Just five days after Jeff Weaver, the former Sebastopol Chief of Police, became the Interim Director of Public Safety in Rohnert Park, a gruesome death took place in the “Friendly City,” as Rohnert Park calls itself.
On Aug. 30, a SMART train struck and killed a man on the tracks in Rohnert Park, a short distance from Weaver’s office. “Was it a suicide?” he asked a fellow officer, “or was it an accident?” The initial investigation suggests that it was not a suicide.
Rohnert Park poses problems for law enforcement that Sebastopol didn’t pose; the SMART train and the train station are only two of them.
It has a population of 43,000; Sebastopol has about 7,800. Rohnert Park is a college town, and it’s also a bedroom community and home to commuters who don’t appreciate loud student parties at night. There’s a history of “town/gown conflicts.”
In Rohnert Park, there are more streets to patrol and more neighborhoods to walk, and there’s easy access to the 101; more ways for criminals to make getaways, or try to make getaways.
Police and fire services are under the same roof in Rohnert Park. Weaver is both the police chief and the fire chief, and with a much larger staff than he had in Sebastopol.
He’s the interim director until January or February 2019. That’s when Rohnert Park will have a new person at the head of fire and police. But an investigation into alleged malfeasance in the police department might not be concluded by the time he leaves office.
Given that investigation, this journalist didn’t ask Chief Weaver questions about alleged misconduct by police officers who have strayed beyond their territory and have seized, from alleged drug dealers, millions of dollars in cash on the 101 near Cloverdale. Earlier this year, one officer resigned.
Weaver does not buy the argument that the problems in Rohnert Park are “systematic.” Weaver was the chief in Sebastopol for 14 years, well liked and well respected. In 2016 he was honored as the “Citizen of the Year,” and in that capacity he joined the Apple Blossom Parade.
Building good community relations is Weaver’s specialty. At the police academy at Santa Rosa Junior College he teaches a class on community orientated policing.
His fourth day in office in Rohnert Park, he attended a “Coffee with a Cop” event at a nearby McDonalds. Citizens told him they felt safe in Rohnert Park and that their fears that the Graton Resort and Casino would bring an increase in crime did not materialize.
In Sebastopol, Peace in Medicine, the cannabis dispensary, did not bring an increase in felonies or misdemeanors.
“It didn’t even bring more littering,” Weaver explained. That’s what he told police chiefs from all over California who called to ask him about the connections between the dispensary and crime.
Over the past few years, murders have taken place in the world of Sonoma County cannabis, but none in the City of Sebastopol itself.
As for the future of cannabis in California, Weaver believe that it will proceed in the checkerboard fashion that has been adopted so far, with some counties and cities jumping on the marijuana bandwagon and others choosing not to.
“The cannabis issue should be up to each individual community to decide,” he said. He can live with dispensary-free cities like Rohnert Park and dispensary-rich cities like Sebastopol.
“In Rohnert Park we still make arrests for drugs,” Weaver said, “but it’s not our number one priority.”
The city has problems with heroin and Fentanyl. Officers carry Narcan, a pharmaceutical that can block the effects of opioids and save lives in cases of overdose.
Weaver is not an advocate for medicinal and recreational cannabis. He believes now, as he has for a long time, that marijuana is a “gateway drug” that can lead to addiction to hard drugs.
He does not believe that cigarettes and beer, which are often used by teens, can take them to cocaine and heroin, though he adds that smoking cigarettes might lead to an addiction to tobacco, and that drinking a six-pack at an early age might lead to alcoholism.
Weaver does not smoke and does not drink.
He says he “loves body cameras.”
More than ever, he’s concerned about safety in schools and safety on the streets. Rohnert Park citizens say they want more police protection for students.
What he does not like is the depiction of cops in movies and on TV. “They have the kinds of technology that we don’t have,” he said. “Cops in the media are young, cool, aggressive and constantly pointing their guns at people. That’s not us and that’s not real.”
He added, “I like the community of police. I like being surrounded by smart, caring, ethical cops. They’re why I came out of retirement and delayed plans to travel widely.”
Jonah Raskin, a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, is the author of Marijuana: Dispatches from an American War, published in French as well as English, and shares story credit for the feature length pot film Homegrown.
