Tiburon chief makes strides on community policing vow
Updated: Jan 22, 2023
But on pledge to be aligned with most progressive reforms, Monaghan shows resistance
As Tiburon police officers played cornhole with kids and mingled with families during National Night Out on Aug. 2, Chief Ryan Monaghan stressed that the community-building between police and civilians at the core of the event was a key to creating an environment in which all residents can thrive.
Hired 16 months ago amid national calls for police reform and a local series of incidents that highlighted, and for many widened, cracks in that relationship, Monaghan has made frequent calls to renew the department’s commitment to community policing. His officers now walk the beat downtown to get to know residents and business owners. They’re working on an app that makes it easy to access local business information. They hand out business cards to allow for anonymous feedback through a third-party website. They’ve established department liaisons in three regions of town. They’re starting neighborhood watch programs. They’re updating an internal registry to help officers better respond to callers with special needs. They’ve stepped up direct communication through social-media platforms.
Tonight, Tiburon will also introduce its newest officer, a high-school basketball coach turned cop who has a history in social work, including as a student counselor and working with children with autism and the homeless.
Other goals, including establishing a citizens advisory panel and an officer-wellness program, are also on the department’s radar.
In large part, the practices align with the six pillars outlined in 2015 by President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and frequently cited by Monaghan: building trust and legitimacy; policy and oversight; technology and social media; community policing and crime reduction; officer training and education; and officer safety and wellness. But how those pillars are implemented leaves broad room for interpretation, particularly when framed against more recent justice-reform movements.
Resident reactions to Monaghan’s changes have landed across the spectrum, from the initiatives being unnecessarily burdensome on officers just trying to do their jobs, to being positive steps forward for a community seeking to heal, to not going nearly far enough to translate to the street, where some 80 percent of all Tiburon police encounters are traffic stops — and nearly half of all those stopped for any reason are people of color in a community that’s 80-percent white.
Though Monaghan pledged when he took over as chief to ensure the department’s practices were in line with the most progressive of their kind, many communities in the Bay Area and around the nation have gone significantly further in instituting reform, experimenting with full police-oversight models and redirecting some funding to other resources known to address crime at its root causes, or to the hiring of unarmed licensed therapists for certain calls. Monaghan has rejected both a true oversight committee as potentially “adversarial” and the hiring of dedicated therapists, while he instead sought and won approval to expand the force amid historically low crime.
Other progressive street-level programs implemented regionally and nationwide — Berkeley, Los Angeles, Seattle, the states of Oregon and Virginia — include dramatically curtailing pretextual stops, or those for legitimate yet trivial infractions that don’t pose immediate public-safety threats but that are used discretionarily by officers to investigate hunches, disproportionately involving people of color. In Tiburon, for instance, all six window-tint stops in the first quarter of the year were of Hispanic drivers; a recent point-of-time count of vehicles with illegally tinted front windows at The Ark’s Boardwalk Shopping Center parking lot yielded the same number during a single lunch hour.
Still other communities are seeking the reduction of civil-asset forfeitures, in which property can be seized for an alleged connection to a crime but without enough suspicion for police to make an arrest. That happened in March, when Tiburon police seized a vehicle associated with a San Jose burglary but released all its occupants, who couldn’t be tied to that or any other active investigation. Each year since 2014, police nationally have seized more net assets than burglars have, according to FBI statistics and the Institute for Justice.
Most of the initiatives that are being considered and implemented in Tiburon were born from summer 2020, when the national Black Lives Matter movement homed in on issues of race and policing, use of force and calls for reform after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of then-current and former police.
The seeds of reform
When protests made their way to Marin, the previous Tiburon chief warned in June 2020 that a demonstration planned in predominantly Black Marin City could turn violent but didn’t issue such warnings for closer protests in predominantly white neighborhoods. In the weeks following, protesters made their way to Tiburon’s streets, while vandals in response scrawled “all lives matter” and “white lives matter more” on public property in separate incidents downtown.
As public debate was increasingly revealing division among residents, Tiburon police in August 2020 stopped the Black owners of downtown clothing boutique Yema inside their store after hours, demanding identification and proof they belonged there, which drew additional allegations of profiling.
That incident led to an outside investigation, the results of which are sealed, and a four-hour community forum drawing 450 listeners and some 140 commenters, most of them critical of the police response and many sharing their own encounters, calling race issues systemic in the department. The forum then led to the creation of the Diversity Inclusion Task Force to examine town policies and to extra officer training sessions on transformative justice and unconscious bias. But amid these moves toward reform, a resident complained about an officer wearing a face-covering with a Blue Lives Matter flag, symbol that features a blue stripe across an otherwise black-and-white U.S. flag that had been banned by other departments as divisive after being co-opted by white supremacists and used as a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality.
Then, just as Monaghan came on the job in April 2021, a sergeant — at the time the president of the police union — was charged with domestic abuse and soon resigned; a mistrial was declared after a hung jury, and prosecutors dropped the case.
Monaghan immediately said he wanted to recalibrate the department’s relationship with the community. He brought his staff on “walkabouts” to introduce them to the business owners and residents around town and announced plans to create the area-ofcommand model with regionally dedicated sergeants as community points of contact. He also pledged to continue developing the business app and transparency of demographic stop data of civilian encounters with police, both started under interim Chief Jamie Scardina, who is now the Marin sheriff.