Redding Police Chief Brian Barner speaks to the Shasta County Board of Supervisors at a law enforcement summit on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe.
Shasta County supervisors got an earful from law enforcement leaders Thursday in what amounted to a groundbreaking public safety summit.
Their presentations took up more time than anticipated, so Board Chairman Kevin Crye announced a second forum will be arranged soon – one likely in the evening – to pick up where the discussion left off.
Crye, who arranged the special session, described it as an unprecedented opportunity to have all the top officials gather in one room at the same time.
Redding Police Chief Brian Barner, Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson, District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett, Court Executive Officer Melissa Fowler-Bradley, Public Defender Ashley Jones and Chief Probation Officer Tracie Neal gave presentations during the meeting that lasted more than three hours.
They said they all deal with similar challenges in keeping the county’s criminal justice system intact in the face of staff shortages and relatively low pay for their employees. The officials also cited high turnover and hiring hardships that make their roles difficult.
Crye’s overarching goal is to come up with ways to protect the community from crime through the involvement of the county, cities and related agencies.
“If we get all these individuals that were here today presenting in one room … we can collectively work together toward an outcome that we all want,” Crye said.
“What we know is the state isn’t giving money out, the federal government is going to be getting tighter and it’s really, really important that we pool our resources together and make this community as safe as possible,” he said.
Redding Police Department
RPD Chief Brian Barner said his department has an officer shortage that he anticipates will get worse this spring and that his No. 1 challenge is the budget.
The chief noted how his department has a current $43 million budget but at the same time the city is facing a $5 million deficit.
“That has a detrimental effect on the police department because we are a very big portion of (the overall city) budget,” he said.
When fully staffed, the RPD has 122 sworn officers but right now the force is down 10 police officer positions. He expects to have 17 vacancies by May, partly owing to several officers being hired away soon.
“That’s a huge number,” Barner said, explaining the graveyard shift for Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays has 12 officers. “So 17 officers are more than an entire shift for the police department,” he said.
To keep the patrol staff at 50, Barner said he’s had to reduce the crisis intervention response team and traffic force by two officers each. Reassignments mean the park ranger staff will be down two officers come May 1.
On the upside, Barner said all the city’s crime numbers dropped in 2024, except for homicides. He credits the detective division, though, with arresting all the suspects in the six homicides.
“Everybody was in custody no matter where they went. We went to Oregon. We went to Nevada and we brought everybody back that committed violent crimes and murders in the city of Redding and put them in custody,” he said.
To illustrate how busy his staff is, Barner said his department responded to about 109,000 calls for service in 2024, which he said amounts to 299 calls a day or 12 calls every hour that officers answered.
Barner said police made just over 11,000 arrests and booked 3,851 people into the Shasta County Jail. With total bookings numbering about 7,800, Barner said, “We’re the No. 1 customer for Sheriff (Michael) Johnson and his staff.”
A survey done as part of a strategic plan let the department know what matters most to residents.
The No. 1 concern was transient homeless camps.
“People were tired of that and wanted it cleaned up,” Barner said, adding that residents especially worry about fires starting in greenbelts from homeless encampments.
Retail theft was the second-biggest complaint.
“Retail theft was out of control,” Barner said. “Everybody would go to Lowe’s and Safeway and Raley’s, and people were walking out with items. Stores were allowing it to happen.”
The chief said the police are now doing an excellent job controlling store theft now that Prop. 36 has re-criminalized lower-level offenses.
Traffic was the third-highest complaint.
Barner made the point that his officers and fellow employees have a stake in making the city safe because this is their home, unlike elsewhere.
“We live in this community. Our kids go to school in this community and that’s the difference that I say when you look at other agencies in the Bay Area and in L.A. is we don’t live 45 minutes away. We don’t commute. We live in this community and it’s important for us to be part of the community and to have a safe community for our families,” Barner said.
Shasta County Sheriff’s Office
Sheriff Michael Johnson, with a department budget of roughly $77 million and 232 full-time employees, described his struggles.
He said his department received about 50,000 calls for service last year while his office submitted about 1,400 cases for prosecution. Meanwhile, the coroner’s unit oversaw 538 cases.
Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson describes his department’s struggles during a Board of Supervisors meeting on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe.
Johnson said his top operational hurdle is dealing with jail capacity.
“Without a doubt, finding room in the jail, prioritizing who’s going to stay in jail, who’s going to be released, is a stress on our staff and a stress on our community,” he said.
Adding to the challenges is what he called a “horrible” records management system the county acquired a few years ago that’s also shared with the Redding and Anderson police.
“We got a box of rocks. It’s the worst system I have ever worked in, in law enforcement,” the sheriff said. “It’s causing tremendous amounts of problems across the board.”
He said the system also has caused problems for the district attorney’s office, the probation department and the jail.
“We hope to go to a new system down the road,” the sheriff said. “That’s going to have to be worked on if we’re going to better the criminal justice system at all.”
Maintaining his workforce, including community service and support officers, and records and clerical support staff, is another issue because counties elsewhere pay higher wages. He said Shasta County is a training ground for those types of jobs.
“Staffing for me is always a problem. It is for everybody. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes it’s going good. Sometimes it’s going bad,” he said.
“We don’t pay very well comparatively to other agencies and other corporations even,” Johnson said. “We train them and they get good at it and they’re out the door.”
He says having support staff handle paperwork is crucial to his organization. “Without these people, we can’t survive,” he said.
Johnson said he’s been focused on recruitment and retention plans for his patrol staff and especially in the jail.
One way he’s tried to free up jail space is through out-of-county contracts to place as many inmates as he can with jails in other counties.
He’d like to see fewer people end up with long-term jail sentences. Instead, put them in state custody when appropriate or have offenders placed in alternative programs.
“Let’s push and give them prison sentences when they need it and send them off to prison. If not, let’s send them to alternative custody where we can ankle-monitor them, supervise them and get them into programs, but let’s not have people sit for two, three years in the county jail,” Johnson said.
Recurring arrests and prosecution of repeat offenders is another thorn in the side of local law enforcement.
“In every agency it’s the same. You deal with about 10 percent of that population over and over and over until you can get to the point where you can get them prison sentences,” Johnson said.
“Those are the people that impact my jail capacity and jail space, and those are all reasons why we need to come up with solutions, which is much of the reason why I propose that alternative custody program,” he said.
District Attorney’s Office
District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett said in her hourlong presentation that staffing is her No. 1 issue.
She said her department has 28 prosecutor positions with six vacancies in the prosecutor unit. Her office also employs many other workers, such as investigators and advocates working in a crime victim assistance program. She said their workload is greater and their pay is lower than in comparable counties.
“Similar counties have double our resources or they have significantly smaller caseloads than we do,” Bridgett said.
Shasta County District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett gives a detailed presentation at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe.
She provided the board with a workload staffing analogy, comparing her office to a fire response.
“Shasta County is fighting a fire with like one fireman and one fire hose compared to comprable counties that have everything we would want to fight a fire. They’ve got the helicopter, multiple fire people, personnel, everything,” she said.
Her team filed 6,580 cases submitted by various agencies last year, leading to 42 jury trials. Of those, 34 were felony jury trials with 29 resulting in guilty verdicts, four returning not guilty verdicts and one hung jury.
Bridgett said the 42 jury trials is a pretty small percentage of the number of cases filed because “a vast majority of cases enter plea bargaining, they enter a sentence, they have some type of resolution.”
Adding to the office’s workload is the RPD’s recent adoption of body cams, which Bridgett said is causing “an exponential amount of work that’s been added to our desk.” The Sheriff’s Office will soon follow with its own body cams.
Bridgett said many other counties are able to hire 10 to 20 analysts or investigative techs to review footage while her office did not get additional help.
Bridgett told the board she believes it’s “a good thing that they’re having body-cam footage, but it’s important for you guys to understand the real-life impact that that has on our ability to quickly process and handle the … additional responsibility that’s been put on us and will be coming with the Sheriff’s Office as well.”
She said her office needs more attorneys as well as five more secretaries and two paralegals.
“I’m not expecting that you’re going to give us another 30 attorneys and 16 more secretaries so we can match, right now, the counties that have the workload that we have, but we need to start getting there,” she told the supervisors.
A new time-consuming requirement from the state is to follow race-blind guidelines when cases are filed to reduce any unconscious bias.
A software program the office uses removes racial identifiers in reports.
She said the software goes through a report to remove references on whether a person was “white, black, Hispanic” and replaces them with Person 1, 2, 3, 4. “This like goes to dogs, too,” she said. “It’s everything that gets scrubbed.”
“We have to re-review the case and see if our decision would’ve been different,” she said of the extra steps.
Shasta County Superior Court
Court Executive Officer Melissa Fowler-Bradley explained to the board that Shasta County Superior Court is not part of the county government but part of California’s judicial branch, co-equal with the state’s legislative and executive branches.
Court Executive Officer Melissa Fowler-Bradley talks to supervisors about the Shasta County Superior Court during the Board of Supervisors meeting on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe.
Fowler-Bradley said the court saw 44,802 new cases in fiscal year 2023-24 while completing 36,546 cases. Those filings range from criminal and civil to small claims, probate and more.
“Our workload per judicial position places us fourth highest in the state out of 58 Superior Courts in California,” she said.
Her personal opinion is that the Shasta County Superior Court needs more judges to help with the workload.
However, it’s the state Legislature that decides the number of judges in each county based on input from the Judicial Council.
She said the Legislature passed Senate Bill 75 in 2023 that determined the need for 26 new judgeships statewide, but as yet didn’t provide funding for them.
She said Shasta County could get another judge, but it’s up to the state Legislature to pay for it.
“If the bill is ultimately funded, Shasta’s workload would be prioritized along with the 57 other Superior Courts and we could receive another judge. There is no other way to add a judge in Shasta County,” Fowler-Bradley said.
Shasta County Public Defender
Public Defender Ashley Jones said her office received 5,000 new matters in fiscal year 2023/24, not including conflicts of interest where private attorneys were assigned, when the office already had 6,000 active cases.
She said her office accepted over 1,300 felony cases, 3,100 misdemeanors and took on over 600 other cases such as probation and parole violations.
“Our county as a whole is doing the work of counties that are two-and-a-half times our size,” Jones said.
Public Defender Ashley Jones appears before the Board of Supervisors on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe.
Based on a staff analysis of a national study, Jones said Shasta County should have 56 deputy public defender positions while it struggles with 20. Jones thinks 56 is an overestimate and that 38 is a better, conservative number to handle the work.
She said her office had a tremendous turnover last year by losing nine attorneys. She now has six vacancies although one attorney is expected to start this month. Training also is a factor.
“You can’t teach experience. That only comes with time,” she said.
Recruitment has been very difficult, she said, because the starting salaries for a public defender in Sacramento County are $44,000 above Shasta’s starting pay.
Also, Sacramento County’s salary scale tops out at more than $60,000 than Shasta’s.
In addition to offering competitive pay, Jones would like to upgrade hiring bonuses, adding that promotional opportunities are needed for her support staff.
“They are the backbone of the department who are ensuring the attorneys can do their job. When those positions top out at a salary where you can serve in a restaurant and make more money, it’s hard to keep people,” she said.
Shasta County Probation Department
Chief Probation Officer Tracie Neal said one of her challenges is burdensome legislation, a similar complaint from Sheriff Johnson.
“State legislation every year continues to place more responsibilities and duties on probation and does not fund or appropriately fund the duties,” Neal said.
Another stumbling block is the case management system they began using in fall of 2021.
“(We) are still working through interfaces, improvements and glitches in technology. This impacts efficiency and places additional workloads on staff,” she said.
Chief Probation Officer Tracie Neal speaks from the podium during the Board of Supervisors meeting on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe.
Places to live are another challenge for their homeless clients.
“(There’s) limited housing for the population we serve – (it’s) not available as well as it’s not affordable,” she said.
“When offenders are homeless, it’s harder for them to engage in structured treatment and supportive services, which increases the likelihood that they will engage in criminal activity impacting the community public safety and leading back to jail,” Neal said.
Solutions sought
Crye said one reason to schedule a follow-up public safety session was that Thursday’s presentations likely will lead to in-depth questions from the public. It’s relevant to keep the conversations current since the county and cities will have upcoming budget hearings.
Shasta County Board of Supervisors Chairman Kevin Crye conducts a public safety summit on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025. Photo by Mike Chapman for A News Cafe.
“I think now is the time to collaboratively talk amongst the various jurisdictions about how we’re going to spread that money because we can talk all day long about challenges we face financially but the reality is, there’s only so much money,” Crye said.
One avenue for possible budget-sharing among the county and cities was Sheriff Johnson’s mention of expanding alternative custody programs and building a corrections and rehabilitation campus.
“I’ll say to this point, the county has been super supportive. The city of Redding has been very cooperative in moving this forward. We’re looking for that piece of property, that 90 acres, and hopefully we will get something up and go over that very soon,” Johnson said.
The 10 or so public speakers thanked the board and the presenters and held out hope for the future.
“We have an opportunity here I think to do a quality-of-life change here in Shasta County that we have not seen in decades,” Steve Kohn said.
Another speaker, Jeff Gorder, asked the board not to politicize the issue.
At the close of the meeting, Supervisor Allen Long noted how he and Supervisor Matt Plummer are working on a strategic plan for the county that involves public safety.
“My hope is that public safety comes out at the top of our strategic plan and then we can allocate resources according to the strategic plan and the priorities for our county,” Long said.
