Sonoma County Sheriff’s Union Demands Probe of Civilian Watchdog

Sonoma County’s civilian watchdog came under fire on Tuesday, when attorneys for local sheriff deputies demanded an investigation into alleged misconduct by the Independent Office of Law Enforcement Review and Outreach.

In a letter to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, Jonathan Murphy, an attorney for the Deputy Sheriff’s Association, accused IOLERO’s executive director, John Alden, and auditor Emma Dill of threatening and intimidating officers during an investigation into the 2022 fatal shooting of a farmworker, David Peláez-Chavez, near Healdsburg.

The letter was sent one day after IOLERO held a public forum to discuss findings in its Sept. 2 report, which concluded Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Michael Dietrick may have violated department use of force policies when he shot and killed Peláez-Chavez, and that it was “unclear” whether Sergeant Thomas Berg adequately supervised the incident.

During the virtual town hall, Alden repeatedly faulted Sonoma County Sheriff Eddie Engram’s refusal to order his staff to answer questions as the reason IOLERO’s review of the shooting remains incomplete.

“This was the most significant impediment we had to gathering the evidence we wanted to gather in this case,” Alden said. “In our written report, we go through many of the questions we would’ve liked to have asked but couldn’t.”

The investigation of the 2022 shooting was the first time IOLERO attempted to exercise expanded powers to directly interview officers involved in incidents under investigation, Alden said.

Dietrick left the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office before IOLERO’s investigation. But Deputy Anthony Powers, who deployed a taser, and the supervising Berg both refused to answer IOLERO’s questions. In response to subpoenas, the deputies showed up to the interview but invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves.

That is their right as public employees, Alden said at the public forum, but also a reason why Engram should have issued what’s known as a Lybarger warning — a notice issued to public employees during administrative investigations with a promise that anything they say will not be used against them in any criminal proceeding.

“ We had asked the sheriff to issue that order in this case to the deputies that came to us when we were trying to interview them, and he declined,” Alden said Monday. “We haven’t received a reason back that we found credible.”

The sheriff’s only publicly available response was in a lengthy Facebook post on the department’s website, which stated, “Deputies are employees of the Sheriff’s Office, not IOLERO. The Sheriff, as their employer, can only legally compel testimony for Sheriff’s Office administrative investigations.”

Engram reiterated that the Sonoma County District Attorney Carla Rodriguez “concluded the deputies’ actions were reasonable and lawful. By contrast, IOLERO acknowledged it lacked key evidence and instead issued a report riddled with speculative commentary.”

In his letter to county supervisors, Murphy alleged Dill threatened and harassed those officers by insisting they show up in person, fully knowing they had refused to talk. Murphy also accused IOLERO of publicly shaming staff by posting audio recordings on the watchdog’s website under the caption: “Hear our interviews with the involved Sheriff’s Deputies, and how they would not answer our questions.”

Murphy called IOLERO’s approach “harassment and humiliation masquerading as oversight.”

During the town hall, Dill said IOLERO’s fundamental mandate is to investigate law enforcement incidents fairly.

“Our intention is to approach them from a place of neutrality,” Dill said, “to look at everything that we can get our hands on in terms of evidence, whether it’s interviews, video documents, whatever we have that might be relevant to it and try to start from zero — looking at [the] sheriff’s office policies and looking at the facts and do our best to figure out what happened.”

Dill said not being able to ask questions of the involved personnel deprived them of some of the key facts about the fatal shooting.

Last year, Murphy filed a harassment claim against IOLERO, which he claims they ignored, and filed a formal complaint with county human resources. In a written response shared with supervisors, county counsel stated that HR had hired an independent investigator.

“To our knowledge, no actions have been taken and no meaningful changes have occurred at IOLERO,” Murphy wrote.

Late Tuesday, the DSA retracted an earlier press release about its complaint to Sonoma County, stating, “A previous version of the attachment contains court-ordered sealed materials. The attorneys made an error in providing it and ask that you destroy the earlier attachment and use this redacted version.”

The documents released in error relate to IOLERO’s investigation of a whistleblower complaint.