Q&A: Ron Nelson retires after 30+ years of service

We sit down with the Sebastopol Police Chief to talk about life as a cop

Ron Nelson’s last day on the city’s payroll will be October 26.

After four years with the department, and following three decades of service throughout California from Orange County to Santa Rosa, Sebastopol Police Chief Ron Nelson is hanging up his cleats—this time for good.

I sat down with Ron on Monday to pick his brain about the way policing has changed in recent years and what it takes to be an effective cop. Ron’s answers are representative of a man who has spent his life in a career, and now, being done with it, is ready to tell you everything about it.

When I arrived at the police station, Ron was dressed in everyday clothes with a big smile on his face and a relaxed, casual demeanor….

You seem to be doing well?

Yeah, I’m doing good. You know, I made the decision to retire, which was not out of the blue. When I took the chief’s job two years ago, I said, ‘I’ll give you two years.’ I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I’m in my 60s, and at some point you want a little more freedom.

Take me through how you got into policing and how your career has progressed to this point?

Growing up, my father was a police officer, my uncle was a police officer, and the man across the street was a deputy sheriff. So I grew up around law enforcement, and growing up, you know, I was a good kid for the most part. Everybody said, ‘Oh, you should be a cop.’ You know, as a young man in your late teens and 20s, you’re like, ‘Well, I’m not going to do what everybody wants. I’m going to figure it out myself.’ So at one point, I was in my early 20s, and I thought, well, maybe I’ll give it a try. So I had tested with the department in Orange County, and they were ready to hire me, and I did a self evaluation, and I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m ready for this.’ So I turned it down and I went into business for myself with another partner. We were in the automotive business, a mobile business where we kind of dressed up new cars for sale, or to body shops and stuff.

As I started getting into my late 20s, I really started looking thinking, ‘Is this what I want to do with my life? It’s not fulfilling, it]s not challenging.’ And so I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should re-explore the law enforcement thing.’ I went on a ride along with my dad’s department, and just fell in love with it. So I started applying.

And it’s interesting because back then—this was in the early ’90s—law enforcement agencies, once you start getting into your late 20s and your 30s, there was kind of a stigma attached to you at that point, like they wanted younger people whose dream it was to be a cop their whole life. And that was not the case with me. I applied probably with 10 different departments, and I got pretty far with a couple. Eventually, the El Monte Police Department down in the San Gabriel Valley—I had taken the test, hadn’t heard anything from them, and about six months after—I remember because they called me on my birthday—they said, ‘Hey, are you still interested?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ‘Well, we want to put you in the police academy next month. Can you come up here today to sign papers?’ ‘I’m on my way.’

So that was in the fall of 1992, and I was stoked. I mean, they were giving me the opportunity I had hoped for, and I’ve been prepping for two years. I’ve been working out because it was pretty physically demanding, more so back then, and you had to pass physical fitness tests and all kinds of stuff. So in October 1992, I went to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Academy and graduated. In February of ’93 I started my field training with El Monte and really loved it there. It was a busy city with a lot of crime, so I got some great experience. We had formed a SWAT team, and I was one of the original members on the SWAT team. I was getting to teach, do some instruction, teach the other officers on some stuff. So I was a, I guess you’d say, kind of a rising star.

I got married—it was my ex-wife. She had two little kids, and she ended up pregnant with a third. And I thought, ‘Do I really want my kids growing up in Los Angeles?’ I was just kind of tired of LA and so I started looking, and as luck would have it, I attended a class with two Santa Rosa officers, and they were trying to recruit me. I knew nothing about Santa Rosa. Well, I had broken my hand fighting with a robber and so I had a few weeks off. I always loved San Francisco and the area. Well, I got six weeks off, so I’m gonna go visit my grandma in Nevada, and then I’m gonna head out to the Wine Country. I ended up camping at Armstrong Redwoods and then passed through Santa Rosa, and I just fell in love with it. It was kind of rolling around in the back of my head: ‘Well, maybe I should look at Santa Rosa PD.’ So I did.

There’s kind of this misconception that when you transfer, you just say, ‘Oh, I want to go here.’ But it’s not like that. You have to test all over again. You have to go through another background investigation, another polygraph, psychological exam, the whole process, just like you were brand spanking new.

So I went through all that, and they hired me, and within about a year, I got a special assignment as a neighborhood officer under a Department of Justice grant out in a neighborhood that was pretty crime ridden at the time. There a lot of open air drug dealing, prostitution, etc. and it kind of culminated in a clerk at the 7/11 store on Coffey Lane being murdered during a robbery. So I had a partner, and we formed a task force and started going after some of the slumlords, you know, mostly an immigrant population who were, for the most part, being victimized by gang members and people in the neighborhood. The slumlords were renting to anybody. They didn’t care. The apartments were dilapidated, in bad shape. So we started attacking that, making the landlords run screenings and making sure they’re not renting to drug dealers and people who shouldn’t really be there. It took a few years, but we got a national award for our efforts and kind of turned the neighborhood around. It was really rewarding. It was one of the best experiences of my career.

And then after that, I became a training officer with the department and was a member of the hostage negotiation team. Then I was promoted to Sergeant in 2005, and I believe it was around 2010 that I became responsible for all the training and internal affairs investigations. I rotated out of that assignment in 2014 and became part of our mobile field force, which is basically crowd control and dealing with civil unrest. I was promoted to lieutenant and was eventually named the tactical commander. So I was put in charge of the SWAT team, the hostage negotiations team and the mobile field force team, and spent four or five years as the lieutenant, and retired in February of 2020.

And then four or five months into retirement, I got a phone call from an HR person who contracts with the city of Sebastopol, and she basically said, ‘Hey, they’re looking for a second in command. The department’s going through some transition. Your name keeps popping up. Are you interested?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m retired, and I don’t want to mess up my retirement.’ She said, ‘Well, there’s an exemption right now because of COVID.’ So I started thinking about it and thought this is a great opportunity. Don Mort was the interim chief at the time, and he calls me up and says, ‘Hey, I got your paperwork sitting on my desk. Are you still interested?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ So we met for coffee, and next thing I knew I was here.

So I came here in September of 2020 as the Lieutenant, which is the second in command here, and Don and I went to work on kind of, you know, helping the department, fixing some things that we felt needed to be addressed. Morale was bad at the time. There were some employees who were considering completely getting out of law enforcement. So job one was kind of to just reinvigorate them and let them know they were supported and to put some structure in place. And we’ve been working on that ever since, and then they brought in Chief Kilgore. They hired him in the spring of 2021. I was his number two guy for about a year and a half, and then he decided to leave and go to Rohnert Park as the deputy chief. So the chief’s job opened up. I talked to a city leadership and they said, ‘Well, we, we’d love for you to be interim. We’re not sure what we’re going to do yet.’

And so I took it as an interim and then started thinking that this exemption is going to end. The way the state retirement system works is you can only stay under regular circumstances for 960 hours, which is about five and a half months. I know the department, I think we’re moving it in a good direction. So I spoke again with city leadership, and I said, if you’re interested, I am willing to un-retire and I’ll be your Chief of Police for two years. And the rest is history.

So two years is up, and I just realized, yes, you know, I think part of being a good leader is knowing when it’s time to go. Don’t stay too long. I feel like we’ve accomplished with my team most of what we set out to do, and I’m not getting any younger. I love this community. I fell in love with it from the day I came here. I love its uniqueness and how eclectic it is. It’s pretty unique. And we have a great Police Department. We’ve made great hires. It’s in a good spot, so it’s a good time for me to leave and hand it off to somebody else and see what they can do with it.

You said that when you were starting out, you were in the Police Academy. What does that entail?

It’s everything. It’s like going to school. It’s really like going to Police School. In California, everything that’s taught in the police academies is governed by a state commission and a board known as POST, which stands for Peace Officer Standards Training. So they have set out the curriculum. You study law, vehicle code, penal code, civil code, civil laws, laws of arrest. You are taught defensive tactics, where you learn how to properly arrest and control people and use techniques to avoid you getting hurt and avoid them being hurt if they resist. You learn about lethal force, you learn how to shoot, you learn how to drive, you learn first aid. It’s pretty comprehensive, and they cram a lot in about five months of time. So it’s basically like going to college. You get college credit for it as well.

When you graduate the police academy, you’re not done. That’s just the start of your training. They call it your basic training. Then you go to your department, you have to learn all the rules and regulations with your department and all of their procedures and all their practices. You’re assigned to a training officer. There’s different phases in the training program, so they kind of start you slow, but by the time you get into your fourth phase, you’re pretty much expected to be able to do everything on your own. There, you’re evaluated on a daily basis on a variety of things, from communication skills to tactics, to driving, to report writing, you name it. You’re getting a numerical grade every day, and you need to be at least at the 80% range consistently in almost all the categories before they will put you out on your own. It takes anywhere from 16 to 30 weeks to complete your field training. During that period of time, if you’re not being successful and meeting the standards and the evaluation criteria, you can be fired. You can be released. We can say, ‘Nope, you’re just not making it here, kid. Maybe try with another department.’ So it’s a long process, and it’s stressful.

When you’re released on your own, and you’re assigned to shift, at that point you get to function as a solo patrol officer. But again, you’re being watched, you’re being evaluated, not on a daily basis, necessarily, but you’re on a probationary period, which generally is about 18 months. If at any time you’re not meeting standards, you can be terminated with no notice. It’s progressive. They’ll start by saying, ‘Hey, you’re not doing well in this area. You need to improve. How can we help you? What resources can we provide you to help you get to where you need to be?’ But if the pattern continues, you’ll be released from probation and you’re out of a job. So it’s it’s very comprehensive, it’s very structured, and for a reason.

Police officers are given an inordinate amount of responsibility. We’re really about the only profession that has the authority to use deadly force and take a life if need be. Most cops go through their career and never have to face that, which is good. The job has gotten a lot more complicated from when I started. I mean, we were handwriting reports back when I started. And the more complicated ones, you would talk into a tape recorder and then a typist would transcribe it. Now, everybody has to be computer proficient. You used to hand-book evidence into our system to keep track of it, fill out paper forms. Now it’s all electronic. There are systems where you’re printing out barcodes or QR codes to track everything. Nowadays, every stop you make, you have to fill out racial identity and profiling information, list why you stopped the person, what your perceptions were, what your reason was. You have to justify everything you do now in these various computer systems.

When a cop pulls someone over, I imagine they have to strike a balance between being stern and unforgiving, but also refrain from being cruel. How do you teach that temperament, or how do you see that in the people that you’re training?

I think it’s important to understand when we pull a car over, we never know what we’re walking up on. There’s a lot of cops that get hurt or killed on traffic stops. You don’t know if you’ve pulled over the soccer mom or whether you’ve pulled over a mass murder. You really don’t. Most time you got a pretty good gauge. 99.9% of the time, it’s just some citizen who broke a traffic law. But when you approach the vehicle initially, you have to be very mindful of your safety and be able to react if something bad does happen. You never know what you’re going to encounter. There’s a lot of people with mental health issues now, and suddenly you’re just walking up to tell them, ‘Hey, you need to slow down,’ and they’re going to go off on you. So that kind that plays into that initial stern approach. Especially when you’re new, you have a really heightened sense of that, of your safety and oh my gosh, what am I walking up on? But what I think we’ve gotten better at is teaching people to find some of that balance, like, you always have to be aware of officer safety and be ready to react. You have the tools, you have the skill sets, and you have the mental capacity to remain safe, but we’re expected to be thinking on our feet as well and evaluating situations in split seconds, which is really the hardest thing about this job.

The public can be very unforgiving at times, and we’ve seen that cops get placed in horrible situations, and anytime they have to use deadly force, it’s a horrible thing, but then the monday morning quarterbacking starts. It’s tough, because if you’ve never pulled over a car full of gang members at midnight and had to react to a situation where potentially, your life is being threatened, then you really don’t have a full understanding of what cops go through. They expect us to be perfect. We’re human beings. We can’t be perfect, and we make mistakes, and when we make mistakes, we need to own our mistakes. As your career goes on, and you get some experience under belt, generally you have a pretty good idea if you’re walking up on the mom who’s in a hurry to pick up her kid from soccer practice, and you don’t have to be as firm, so to speak. You try to start off on a somewhat of a more casual, interactive type basis. Try to be a little friendlier.

It used to be that cops had this persona, and it goes back way before your time. There was a TV show called “Dragnet,” and they would say, ‘Give me the facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.’ Well, you’re not going to win a lot of popularity contests for that. So I think we’ve gotten better about, you know, approaching somebody and saying, ‘Hey, how’s it going today?’ Just start off at a low level, try to deescalate things, and if they start getting into like, ‘I don’t know why you’re pulling me over’ we can say, ‘Okay, hold on. Let me explain it to you.’ We can use a softer tone and take the time to explain what you’re doing and why you stopped and why that might be dangerous without lecturing them. If a ticket’s appropriate, there’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘Listen, I’m going to have to write you a citation. I know it’s not pleasant. Let me explain the process to you and give them some options.’ That can help put them at ease.

Let’s face it, anytime the red light goes on behind you, even as a police officer, that makes me nervous. And that’s a completely normal reaction. Anytime people see us in our uniform with all our equipment and our gun and our baton and our taser and all that, it’s a little off-putting, so that’s why we try to get out in the community and go to events and show people we’re just normal human beings. Man, we’re just trying to live our lives like you are. This is our job. We’re not anybody you need to be afraid of. If you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about. We try to do things to demonstrate that we’re not these horrible people that some might perceive us to be.

You mentioned the morale of the department being down in 2020. I can imagine what sparked that.

It was a lot of things. The Black Lives Matter movement happened. We had some horrible situations where police officers, frankly, committed crimes and people died as a result of some police actions when it didn’t need to happen. Those horrible situations kind of drove the “Defund the Police” movement and everything else, and cops were being vilified. I felt it when I was retired, and my wife called me on it at one point. She said, ‘Hey, you seem irritated.’ I said, ‘Well, I am, you know, I’m watching this on the news every day. They’re painting all of us with a broad brush because of something that happened 2,000 miles away.’ We’re not like that here. Never in my career have I ever seen an officer do something that horrific. Most of us are out here trying to do the right thing for the right reasons and help our communities and take bad people off the streets that are predators. Now they’re basically saying that we’re all a bunch of murderers and that we’re abusing our powers, and that’s not what we’re about. So it was frustrating, and I think the staff here felt it, coupled with the fact that there had been a lot of transition here with the leadership. So morale was bad, and people were starting to question, ‘Do I really want to be in law enforcement anymore? Do I really want to be a police officer? Do I want to be a dispatcher? You know, the public hates us.’

With the public being so critical, you don’t want to step out of bounds. But you also don’t want to lose your power dynamic as a police officer, right? You do want to have that threat always available, where it’s like, ‘You can’t speak to me like you can speak to anybody else.’ How do you maintain that dynamic?

Well, the reality in our society is actually that they can they can call you every name in the book, and the expectation is for us to not take the bait and not overreact to that. It’s in the Constitution. And it doesn’t mean that we’re powerless to retort back and say, ‘Hey, you need to stop. I understand you’re upset. Can I and try to engage in some dialogue and try to deescalate the situation?’ The truth of the matter is, our authority is granted by law and it’s codified, so that is always in our back pocket. I think people know that.

I think what I’ve really seen change is there used to be an inherent respect. I’m hoping it wasn’t fear-based. I think it was more of a respect-based thing that people really appreciated what we did. And that’s devolved to the point now where there are people out there who have no respect for us. They think that we’re evil, we’re horrible, we’re thugs, we have no right to do anything. And so that’s made it harder on police. It used to be that if you gave a directive to somebody, they pretty much would comply. Now they’ll push back, and they’ll push back hard, and that’s where the de-escalation comes in, where you have to explain, ‘Listen, I appreciate what you’re saying. I know that’s your opinion, but here’s what the law says, and here’s what’s going to happen if you continue.’ So that’s changed a lot.

And the other thing that I’ve really seen change is in regards to any time we use force. I think there used to be kind of an understanding that there were times where police officers had to use force. Where I’ve seen it get to now is there’s a lot of people who think we have no right to even put hands on people, even if we’re arresting them. They violated the law and we’re about to take them into arrest and they struggle, and whether it turns into a wrestling match or whether we end up having to punch them or strike them with the baton or force them to the ground, there’s people basically who will push back now, and you’ll see bystanders doing it. ‘You can’t touch them! That’s police brutality!’ No, it’s not police brutality. We’re overcoming their resistance to make a lawful arrest. There’s pushback from the suspects, there’s pushback from the community, and it never looks good. It’s never pretty. You know, nobody wants to see a uniformed police officer punch somebody or pull a stick out and have to hit them, but there’s times that that’s necessary.

Are you worried that with the police losing that sort of authority or respect that society will turn into chaos? Do you have thoughts about that?

I have some thoughts but I don’t know if I would characterize them as fears. We’ve seen the weakening of some of our criminal statutes, which has led to things like organized robbery crews, mass car burglaries and things like that. But also, what I’ve noticed over the past couple of years is a bigger segment of the population now is recognizing that, yeah, we’ve lost some of our law and order, and now the support for police being able to do their job is on the upswing. There’s a saying in this business that the pendulum swings. It goes one way, stays there for a bit, and then some reasonableness comes back. Then it can tend to go too far in the other way and at some point you get some homeostasis and some sense of balance.

I do believe that probably over the past decade, we’ve gone a little bit too far with some of the decriminalization efforts to lessen the prison population. We have some dangerous people roaming our streets that, in my opinion, had no business getting out early. There has to be consequences for actions, and I think we’ve lost some of that, and with that, we’ve lost some safety in our communities, and we’ve seen it nationwide, but we’ve also seen over the past couple years, even as a result of some of the “defund” movements and things like that, you saw crime rates starting to spike in a lot of the jurisdictions that started cutting funding to the police. The consequences were a rise in officers saying, ‘I’m not getting the support from the community. I’m leaving the profession.’ Mass vacancies in big cities. It’s hard finding people who want to do this job anymore, and we’ve seen a lot of those places flip the other way and say, ‘Oh, we need to hire more police.’ We need police on our streets. And people in a lot of these communities that are affected by it are saying the same thing, whether they’re BIPOC communities or others. They’re like, ‘No, we want to see cops. We need them to be able to enforce the law and make arrests, and we have to start locking up some of these criminals. They can’t keep getting away with this.’

You know, we’ve seen situations out here where we’ll contact somebody and they’re on four different probations. They’ve been convicted, essentially, of four different crimes. Well, a condition of probation is agreeing that you’re going to obey all laws and you’re going to behave yourself, otherwise you get locked up and potentially sent to prison. And their probations aren’t getting violated, and they’re committing another crime, so they just put them on another probation. That’s ludicrous. That’s absolutely ludicrous. So we’re seeing things tighten back up a little bit and see more support for law enforcement, but I think it’s always going to wax and wane. It’s just the nature of society, and our role in society as police continues to evolve and change, and we have to continue to have change ourselves.

There was a well-known situation in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the Summer of 2020 that got a lot of media attention and later sparked massive protests. The officers were called by a woman saying that her boyfriend was there and he wasn’t allowed to be on the property. The man already had a warrant for his arrest on sexual assault and domestic abuse related charges. The officers show up and the guy is being erratic and heads towards his car, opens the door and goes to grab something. The police officer doesn’t know what it is, and basically unloads a round. I remember the public reaction to that was to vilify the police officer, but it was hard for me to tell if the officer did anything wrong or not. What do you teach the police officer to do in that situation?

Our penal code has been modified now where it it has to be so unequivocal, so clear, so irrefutable, that your life may be in danger—that’s when you’re authorized to use deadly force. So in this particular case, you have a domestic violence abuser. He’s gone to the ex’s home. He’s reaching under the seat to get something. Who knows what. Maybe it’s a cell phone. It’s an ID. It used to be that if, in your mind, you believe that he was retrieving a weapon to potentially use deadly force against you, you likely would be deemed justified. With the modifications now to the penal code, it’s changed so that now you would have to wait and start giving commands or directives. Let him know: ‘Hey, you need to quit reaching under the seat. You may be shot.’ If you have the ability and time to do that. If he continues to do it, you can’t just fire because you don’t know what he’s reaching for. So we do scenario trainings with similar things like that. And some of it’s on computer simulators, where if they shoot too soon, then basically you’d have to say, ‘Hey, that’s unjustified. You’re probably going to go to state prison for doing that.’ Now it’s more like you have to get your firearm out, be prepared to react, and the minute you identify that they may have a weapon and that they’re going to use it on you, it’s imminent. At that point, he reaches under the seat, raises his arm up, you see they have a firearm and they’re spinning towards you. Well, it’s a split second. I mean, we’re talking nanoseconds where once you see that gun, for that person to just go bang. It could hit you. So we teach them to wait, evaluate, if you can identify it’s an eminent threat and they’re not ceasing and stopping and following your commands, then you’re good to shoot. So there’s a lot of training you have to build their confidence, their proficiency with their tools, including their firearm. We’re giving them situations like this and seeing how they react to it, trying to put some stress into the situation.

Could you give me an example of a time when your decision-making skills were challenged?

I can. So I was a young officer and I observed a gang member as I was patrolling in a neighborhood one day. I watched him knock this guy off of a bicycle, and he took the bike from him. It’s a strong-arm robbery. So I start giving chase, and as he’s running away from me, he pulls the firearm out of his waistband and he’s holding it and the gun is going up and down, and he’s looking back over his shoulder. So I had drawn my gun, and it was decision-making time, because he could have easily kind of spun back and just started randomly firing, but he was running, so I took that into consideration, and I didn’t shoot. I continued to give chase, and he had jumped up on top of a fence at one point, and I was behind him, and he had the gun in his right hand. He was straddling the fence, and he looked back over at his left shoulder, and I had a good shot, and likely would have been completely justified in shooting him at that point. But I held off, and he looked at me, and, literally, as I was making that decision, he threw the gun away, and then he jumped into a backyard. So then I continued chasing and I remember kind of cautiously peeking over the fence, and I saw him hiding under like a picnic table in the backyard or something. So then I climbed up on the fence, and I held him at gunpoint, and I called for help.

But that was challenging. You know, it was, ‘Do I shoot him? Is he going to shoot at me?’ And you’re having to process all this information while you’re running and you’re out of breath. And, obviously, I decided I didn’t need to shoot, and it was the right decision at the right time. I’m still here to talk about it, but he just as easily could have swung his arm to the left and fired a round at me, and I could have been killed. But something you know, innately told me at that time, no, just wait. Just wait. And those are the types of situations that it’s tough to teach. You just don’t know how you’re going to react until you’re under that stress.