Fired deputy now Pinole police officer
Records: False police report filed with another police agency; chief says he found officer worthy of second chance
A former Alameda County deputy sheriff fired for dishonesty in 2015 after he filed a false police report that was related to his divorce is now working as a police officer in the small city of Pinole in west Contra Costa County, public records show.
Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern terminated then Deputy Josh Shavies on Jan. 22, 2015, after an internal investigation found that Shavies had filed a false police report with another police agency, lying about vandalism in his home, according to records released Saturday under the state’s new police transparency law and first reported by the Bay Area News Group.
Ahern called Shavies’ conduct “contrary to how a member of law enforcement should be,” adding there was no choice other than to dismiss him. The firing was upheld by both a review board and the county Civil Service Commission, records show.
But Pinole Police Chief Neil Gang said in a statement issued Monday that Shavies was forthcoming about his firing when he was hired last year after not working in law enforcement for three years.
“We do not condone” Shavies filing a false police report, Gang wrote. But the chief said Shavies showed remorse over the incident and “personal growth,” adding he found the officer worthy of a second chance to resurrect his career.
The statement did not address credibility issues or whether Shavies’ firing affects his ability to testify in court. Gang declined to take questions on the matter.
A policing expert said the hiring is part of a national trend in which “cops with bad records get hired.”
Small departments sometimes get “cognitive denial. They turn away and hope for the best,” said Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg. Shavies could “be very impeachable on the stand,” although he might be able to use remorse to overcome that.
“The problem” is that if he is discredited because of the firing, “then people start looking back at old cases,” Weisberg said.
Shavies is one of the first officers found in records released under the new law, Senate Bill 1421, to have been fired from one law enforcement agency and subsequently hired by another. He did not respond to messages Saturday.
Records show that in the midst of a divorce in 2014, Shavies entered his home to find his wife had left him a note saying that she had sold a dining room set and four theater chairs to a neighbor. Shavies then smashed four of the dining chairs on the floor, breaking them, and ripped the stuffing out of the theater chairs. He also broke the glass in another piece of furniture.
The neighbor, who had agreed to pay $1,100 for the chairs and table, was watching through a window, unbeknownst to Shavies.
Shavies then made a report with the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Department, saying he had returned home and found the smashed chairs and suspected that a person, whose name is redacted in the report, had entered his home and wrecked the furniture.
Eventually, Shavies admitted he filed a false police report, telling investigators, “I’ve been going through a very nasty divorce” and became upset when he saw the note from his wife.
Ahern was highly critical of Shavies, a seven-year veteran.
Shavies’ “conduct constitutes serious misconduct in that you lied to a fellow law enforcement agency and took up valuable law enforcement time and resources in reporting a false claim of vandalism,” Ahern wrote in a termination notice. “Your poor behavior reflects negatively on our agency and on law enforcement in general.”
The sheriff wrote that even though Shavies was going through a difficult time in his personal life, he was “still expected to maintain the highest standards of behavior on and off duty.” Ahern also noted that filing a false police report is a misdemeanor crime. The Contra Costa sheriff did not file charges in the matter.
Shavies, in a 2017 letter to Alameda County after his firing was upheld, wrote that he was looking for another job in law enforcement. He was concerned about whether his name had been placed on a list of officers found to have committed dishonesty-related offenses.
Known as a “Brady List,” it is used to track officers who have been dishonest to limit or prevent their court testimony so their past history can be used to impeach or discredit them in court. No response to Shavies’ letter was included in documents released Saturday. The name comes from a U.S. Supreme Court case, Brady v. Maryland, in which justices found that criminal defendants have a right to information that could question the credibility of police officers.
The records involving Shavies are the second showing a dishonesty termination that the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office has made public under SB 1421, which requires the release of dishonesty and sexual abuse discipline as well as use of force incidents resulting in great bodily injury and all instances where an officer fires a weapon at a person.
The other involved former Deputy Donald Couch, who was fired in 2015 after being suspected of taking drugs seized during arrests. Like Shavies, he blamed the stress of a difficult divorce for his behavior.
Unlike Shavies, he has not returned to law enforcement. He taught in the San Ramon Unified School District in Contra Costa County from June 2015 to December 2017.
Police personnel records were secret at the time and district officials didn’t know when they hired Couch that he had been fired, district spokeswoman Elizabeth Graswich wrote in an email. He passed a routine background check, she said.
“Our understanding is that he was seeking a change in career,” Graswich wrote. “We have nothing to indicate that he had been terminated from a previous employer.” This story was produced as part of the California Reporting Project, a collaboration of more than 30 newsrooms across the state to obtain and report on police misconduct and serious use-of-force records unsealed in 2019.