Marin County Sheriff Robert Doyle vividly recalls the day when he realized how much was at stake as a law enforcement officer.
It was the summer of 1970 and Doyle was working as a bailiff overseeing courtroom nine when he and other deputies received orders to lock down the court.
“We didn’t know what was going on,” said Doyle, who had joined the sheriff’s office just eight months earlier. “The interesting fact is in those days bailiffs did not carry guns in the courtroom.”
What Doyle and the other bailiffs didn’t know was that Jonathan Peter Jackson, the 17-year-old brother of George Jackson, a Black activist serving time in San Quentin State Prison for the armed robbery of a gas station in 1961, had smuggled guns into courtroom three.
The younger Jackson, joined by three inmates in the courtroom, took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas and three female jurors hostage and attempted to make their escape.
When Jackson and the other kidnappers tried to escape with their hostages in a van, police and prison guards opened fire on the van. Jackson, two of his accomplices and Judge Haley were killed. Thomas and the third inmate were seriously injured.
“The stark reality of danger struck me when we had the shootout,” Doyle said. “That was a real wake-up call.”
Doyle has a lot to reflect on as wraps up a 53-year career with the sheriff’s office this week. The veteran lawman is set to retire Thursday.
The son of a seamstress and a U.S. Navy jet mechanic who worked at the Alameda Naval Air Station, Doyle grew up Daly City.
“When I graduated high school, I attended College of San Mateo for a couple of semesters and then I decided it wasn’t for me at the time, and I joined the military,” Doyle said.
It was 1966 so Doyle knew that once he lost his college deferment it would be only a matter of time before he was drafted if he didn’t enlist. He served in the United States Army from 1966 to 1969 in California, Oklahoma, Germany and Vietnam.
While in Vietnam, Doyle worked as a radar operator in the demilitarized zone, which separated North and South Vietnam.
“It got interesting very often,” Doyle said, “but I was 21 years old and thought nothing bad was ever going to happen to me.”
As it turned out, nothing bad did happen to Doyle in Vietnam.
“I got out of the military psychologically and physically fine,” Doyle said, “and really didn’t pay attention to the anti-war demonstrations. I’ve always tried to block out the outside noise and encourage other people to do the same thing.”
Doyle initially sought work as a police officer because he needed money to go back to school. He would eventually earn his bachelor’s degree with an emphasis in criminal justice from Sonoma State University.
Doyle ended up in Marin because other police departments in the Bay Area had height and weight requirements that he couldn’t meet.
“For my height, I was supposed to weigh 170 pounds,” said Doyle, who is 5 feet, 11 inches tall. ”I weighed 145 pounds when I got out of the military.”
Doyle worked his way up through the ranks, serving as a deputy sheriff, sergeant, lieutenant and captain before being appointed undersheriff by then-sheriff Charles Prandi in 1988. Over those years, Doyle served in the patrol, custody, and court divisions. He has commanded both the southern Marin patrol station and the Marin County Jail.
Farhad Mansourian, who served both as Marin’s director of public works and general manager of Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit before retiring, said he has been Doyle’s friend for 40 years. Mansourian said he first met Doyle when he was an engineer working for the county.
To save money, the county needed to turn off a third of the county’s street lights. Mansourian was given the job of working with local communities, but he was soon confronted by Doyle, who at the time was commander of the sheriff’s office’s Marin City substation.
“He basically told me you ain’t going to turn off any lights in Marin City. This is public safety,” Mansourian recalled.
As a result of Doyle’s advocacy, the lights stayed on in Marin City.
When Prandi retired in March 1996, he appointed Doyle to be his successor. Doyle was re-elected in June 1998 and five times after that, most recently in June 2018. Doyle’s undersheriff, Jamie Scardina, ran unopposed and was elected to succeed Doyle on June 7.
“He’s extremely knowledgeable, a historian of the county,” Scardina said of Doyle. “He was progressive in law enforcement before the word progressive got its current meaning. As a boss, he gave me a tremendous amount of autonomy. People want to work for this organization because of his leadership.”
The only time Doyle faced a challenger in an election was when the county decided to eliminate its coroner’s office and shift its responsibilities to the sheriff’s office. Rather than retire as expected, the coroner, Ken Holmes, decided to run against Doyle for the job of sheriff in the June 8, 2010 election. Doyle won the contest with over 60% of the vote.
Doyle is a registered Democrat, a rarity among his fellow members of the California Sheriffs’ Association, where he served as president from 2004 to 2005.
“Right now there might be two or three,” Doyle said. “If you talk to my colleagues, I was always viewed as being left of center.”
Nevertheless, Doyle has taken criticism in recent years from some who think he should do more to distance the sheriff’s office from efforts to deport undocumented immigrants and activists who assert that his deputies are over-policing Black residents in Marin City.
At the request of the San Rafael-based nonprofit Canal Alliance, Doyle has significantly scaled back his cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2020, he supplied ICE with release information for 14 inmates, compared with 68 in 2017 and 72 in 2018.
Doyle now only notifies ICE of the release dates of Marin inmates who have been convicted of serious or violent crimes or have open charges involving serious or violent crimes.
At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Judy Arnold noted that 29% of the sheriff’s sworn staff are women and 20% are people of color. She said of the last 30 deputies hired, 12 were women or people of color.
“I think Sheriff Bob Doyle has done an exemplary job for us, and I want to thank him for his hard work,” said Arnold, the only supervisor to comment.
Doyle hasn’t forgotten how the supervisors reacted during budget hearings in 2020 when activists called for defunding the police and maligned the sheriff’s office and its deputies via online teleconferencing by referring to them as Nazis and racists. The supervisors reduced the sheriff’s budget that year by $1.7 million, the equivalent of eight sworn officers.
“To me, that time was very disturbing, and it didn’t go unnoticed by the men and women of the organization that not one board member stood up for them,” Doyle said.
“This points out exactly why the office of sheriff is independently elected because it shouldn’t be influenced by politics.”
Source: www.mercurynews.com