Atascadero Chief of Police reflects on five years of service 

Jerel Haley talks crime and community

– It’s not everyday that one comes across a police chief who liberally quotes Plato, Aristotle, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same interview. For the record he was talking about the identity and culture of the Atascadero Police Department (APD) and its mission to “be of service to the community beyond the self.”

Haley wanted to be clear that for him and the APD, being an effective police officer is about working “towards the greater good.” No one would accuse the man of being your typical orthodox authority figure.

APD Chief Jerel Haley goes incognito as a bicycle cop on the beat [photo: Jordan Elgrably].

We caught up with Chief Haley in his office, joined by APD public information officer Sgt. Caleb Davis, as Haley was about to celebrate his fifth year of service in Atascadero’s “bedroom community” of some 29,000 residents.

Following his tenure as a lieutenant with the Santa Maria PD, the City of Atascadero appointed Haley to the position of Chief of Police in the fall of 2011. Since then Haley has borne responsibility for an annual budget of nearly $6 million and a department with almost 30 sworn officers.

The first thing one notices upon entering Chief Haley’s office is a shelf sagging under the weight of many books. Haley describes himself as “a voracious reader, especially of titles dealing with leadership and spirituality.” The California native is characteristically curious about how other people think and act, which is probably a handy quality when you’re trying to build better relationships between police and those they’re sworn to serve. The word community comes up often in conversation.

“I have a strong Christian faith so I do a lot of reading related to my faith and the practice of my faith,” Haley says. “I’m reading a book now that’s taking a look at interpreting the Bible through not just American culture but through the eyes of other cultures in the world…If you knew other cultures and the context under which they operate, you could interpret something a whole different way.”

When Haley came in he wanted to improve the professionalism of the department, to insure that there were systematic methods for getting the job done. That included implementing the new Lexipol manual to keep up to date on case law, legislation and policy. Says Haley, “We enact amendments and changes to our policy so that every six months we’re sure we are up to date with the most current way of practicing this profession, that will keep us out of the courtroom, keep us out of trouble, and really provide a better service to our public.”

While around the country police departments and communities are facing some heartbreaking instances of police shootings of unarmed black males, Atascadero has had few police shootings and hasn’t had to deal with race in any substantial way. “We are in a different situation,” Haley said, pointing out that Atascadero doesn’t have the cultural diversity of other nearby towns such as Santa Maria where 70-percent of the population is Hispanic and Paso Robles where almost a third of the population is Hispanic.

“We’ve rarely had to deal with any racial profiling issues here. For instance, we had a case where somebody from King City came down and robbed a liquor store. The suspect was described as a Hispanic male with half his face tattooed. The next day we see a Hispanic male with tattoos on half of his face walking down the street. We contact him and sure enough, that’s the suspect. And he says ‘you’re only stopping me because of a racial bias.’ Well, no, you’re a Hispanic male with tattoos on half your face.”

Haley is a believer in community policing

Says Chief Haley, “I’ve worked for three different departments now [Santa Cruz, Santa Maria and Atascadero]. Each community has its own culture and it’s own personality. Atascadero has a very unique personality that kind of makes our job pretty easy. They’re strongly supportive of law enforcement in our community. And one of the things that I’ve constantly said is we have an obligation to constantly make deposits into peoples’ emotional bank accounts.”

One of the ways the APD does this, Haley said, is to be available and transparent. “I as the chief of police put myself on a bicycle a couple of times a year at events like Colony Days and I ride around and give you access. Here, because of the nature of our community, we have a tremendous opportunity for the chief to be in the middle of things, to be accessible, so that if I’m standing there in line behind you at the grocery store, you can turn around and say ‘Hey, Jerel, how are you?’ as opposed to this kind of standoffishness, this ‘us vs. them’ mentality that other communities have.”

Haley says this was the case long before he arrived. His PIO, Sgt. Davis, nods when he mentions the good works of the Atascadero Police Association, such as its annual golf tournament and other charitable activities that enabled the association to raise over $10,000 this year. “They invite members of the community to participate, raise money, and then give it back to sports programs for youth. What better way to build relationships?”

Haley did not always want to be a cop, although he cherishes a framed drawing from childhood, hanging in his office, which suggests he wanted to grow up and be a policeman. “My dad was a police officer for 30 years. He started with Manteca PD and went to Santa Clara County Sheriffs’ Dept and finished his career there. There was a period of time in my high school angst-ridden years when I said I was not going to be anything like my dad.

“I had been working in construction for about five years—I was a journeyman carpenter, hanging t-bar ceilings as a matter of fact—when I thought, you know what? Dad had something here. That career looked pretty good. I started when I was 24 and I haven’t looked back. It’s been the greatest profession I could have been a part of.”

A-Town is safe but crime is on the rise

Atascadero is a town that has only experienced two homicides in the last 10 years. While violent crime is rare, residential burglaries, drug abuse and domestic violence keep officers and detectives on their toes.

“Like many other communities throughout the country,” Haley said, “heroin has been the biggest problem. We went through a period when methamphetamine was our biggest headache, and it still exists, but over the course of the five years that I’ve been here, heroin addiction has really taken over. About two years ago, we saw a number of people overdose on heroin and we’ve had people die from heroin overdoses. One of the reasons that we have the detectives in our bureau is that we’ve assigned them as street crimes detectives.

“What we saw was a tremendous reduction in the first year that they were operating as a team. We started to hear rumors on the street that it was really hard to get heroin in Atascadero. I love hearing that. If you gotta go to another community to get your drug, that means we’re doing something right.”

Chief Haley says the APD has good relationships with other agencies throughout the county and has cooperated to crack down on heroin dealers. “We’re in conversation with all local law enforcement, but we have a special bond with Paso and Chief Burton because we feel as Paso goes we go, and as we go, Paso goes. Our two guys and their two guys started working together and soon enough we had a number of significant [drug] seizures as we cooperated.”

Haley strikes one as extremely live-and-let-live, but he expressed skepticism at the trend to decriminalize drug use, as Prop. 64 is proposing to do now for personal marijuana use, and as Proposition 47 did upon passage in November 2014. The so-called “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” effectively changed a number of drug-related offenses from felonies to misdemeanor citations.

“Because of Prop. 47, what did we see crime do last year?” Haley said. “Spike sharply, a double digit increase…Our streets are less safe as a result of that and so we have to be concerned about any kind of legislation that is disguised through the proposition system as a good thing for California, when in fact if you take time to read what’s actually going on, it’s not a good thing at all.”

Asked what folks can do to support the APD and Atascadero’s community at large, Chief Haley didn’t hesitate.

“First, be good citizens. Back in early 2015, all of a sudden we started seeing people driving drunk on our roadways to a tremendously high level that we hadn’t seen before. We have a lot of wineries. Be responsible and be a good citizen.

“Second, volunteer, get involved. This is a volunteer-involved community. For instance, we have an APD volunteer unit; we could not do the job that we do without volunteers.

“Third, there is a new program called Nextdoor that we’ve rolled out and that we’re going to start pushing. It’s kind of a Facebook type of a program that selectively groups together individuals in neighborhoods and allows them to join forces… Nextdoor is really going to be what we hope will be this generation’s Neighborhood Watch program.”