San Leandro Police Sergeant Caught Stealing

(Picture by Sheyda Sabetian.)

SLPD Sergeant Robert Sanchez has been charged with embezzling and misappropriation of public funds. In plain language: Sanchez was stealing through fraud and corruption. Local news reports are available at here and here. However, I’m sure many of you – like me – found out via the city’s Nixle alert system.

What’s interesting is how San Leandro Mayor Pauline Cutter and San Leandro Police Chief Jeff Tudor were able to make such timely and heartfelt statements when it comes to misconduct over money, but not for the murders of Steven Taylor or Anthony Gomez. Indeed, I wonder why immediate action can be taken in the case of this property crime but not for violent crime against innocent citizens? It took months of public pressure, letters, petitions, social media campaigns, and video evidence, as well as a bevy of new laws based on the burgeoning outcry against police brutality just for Jason Fletcher to be charged for killing Steven Taylor. Either the law governing police misconduct is being applied unfairly or the law is itself unfair.

That said, Sanchez is a 19-year veteran. He’s been treasurer for the San Leandro Police Officers’ Association (SLPOA) and was in charge of SLPD’s payroll. He worked as a detective, among other enforcement duties, as well as a training officer and mentor. This history makes Mayor Cutter’s own statements as disjointed as the city’s moral failings. “I was disappointed to hear of these allegations … However, I was pleased to see immediate action was taken by the San Leandro Police Department as soon as the discrepancies were discovered through an internal audit.” What immediate action? Apparently, Sanchez has been doing this for almost a decade and it took an audit this long to figure it out? Do we even have the competency to know whether any others were involved?

To be clear: police officers gaming the overtime system is nothing new. It’s a perfectly legal and shameless tactic that has been going on for generations. The Marshall Project has an entire section devoted to the subject here. Cops will regularly write erroneous tickets and citations, not to mention bogus arrests, in order to get time-and-a-half doing the paperwork at the end of their shift as well as fighting them out later in court. The difference for Sanchez is he got too greedy and started exceeding the threshold for illegal avarice, combined with a sloppy cover-up of his crimes.

But let’s talk about the costs of this scandal. Do you know how much money Sanchez made just in overtime over the last 5 years?

2015: $61,724.
2016: $51,435.
2017: $61,494.
2018: $64,716.
2019: $60,663.

That’s on top of his six figure salary of over $150k, $141k in benefits, plus $29k in “other pay”. But it doesn’t stop there! Then you add on all the cops he trained and supervised. Their salaries. Their overtime. The costs of their training, equipment, testing, and certifications. Then add the cost of every case Sanchez and any other officer he ever worked with getting reopened and reviewed. The people who were guilty that are now set free; the innocent who were forced into the prison industrial complex. Then add the cost of every person he interacted with, every ticket, every call, every arrest, every life he may have harmed while enriching himself.

The true cost of just this single crime is staggering.

So, the next time someone tells you we can’t afford to fix the potholes, help the homeless, treat mental health or substance addiction, invest in affordable housing, bring in jobs with a livable wage, or just pay the teachers and nurses and social workers and street sweepers, you tell them this: we paid almost $2.5 million in police overtime despite stagnant crime rates. And all we got for it is a clearance rate of 8% for property crimes and 29% for violent crimes. Meanwhile, SLPD gets a tank they almost never use, a refurbished shooting range they don’t need, a red-light camera system that doesn’t save lives, tear-gas as if they’re playing military war games, and brand-new fleets of police cruisers that mostly sit looking pretty. We can damn well afford to help people. We’re just choosing not to. (See my previous posts for citations and references.)

Also, notice who isn’t speaking up about this crime: the same SLPOA and their supporters who continue to defend police brutality and misconduct. The same ones scaring the public with lies about crime in the city. The same ones misusing public funds for their campaigns. The same ones paying off politicians to give their outsized voices an even bigger seat at the table. The same ones who’ve stood by in silent complicity with every scandal in the department’s history.

If you haven’t been listening to local activists and organizers before, when people were being hurt and lives were being lost, then maybe you’ll listen to us now when the ones supposed to be protecting and serving us are now robbing us, in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis no less. We literally cannot afford the fundamental and systemic failures within SLPD, not in human lives or dollar signs.

As the saying goes, “a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch,” and ours is tainted to its very core.

Take note and take care.