.

The Public Defender’s Office is asking a judge to consider dismissing the methamphetamine case because the District Attorney’s Office delayed disclosure of Gooler’s conviction. The parties meet next week to schedule a date for the hearing. Santa Rosa Police Chief Hank Schreeder has been subpoenaed to testify.

At stake are the due process rights of the hundreds of people Gooler has arrested. The case also calls into question how many other people have been convicted of crimes in Sonoma County without the knowledge of an officer’s relevant history of convictions and misconduct as required by law.

District Attorney Jill Ravitch said her office is notifying defense attorneys and evaluating how central Gooler’s testimony was to the outcome of the 792 cases - which she acknowledged was a massive undertaking.

Ravitch defended her office’s procedures and said law limits the ways her office can get information about police officers, including on-duty misconduct and off-duty crimes. She said it is incumbent upon law enforcement agencies to voluntarily provide the information to her office.

“I don’t know what I don’t know,” Ravitch said. “And I have made very clear to law enforcement that this is a very important responsibility, and failure on anyone’s part to abide by this responsibility can result in dismissal of a case and a finding of prosecutorial misconduct.”

The situation reveals inconsistencies with how agencies interpret what are called Brady guidelines, named for the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland that first established the prosecution’s mandatory duty to disclose information that could help exonerate a defendant. Subsequent rulings have built on this decision, expanding the obligation of prosecutors to learn about witnesses’ credibility and disclose the information to the defense without being asked.

The Santa Rosa Police Department has since changed its procedures for providing information to prosecutors, Schreeder said. He said police officials weren’t trying to hide information but didn’t believe they could lawfully reveal Gooler’s expunged conviction to the District Attorney’s Office, saying California’s strict privacy protections for police prevent departments from releasing personnel information. The Police Department will review the pre-employment backgrounds of its entire sworn force to ensure nothing else requires disclosure, he said.

“The lesson for us is maintaining a relationship of collaboration with the District Attorney’s Office,” Schreeder said. “We’re adding those layers in our hiring process, we’re adding training. Any time you have a problem, we ask, ‘Where did the process break down?’?”

The discovery of Gooler’s conviction could result in a reopening of old cases, but it’s unclear how many. His past won’t be relevant to every case, and it doesn’t mean his testimony as a police officer wasn’t credible.

The Public Defender’s Office has begun filing motions in Sonoma County Superior Court to dismiss cases against clients arrested by Gooler because of the new disclosure about his past crime.

Public Defender Kathleen Pozzi said her office is reviewing old cases and said her attorneys have already identified a number they’d like to reopen.

“When a law enforcement officer is known by the prosecution to have previously lied, given false information ... it’s important we know that,” Pozzi said. “It relates to their current credibility in a case.”

Schreeder defended Gooler, saying he is an especially proactive police officer who works a very busy assignment - graveyard shifts on weekends.

Gooler said he is a good police officer and plans to have a long career in law enforcement.

“The arrests I make are backed by evidence and my body-worn camera,” Gooler said. “I’m not entirely worried about the court process. What happens will happen.”

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jjpressdem.