Rohnert Park ordered to train police on searches

A federal magistrate ordered Rohnert Park to train its police in conducting legal home searches Wednesday after an officer, following his department’s standard practice, entered a home through the back door without a warrant while two fellow officers were talking to the owners at the front door.

A jury in San Francisco found the searches illegal in October and awarded the homeowners $145,000 in damages, including $70,000 in punitive damages against the officer who entered at the back with his gun drawn. On Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Sallie Kim granted the owners’ request for an injunction requiring the Police Department in the Sonoma County community to conduct police training and issue a written policy, distributed to all officers, on legal home searches.

“There are systemic problems in the way that the city of Rohnert Park fails to train its police officers,” Kim said.

Specifically, she said, the city has allowed police to violate constitutional standards for probation searches — inspections of the homes of people who are on probation for criminal convictions.

Probationers generally agree to allow searches of themselves, their vehicles and their homes without requiring police to seek a warrant from a court. But Kim said police must still announce their presence and seek the occupants’ consent before entering, unless there is an emergency or the probationer has committed a violent felony. And when the probationer is only one of several occupants of the home, as in this case, Kim said, officers must limit their searches to the probationer’s room and common areas of the home.

In November 2014, the officers went to the home of Edgar Perez, who lived there with his mother and stepfather, Elva and Raul Barajas, and a brother and sister. Perez was then on probation for drug crimes, none of them violent.

Two officers went to the front door and were met by the Barajas couple, Kim said. One officer said they were there for a probation search, but Raul Barajas replied that Perez was not home. Meanwhile, the third officer, Jacy Tatum, had gone through a side gate and entered the home through a rear sliding door, with his gun drawn. When they saw Tatum in the home, the couple let the other two officers enter, and they looked in every room, saw Perez wasn’t there, and left after 18 minutes, Kim said.

Asked why they had chosen that day for a search, Kim said, one officer “fabricated” a story that an informant had told him six to eight months earlier that Perez had a gun and was selling drugs. Kim also said evidence at the trial of the Barajas lawsuit showed that Tatum had entered a home through the back door during probation searches 50 to 60 times, and that the Police Department had instructed its officers that such entries were proper.

She ordered the city to provide at least two hours of training on lawful searches for its officers, issue a written policy on probation searches, and give all officers a copy of her ruling.

Arturo Gonzalez, a lawyer for the Barajas couple, said the ruling protects families, particularly parents who have an adult child in their home.

Even if the child is on probation, Gonzalez said, “you’ve got to take into consideration the fact that the other people who live there also have rights.”

A spokesman for the Rohnert Park police could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.