New captain to become Tiburon’s first female police chief

Editor’s note — This article won second place for best investigative and depth reporting in the National Newspaper Association’s 2024 Better Newspapers Contest.

Capt. Michelle Jean will become Tiburon’s first female police chief next month as Ryan Monaghan, who took over the department less than two years ago, is leaving effective Feb. 3 to join the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office.

Tiburon Town Manager Greg Chanis announced the news in a Jan. 5 press release and the town’s newsletter.

In an interview, Chanis said Monaghan informed the town of the news in mid-late November. That was shortly after Jean was hired Nov. 7 as Tiburon’s captain — a role that had been vacant for eight years — and before she was formally introduced to the Town Council at its Dec. 7 meeting. Chanis said the town initially planned to make the announcement Dec. 20 but delayed that after the death of Sgt. Sean Christopher on Dec. 12 and the ensuing closure of town offices for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

Monaghan, who lives in Belmont, is a former city of San Mateo police lieutenant who will be joining that county’s Sheriff’s Office as assistant sheriff.

“I will miss working with the dedicated professionals of the Tiburon Police Department and the entire town organization as well as the very supportive Tiburon community members,” Monaghan said. “I am confident Capt. Jean will build on our efforts to enhance community engagement, transparency and public safety.”

Jean, who grew up in Yuba City and moved to San Francisco after high school, joined the Tiburon force as a retired captain of the San Francisco Police Department, where she had served from 1991 to 2020. She was an officer for 10 years in the Bayview, Tenderloin and Park stations before moving through the ranks as sergeant, lieutenant and captain. She has worked in the special-victims unit, internal affairs and Homeland Security unit and taught professionalism and off-duty conduct to recruits at the S.F. police academy.

“I assure the community the department will be transparent, accountable and responsible to your concerns and needs,” she said. “I will remain focused on current policing challenges and am committed to diversity, equity and inclusion within the department as well as in the way we serve the community.”

Jean makes $171,639 a year as captain, but her chief’s salary is still under negotiation, Chanis said. Monaghan makes $212,675 a year.

Internal promotion

Chanis’ swift and direct appointment without a broad recruitment and multipanel interview process raised eyebrows among some members of the community in discussions on Nextdoor.com and of the town’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.

Monaghan had been hired in April 2021 after a series of racially charged incidents involving the department that coincided with Black Lives Matter protests across the nation and locally. In June 2020, then-Chief Michael Cronin was forced to apologize after warning residents that a peaceful protest planned for Marin City, which has the county’s largest Black population, could result in mayhem locally, when such warnings weren’t issued for closer protests in predominantly white neighborhoods.

That August, a Tiburon officer, his supervising sergeant and a Belvedere officer were accused of racially profiling the Black owners of downtown clothing shop Yema during an early-morning stop at the store that was recorded on a cellphone and an officer body camera. The owners filed a $2 million claim against the town and reached a $150,000 settlement, with police-reform concessions, last April; a $2 million federal suit against Belvedere is outstanding after the city declined to negotiate.

Within a few weeks of the shop-owner incident, Cronin retired and the sergeant resigned from the department. As members of the community called for increased transparency and accountability, the town launched the diversity task force and its layered recruiting process for the new chief. Chanis selected Monaghan after a community survey determined the job description, a national recruitment yielded 17 candidates and the finalists were interviewed by regional officials and a local citizen panel that included task-force members.

In February 2022, on the recommendation of the task force, the council then included a requirement that it also be given the option to interview at least three finalists for department-head positions.

Ruben Kalra of Belvedere, a citizen member of the task force, said it would have been good for Chanis to include the force in hiring for this vacancy as well and that the appointment undermined the intent of the process.

“Often, our elected officials are not making the hiring decisions that shape the culture and diversity of our community,” he said. Noting Monaghan informed the town in November and won’t leave until next month, Kalra said “it is mind-boggling that (Chanis) again chose not to involve the (task force) in the hiring process.”

“Having Jean as interim chief would have been the right thing to do for our community.”

Vice Mayor Noah Griffin, who was an inaugural citizen member of the task force and remains on it as a councilmember, said he understood people may want a more open process but said he was comfortable and confident with Jean in the role. Rather, he said he was “deeply disappointed” by Monaghan’s departure.

“I am wondering how committed he was to the town in the first place,” he said. “He was supposed to have moved here. He did not do so. We had a couple of incidents whereby a citizens advisory panel was supposed to have come about as a result of the Yema settlement. That has not come about, so I wonder what his real commitment was to diversifying the staff.”

While Chanis acknowledged that recruitment for a new chief vacancy may have drawn a different pool of qualified applicants than the captain role into which Jean was hired, he said one of the primary reasons for reopening the position was to establish a succession plan.

“It was always our intent to fill the captain position with an individual qualified and prepared to assume the role of chief from day one,” said Chanis, noting he didn’t, however, expect that time to arrive so soon.

Chanis asserted that considering this, the full hiring process had already occurred: Jean emerged as the top choice for captain after a broad recruitment and interview process that included police and non-police professionals, a community panel and two members of the diversity task force. He said before he appointed Jean to chief, he also notified the councilmembers and encouraged them to meet with her before he made his final decision.

“This is essentially the exact process we followed in 2020-’21 when the current chief was hired,” he said.

Jean, too, said that succession has already played a critical role in department unity and healing through tragedy, as she was among the officers on duty when Christopher took his own life at the station and has a shared understanding of what staff are now going through — something an outside chief would not.

Mayor Jack Ryan also said succession was implemented sooner than he would’ve expected but that he was happy it was part of the initial consideration for captain.

“What gives me confidence in her ability to lead is the fact that when she was recruited, it was with that in mind,” Ryan said.

Chanis said the town plans to fill the soon-to-be-vacant captain role using the same process.

Monaghan’s legacy and challenges ahead

Jean will soon take over a department tasked with reform.

Monaghan was hired in part to help rebuild trust in the department and institute community-initiated policing-reform goals stemming from the local incidents in 2020. He made early promises his policies and practices would be aligned with the most progressive of their kind.

On those matters, he has received mixed reviews from the public and local officials while resisting substantial changes in policing practices and failing to implement key promises. And though he has cited transparency and accountability improvements, he issued policy changes attempting to wall off direct access by The Ark, frequently declines to answer questions about department policies and has sat on public-records requests.

Mayor Jack Ryan said he felt like Monaghan was implementing a fairly comprehensive set of changes — citing work to get police data on stops to be more transparent and getting officers supplemental training on bias-free policing — and leading the police in a fairly productive direction.

However, stop-data collection is required under California law and was launched early in December 2020 by the interim chief, now-Sheriff Jamie Scardina. Under Monaghan, who contracted with an outside vendor to handle state compliance, updates have moved from being daily to being more than six months behind, with significant data points and all searchability and sortability functions stripped from the public-facing data dashboard. Ark requests for the data and functionality to be restored have gone unheeded.

The data that is available show racial inequities in police detentions in Tiburon have been increasing under Monaghan’s tenure.

An Ark analysis of records compiled under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act between June 1, 2021, and May 31, 2022, show Hispanics are 2.65 times more likely to be detained by police than whites, a figure rising to 3.21 times for the first half of 2022, compared with 2.99 times in Mill Valley. An 18-agency study by Mill Valley citizen group MVFree for the same period showed the average was 1.16 times across those agencies.

In Tiburon, Black people are 14.34 times more likely than whites to be detained, a number that jumps to 18.93 for the first half of 2022, compared with 6.44 times in Mill Valley and 2.79 times across the 18-agency average.

The vacancy for Monaghan was created with the early retirement of Chief Michael Cronin shortly after the Tiburon police encounter with the owners of Yema in August 2020, which was recorded on cellphone and police body cameras, going viral online and making national headlines.

At the time of the incident, it led to a four-hour community forum drawing 450 listeners and some 140 commenters, most of them critical of the police response and many sharing their own encounters, calling race issues systemic in the department. The forum then led to the creation of the Diversity Inclusion Task Force to examine town policies and to increase officer-training sessions on transformative justice and unconscious bias. But amid these moves toward reform, a resident complained during the COVID pandemic about an officer wearing a face covering with a Blue Lives Matter flag — a blue stripe across a black-and-white U.S. flag — a symbol already banned by other departments as divisive after being co-opted by white supremacists and used as a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality.

When he was hired in April 2021, Monaghan immediately said he wanted to recalibrate the department’s relationship with the community. His officers now walk the beat downtown to get to know residents and business owners, and they hand out business cards to allow for anonymous feedback through a third-party website. The department has established liaisons in three regions of town, started neighborhood-watch programs, stepped up direct communication through social media and updated an internal registry to help officers better respond to callers with special needs. All are essentially in alignment with the Six Pillars of 21st Century Policing, which Monaghan frequently cites.

Monaghan also held a series of five “Living and Growing Together” community forums, moderated by the Transformative Justice Institute — which had been conducting some of the officer training — to give different local groups a chance to offer feedback about community policing. Some gave high praise for the unique effort to connect with the community. But turnout was low, with critics expressing fear that participation itself could lead to retribution, disappointment in a format that didn’t offer clear accountability and a moderator that appeared to show strong favor to the department during the discussions.

On his goal to establish a comprehensive officer-wellness program by November, there’s been little progress. The department formed a health-and-wellness committee and gave officers a self-help book and a reference card with 24/7 support resources, saying they’re now hoping to form a first-responder peer-support group — programs that focus on self-initiation of partly unguided care. Departments nationwide have successfully instituted regular individual and group counseling sessions with a professional therapist; on-site psychologists; chaplaincy programs; mandatory group physical fitness, yoga, mindfulness and cognitive-function practices; spousal-support programs; and financial-management guidance, among others.

While Monaghan has increased the frequency of officer training for biased-based policing, he’s resisted other programs and practices that seek to directly address inequities, including oversight or the use of unarmed licensed therapists for certain calls. Healdsburg and San Mateo, Monaghan’s alma mater, have since launched programs to pair officers with mental-health clinicians for certain calls. Monaghan has said the data doesn’t support such a program in Tiburon but declined to say what data he assessed — the town has about 10,000 service calls per year and about 83 property and 3.5 violent crimes over each of the past five years, according to department statistics — and instead expanded the number of sworn officers in the department despite the historic lows in crime.

Meanwhile he sought an advisory-only citizen body, calling oversight boards “adversarial,” while departments across Sonoma County have recently instituted independent-auditor and citizen-oversight models. Monaghan had said the local panel was to be created by December, but it’s still in limbo and is now expected to be formed under Jean. In April 2022, the body’s creation became a requirement of the town’s legal settlement with the owners of Yema, one of whom must sit on the board.

Monaghan has entirely declined to address curtailing civil-asset forfeitures or pretext stops — those for legitimate yet trivial infractions that are used discretionarily by officers to investigate hunches — both of which disproportionately involve people of color but statistically do not help police solve crime, with studies showing the practices can make it harder for police to investigate.

Officers last year, for instance, impounded a vehicle allegedly connected to a San Jose burglary, though none of the occupants were suspected of any crimes. Meanwhile, dozens of agencies across the U.S. have reduced pretext stops and limited their focus to traffic infractions, with studies and data repeatedly showing a reduction in accidents, a reduction in racial stop inequities, improvements in community trust and relations and no increase in local crime.

Nearly 80 percent of temporary detentions in Tiburon are from vehicle stops.

In 2021, roughly 30 percent of all detentions were of nonwhites by Tiburon, Mill Valley and the Central Marin police agencies, where residents of each community are 20 percent nonwhite and critics already questioned the 10-point racial gap. For the first half of 2022, the most recent available data, the stop figures remain 30 percent nonwhite in Mill Valley and Central Marin, but in Tiburon nonwhites now make up some 45 percent of all detentions despite making up less than 20 percent of the population.

Monaghan has given apparently conflicting accounts of the data — asserting both that transient workers increase the nonwhite daytime population, but that biased policing isn’t occurring because the stop ratios of whites and nonwhites are the same day and night — but he has declined to answer questions about the compatibility of those claims.

Jean’s involvement in Textgate

Jean’s own hiring as captain and now promotion to chief comes with lingering online news archives attaching her to the San Francisco Police Department’s Textgate scandal of the 2010s.

In the articles, published before the final outcome of the case was determined in the courts, she’s painted as one of two lieutenants who knew that a group of 14 officers had been exchanging racist, homophobic, sexist and other bigoted text messages but failed to seek disciplinary action, saying during a deposition she had “worked with each of the (officers), knew them to be good, effective police officers and had never seen any of them act or enforce the laws in a racist, homophobic or antisemitic manner.”

In an interview, Jean said she didn’t realize the articles naming her existed until she went through her Tiburon background checks and was asked about it during her hiring process. The articles have also been circulating in the community, with questions about whether she’s able to be fair and represents the town’s goals toward diversity and inclusion if she has a history of protecting bigoted officers.

“I’m a gay female who’s married to a Jewish woman, so if you think that I would tolerate any abuse toward homosexuals, Jewish people, my coworkers who are African American — absolutely not,” she said in an interview last week. “I would never tolerate that behavior. They would be written up immediately. It would be turned over to an investigation.”

The Textgate case had stemmed from a separate joint investigation by the FBI and S.F.’s criminal internal-affairs division into a group of corrupt cops. By December 2014, three were ultimately convicted of shaking down citizens, robbing drug houses and stealing from the evidence room to sell items on eBay, among other crimes.

The ringleader was a sergeant at the Mission station, where Jean was lieutenant. Evidence from the sergeant’s phone obtained in 2012 during the corruption investigation included the text messages that would become Textgate. Jean said she became aware of the messages in 2013 after she was pulled onto the criminal internal-affairs team, where she said she signed confidentiality agreements and couldn’t even tell her bosses what she would learn as an investigator in the unit.

In San Francisco, a separate administrative internal-affairs division is tasked with investigating non-criminal conduct by officers — conduct such as the bigoted texts. But city lawyers, and Jean, said protocols were in place to ensure there weren’t any leaks from the criminal unit: Not only would it have been illegal for her to share the text messages with the administrative division, any action by that unit could have tipped off the officers targeted in the corruption case and ultimately risked the ability to prosecute.

The courts ultimately agreed.

After securing convictions in the corruption case in December 2014, police officials referred the Textgate messages to administrative internal affairs, and in April 2015, the unit recommended to the Police Commission that eight of the 14 officers be fired; the remaining were to be disciplined. Five immediately quit, but before the commission could act, a court filing in the sergeant’s appeal of his corruption verdict included the explicit details of his bigoted texts to other officers, making national headlines and setting off a community firestorm demanding investigations and accountability.

But the remaining nine cops sued the city, arguing that supervisors — including Jean and the other lieutenant, who had preceded her on the confidential criminal internal-affairs team — knew of the messages and did nothing in 2012-2013, so the one-year statute of limitations had closed. The first judge agreed with the cops, ordering them back on SFPD’s payroll and blocking the department from disciplining them. The articles that remain online reflect this ruling, that Jean knew of the messages but chose to not act.

But an appellate court in 2018 reversed the decision, agreeing with city attorneys — and Jean’s accounting today — that the messages were the result of discovery in the criminal case and couldn’t be reviewed by administrative internal affairs until they were turned over by the U.S. Attorney’s Office when the corruption prosecutions ended in December 2014. The state Supreme Court declined to hear the officers’ appeal, and the department fired all six officers who had remained on paid leave.

Jean said in an interview that her quote about her knowledge of the cops as being “good, effective police officers” was accurate, but not in the context of why she didn’t act to discipline them. Instead, she said, she was responding to a direct question in a deposition about whether she had personally observed bigoted behavior on the job. She says she hadn’t.

“People act in different ways when you’re not around them,” she said. “They knew enough to not say stuff around me.”

San Francisco’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Transparency, Accountability and Fairness in Law Enforcement was created in mid-2015 as a direct result of the Textgate scandal to examine the existence and extent of institutionalized racial and homophobic bias in the department, and Jean said she personally worked on implementing a number of the reform policies stemming from its conclusions.

“Based on my understanding of the role Capt. Jean played in that matter, I can state unequivocally she exemplifies the values we desire in a police chief for our community,” Chanis said.

Executive Editor Kevin Hessel contributed to this report. Reach Belvedere and public-safety reporter Katherine Martine at 415-944-4627.