LAKEPORT, Calif. – A week after the county’s sheriff’s cut Lakeport Police’s access to shared law enforcement records, the Lakeport City Council decided to take the county to court.
Emerging from closed session following a special Tuesday evening meeting and budget workshop, the council voted to retain the law office of Colantuono & Levin to take action against the county, according to City Manager Margaret Silveira.
City Attorney Steve Brookes said the goal was to get back to the previous level of services Lakeport Police had in the Records Information Management System, or RIMS, “prior to Sheriff Rivero’s wholly uncalled for unilateral actions.”
Both Brookes and Silveira said the city intends to enforce Lakeport Police’s rights under the present dispatch agreement it has with the county.
“We are in the process of assembling information and drafting legal documents that will set forth our position in Superior Court,” Brookes said.
County Counsel Anita Grant told Lake County News on Wednesday that she was notified that the outside law firm had been retained.
Without warning, Sheriff Frank Rivero cut off Lakeport Police’s RIMS access last week, initially telling Police Chief Brad Rasmussen that it was due to an audit issue and that no wrongdoing had occurred, but the following day – after Rasmussen went public with his concerns – Rivero leveled new allegations of inappropriate access to the system and then cut off temporary access he had given to the agency’s command staff.
Rivero also cut off Lake County Probation’s access, but didn’t give a specific reason, according to Probation Chief Rob Howe.
Two and a half years ago, Rivero locked the District Attorney’s Office out of the system, and still has not allowed access despite signing a memorandum of understanding with District Attorney Don Anderson in October 2011.
Rasmussen and city officials say that Rivero’s unilateral action has endangered officers and the safety of the community, a sentiment with which Lakeport Mayor Tom Engstrom, who retired as the city’s police chief in 2005, agrees.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my 40-plus years in public service,” said Engstrom.
The city of Lakeport asked the Board of Supervisors to remedy the situation, and last Friday the board held a special meeting to try to get to the bottom of the matter, with law enforcement heads from around the county and four Lakeport City Council members – Engstrom among them – in attendance.
At the Friday meeting, Rivero claimed that the Lakeport Police Department had made hundreds of inappropriate accesses to the RIMS system, alleging that Lakeport Police Chief Brad Rasmussen had assured him that they only wanted access to Computer Aided Dispatch – or CAD – records.
He even alleged that Rasmussen himself had made questionable accesses, although when pressed about whether a crime occurred, he acknowledged he could not tell if all of the agency’s accesses were legitimate or not.
Rasmussen said Rivero twisted his words and that his staff has always accessed RIMS in addition to CAD. The records Rivero questioned included Rasmussen’s access to related to a registered sex offender making contact with children, according to Rasmussen.
The Board of Supervisors asked Rivero to restore access to Lakeport Police and Probation, assemble a task force of local law enforcement agencies to work on protocols for accessing the system and ask the California Attorney General’s Office for an independent audit.
While he agreed to most of those requests, Rivero flatly refused to allow Lakeport Police to resume access to RIMS, which law enforcement chiefs said has always been meant to be a system of shared information to benefit investigations and operations.
On Wednesday Rasmussen told Lake County News that his agency remained locked out.
The only information they are getting are sheets on individual calls, which were supposed to have been sent electronically but, because that isn’t working, have been faxed. He said one of his sergeants had been working with dispatch to try to get electronic access to those dispatch reports.
“It’s very limited information,” Rasmussen said.
The city has had a dispatch contract with the county for years. The county purchased the new RIMS system in 2002, and information on Lakeport calls and cases that go through county dispatch are put into that system, which is separate from a RIMS system maintained at Lakeport Police, according to Rasmussen.
Silveira said Lakeport Police is now unable to access about 10 years of information about its own cases stored in the county’s RIMS system.
As for Rivero’s accusations of wrongful access, Rasmussen said an investigation is under way into those allegations. He suspects that most of them are related to investigations his agency has conducted, but couldn’t offer more details due to the inquiry’s ongoing nature.
Rasmussen said that since last week he’s had no further communications with the sheriff’s office.
He’s also heard nothing about the formation of the task force the Board of Supervisors requested be set up, nor any follow through regarding a request for the Attorney General’s Office to conduct the RIMS audit.
Engstrom, who spent 25 years as a police chief in four different counties – Stanislaus, Santa Barbara, Monterey and then Lake – said that in all of those places the small police departments where he worked contracted with local sheriff’s offices for dispatch services, just like Lakeport Police does.
He said previously the Lake County Sheriff’s Office has always bent over backward to help local law enforcement.
With resources slim for all of the local agencies, “We have to work together,” said Engstrom.
He added, “I’m just hoping that it can be resolved.”
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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