Sgt. Sandra Brown—Sheriff Bill Brown’s challenger in the June 2014 election and former head of the county’s coroner’s bureau—is now overseeing bailiffs at the Superior Court in Santa Barbara.
The transfer has raised eyebrows in the community, especially among Sandra’s supporters—some of whom likened the decision to the firing of District Attorney Joyce Dudley’s challenger, Josh Lynn, in 2011.
Command staffers, however, maintain that the switch is routine.
“People are going to look into this and interpret it the way they want to interpret it,” acting Undersheriff Don Patterson told the Sun in an interview. “The short story is that it was a routine transfer. The longer story is that a lot of thought and energy goes into these decisions.”
He explained that while transfers typically happen in March, the department’s command staffers chose to postpone the process until after the June election because there were concerns that the transfers—Sandra’s specifically—would be misinterpreted.
About two weeks ago, the sheriff and his commanders talked about the transfers and decided that Sandra, who’d served as head of the coroner’s bureau for just fewer than four years, should be transferred to “round out her experience” in the department. The command team also transferred two lieutenants and seven other sergeants. Each officer is asked to turn in a “wish list” of three potential assignments. The courthouse wasn’t on Sandra’s wish list.
Patterson said that in the world of law enforcement, there are typically two ways of running departments: “There’s the one-career track in which people develop specialties, or people can get more experience [by serving in numerous positions]. We lean more toward the latter.”
Sandra is now overseeing close to a dozen bailiffs at the courthouse. When asked about the transfer, she would say only that it was a personnel matter and therefore couldn’t be discussed. Sgt. Jason Grossini has replaced her in the coroner’s bureau.
This article appears in Jul 24-31, 2014.
