Sonoma County park rangers will no longer be designated peace officers after a change approved by the county board of supervisors this past week that will reclassify them as public officers starting in August.
Primary law enforcement duties in parks will be performed by a new team from the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff’s deputies and local police already make arrests in the county’s parks, according to Regional Parks Department Director Bert Whitaker, who said there have been zero arrests made by park rangers within the last decade that involved a cuffing, detention, and jail booking.
The biggest changes will be the loss of rangers’ batons, pepper spray and handcuffs, along with a loss of arrest powers, and potentially losing lights and sirens atop emergency vehicles.
Whitaker said before the ordinance’s first passage in May that the change was motivated by the desire to more closely align the policies governing the rangers with their mission, which he said was broader than primarily being law enforcement.
The 4-0 vote, with Supervisor James Gore absent, came despite impassioned pushback from rangers who called the move a “slap in the face.” More than two dozen people spoke against the change at the board of supervisors’ July 16 regular meeting, most of them active rangers and some who said they had left recently because of dissatisfaction with the direction the department was moving.
The new parks unit at the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office will be made up of four deputies and a sergeant that will be assigned to cover the county’s 60 parks overseen by Sonoma County Regional Parks. They will only operate from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. Some of the funding for the positions will come from savings from vacant park ranger positions that have not been filled.
Along with county rangers who spoke out against the move, labor leaders with the Service Employees International Union and some law enforcement officials said the changes would make rangers and parkgoers less safe.
‘Changing over 40 years of precedent’
Damien Evans, president of the Sonoma County Law Enforcement Association, known as the SCLEA, told supervisors that the union opposed the change. He said the union supported augmenting the rangers with the additional sheriff’s deputies but not stripping them of their peace officer status.
“If the board approves this ordinance, we’ll be changing over 40 years of precedent, which we believe will make the park rangers working conditions and the public less safe in our system,” Evans said.
Evans and others urged the board to either vote down the ordinance making the change or remove it from the consent calendar.
Kat Pringle, a county regional park ranger, said removing the requirement to complete a specialized law enforcement training academy would significantly reduce the level of training new rangers receive.
“It is a slap in the face to the diverse and dedicated group of men and women who serve as Sonoma County regional park rangers to tell them now that all the hard work and sacrifice it took to get us where we are today was unnecessary, and worse, that anyone can do what we do,” Pringle said.
The law enforcement academy requirement was removed from the position to allow a broader range of applicants. The new training regimen will include 350 hours during the first year of service, according to Whitaker.
Other commenters cautioned that the change would lead to slower response times, while others argued against an increased presence by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office in parks because of its past cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
‘Two competing views of reality’
But supervisors disagreed with the assessments made by rangers, arguing that their ability to write citations for county code violations would be preserved and that relaying more serious calls to the sheriff’s office was already standard practice.
Supervisor Lynda Hopkins said she was presented with “two competing views of reality.” She said she considered the change primarily a name change and said that the most significant enforcement power being removed from rangers was their ability to investigate reports of crimes that they did not witness, like following up on a report made by a park-goer and making an arrest for probable cause. Hopkins said those law enforcement duties were best left to the sheriff’s office.
The memorandum of understanding with the Sheriff’s Office can be modified with the consent of the Regional Parks Department and the Sheriff’s Office, which satisfied some of Hopkins lingering questions.
Other matters, like whether rangers would be permitted to have sirens and light bars atop their vehicles for emergency medical responses and other reasons, remained up in the air despite the final approval.
“We’re working through that in real time,” said Whitaker.
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