Tiburon police chief named first recipient of diversity award

Four years and three chiefs after the Tiburon Police Department was thrown into turmoil over racial-profiling allegations that made national headlines, the town’s Diversity Inclusion Task Force that grew out of that incident has named Police Chief Michelle Jean the inaugural recipient of its namesake diversity award.

“We all have goals, and we try to accomplish them, so it’s a good teamwork that I feel that we are … pushing the rock forward, and just keep pushing it,” she said at the Oct. 29 presentation ceremony. “Don’t let it roll backward. We’ve got to move forward.”

But while officials point to progress in cultural changes in the department and in community policing strategies, it’s less clear how that’s translated to equitable policing under the 2015 Racial and Identity Profiling Act, or RIPA, California’s primary tool for “eliminating racial and identity profiling, and improving diversity and racial and identity sensitivity in law enforcement.”

Since Tiburon began collecting stop data in late 2020, after the incident at Yema and the creation of the task force, the percentage of police detentions of people of color has increased by 14 points, to more than 45% of all stops in a town that’s 78% white, with racial disparities in stops also growing annually to their highest levels: Hispanics are now 5.2 times more likely to be detained than white people, and Black people 10.3 times more likely to be detained, across 638 stops the first three quarters of 2024.

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