Corrected: Contra Costa County Sheriff Allows a Deputy to Kill, Again.

Newsletter for March 22, 2022

Contra Costa Sheriff David Livingston

On November 3, 2018, Andrew Hall, at the time a Danville police officer, shot and killed Laudemer Arboleda. (Here, I want to clarify that Danville contracts with the Contra Costa, California, sheriff’s department for policing. So, Hall is actually a sheriff’s deputy.) On that evening, residents of Danville called police alleging that Arboleda was “acting strangely” and knocking on doors. (Arboleda appears to have been intending to look for someone but was in the wrong place.) Arboleda got into his car, and some Danville police stopped him and asked him to get out of the car. Arboleda drove away. Other officers yelled not to shoot.

There was a less-then-ten-minute slow-motion car chase by multiple patrol cars which ended when Hall shot Arboleda nine times through the windshield of the car as he was driving. (Hall was not part of the initial response; he had used his car to block Arboleda’s way and then shot him.) Arboleda died at the wheel and his car careened out of control, slamming into other cars.

The entire incident is strange, not the least because Arboleda wasn’t committing any crimes. He had struggled with mental illness and suffered a severe childhood illness that put him in a coma. Not only are car chases ill-advised and dangerous, but they also seem particularly fraught when the person being chased hasn’t committed a crime. (Car chases were officially permitted by department policy, but they are supposed to consider the crime in question.) The SF Chronicle did a full feature on the incident with much detail from the police reports and other official documents, and many of the police version of events are disputed in the civil lawsuit filed by Arboleda’s family. (In October, the family settled for $4.9 million.) Danville is considered fairly upscale and Arboleda would have stood out as an unfamiliar person of color.

The sheriff of Contra Costa County, David Livingston, made a big deal about the involvement of attorney John Burris, who represented Arboleda’s family in a civil suit against the department and has built his career on representing individuals who have experienced police misconduct and violence in the Bay Area. Livingston said, at the time, “This is a tragic case, yet once again John Burris is reaching for his well-worn race card. This is not about race. This is about a dangerous and reckless person trying to run down and murder a police officer.”

Throughout the investigation, leading up to the criminal trial and sentencing of Hall which just ended earlier this month, Livingston made it plain that he was going to make things as difficult for the Arboleda family as possible. Livingston is also a coroner under California’s hybrid sheriff-coroner system so his office was also in charge of the inquest. (Livingston doesn’t do the inquest himself as coroner; there’s a judge and jury, like a mini-trial.)

The 2019 inquest jury found that Arboleda died “at the hands of another.” (Contra Costa County holds a coroner’s inquest for all police shootings.) But nothing happened. An internal investigation cleared Hall.

Enter District Attorney Dana Becton, who took office in the summer of 2018 by campaigning as a progressive prosecutor. (She is also the first Black district attorney in Contra Costa.) Becton charged Hall in 2021 — three years later — with felony voluntary manslaughter, felony assault with a semi-automatic firearm, and unreasonable force. In early March, Hall was sentenced to six years in prison. (The jury deadlocked on the manslaughter but convicted him on the other charges.) Why so long? It seems the murder of George Floyd and the success of demands for police accountability may have nudged her over the edge.

After the sentence was announced, Livingston went on the warpath and blamed Becton for bad morale in the department. He issued a statement of support for Lane, blaming the judge and prosecutor for sending, in his view, a good officer to jail:

For our district attorney to charge a deputy sheriff, or any peace officer, for a crime based on a split-second tactical decision is abhorrent.  It is even more abhorrent for that same district attorney to later repost photos on her reelection campaign social media that show her smiling and proclaiming that she “charged the officer.”

The Prosecutors Alliance of California, a group of reform-minded DAs that includes George Gascon and Chesa Boudin as well as Becton, wrote a strongly worded letter to the Board of Supervisors to condemn Livingston’s statement, and Becton urged the county commissioners to audit the sheriff department’s use-of-force policies in addition to increasing external accountability.

Both Livingston and Becton have just started their re-election campaigns. Livingston had been in office since 2010 and has always run unopposed until this year. His challenger in the next election is Benjamin Therriault, who has substantial law enforcement experience and is president of the Richmond Police Officers Association Livingston hasn’t made a lot of friends in the progressive community as a law-and-order pest: he’s collaborated with ICE, militarized the officers in his department, and has had allegations about unsafe conditions in his jails.

The dynamics of this sheriff election present a typical break-down of what happens in counties around the country:

1)    Sheriff is substantially more conservative than the county as a whole. Livingston seems to be a few steps behind county residents, who voted over 70% for Biden.

2)    Sheriff has not faced meaningful competition in an election, so he has no impetus to change his ways. Seems obvious here.

3)    Other county officials push back on the sheriff and try to force change. Dana Becton appears committed to reducing mass incarceration and generally being fair. Charging officers who kill people is in line with that mission. And, she’s putting pressure on county officials to implement more changes.

4)    Sheriffs gets mad and digs in his heels, acting irrationally.

One interesting aspect in this particular situation is the presence of the Prosecutors Alliance, which is able to act in a more coordinated way to back up Becton. California is the only state with such a prosecutor coalition to counter the state association.

But, because this pattern is so entrenched, I think it’s worth thinking about how to disrupt it. Livingston has a competitor, which appears to be pushing him to close ranks further and be even more cantankerous. If Therriault wins, then the county might have a sheriff more in line with the DA’s mission. (Alameda County is seeking the same approach by having a sheriff/ DA run as a reform-minded pair.) I see the promise.

Because – there’s more. This was NOT the first time Andrew Hall killed someone. In 2021 – before Becton charged Hall but after Hall killed Arboleda -- he shot and killed Tyrell Wilson. (The family also settled their civil suit for $4.5 million.) How did that happen? Hall stopped Wilson because he thought he might have been a person suspected of throwing rocks. Wilson, 33 years old, crossed the street to avoid Hall. Wilson appears to have been a person known about town; he usually slept on a bench and there was Nextdoor chatter about his presence Wilson was also a man who had survived a head-on crash in a car accident with a semi.

Hall, again, ran after Wilson and there was a confrontation in which Wilson held a knife and said, “Kill me,” tapping his chest. He didn’t lunge or attack the officer, but Hall killed Wilson with a bullet to his head.

So, let’s summarize. A deputy killed a man, then was allowed to keep working, and killed another man before he was charged in the first killing. Now he’s convicted. And the sheriff thinks this is a good dude? (As additional background, in 2014, Hall was accused, but cleared by the sheriff's department’s internal investigation, of using excessive force on a man in the jail.) And the DA can’t be let off the hook because in the three years she spent deciding whether to charge Hall, he killed again.

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I am not optimistic about the ability of local elections to solve these types of entrenched problems. For one thing, we already know that progressive-minded prosecutors have faced a lot of backlash and political challenges. Boudin and Gascon are facing recall elections, and in Los Angeles, for example, the current sheriff is running his entire re-election campaign as a referendum on how much he personally dislikes his DA. Which, given the challenges Gascon faces, might work.

Progressive sheriffs might face the same backlash, but we don’t really know because none (that I would call truly “progressive”) has taken office yet.

Additionally, sheriffs, even reform-minded ones, very rarely implement the radical changes that are, quite frankly, necessary in policing. Sure, they will do some training, some de-escalation techniques, get rid of some “bad apples” (who will sue under the Peace Officer’s Bill of Rights and then get reinstated with back pay), add some programming to the jail. We know that this stuff simply isn’t enough. There isn’t even data to show that any training leads to fewer shootings. It’s all just off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all reform ideas that have been recycled over and over. And people like Andrew Hall are literally on a killing spree, with no one stopping them. Even the prosecutor couldn’t charge him fast enough to prevent another death.

I think prosecutors have a little more ability to adjust their offices’ practices because they are on the back end. They can decide to charge or not charge, they can make various decisions about enhancements and sentences length, etc. These choices do make a difference, but it’s far after the point when law enforcement is involved. People are getting killed before they are ever charged with anything. That’s a problem that’s harder to fix. Prosecutors make their decisions in the quiet of a book-lined office; their impact is further down the road to prison. Sheriffs are making their decisions…well…I don’t know if they are making any thought-out decisions at all most of the time. Law enforcement officers like to rely on their “gut” and habit, the independent judgment of officers in the heat of the moment. They don’t like “Monday morning quarterbacking.” My experience has led me to think that it’s an office that is harder to change, possibly because it’s not clear what it was ever doing in the first place.