After about two months on the job, Eureka’s interim chief of police, Todd Jarvis, sat down for an interview with the Outpost to talk about goals, challenges and the future of the Eureka Police Department. 

Jarvis took on the role of interim chief of police in January following the retirement of Chief Steve Watson last November after nearly 17 years with the department, four of them as chief. Captain Brian Stephens briefly stepped in as acting chief of police before Jarvis took the job.

Before our interview Tuesday morning, Jarvis made it clear that he would not comment on the ongoing investigation into a series of vile text messages sent within a squad of six Eureka police officers roughly one year ago. “It is not appropriate to talk about right now. It is an ongoing investigation,” he said.

The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your experience in law enforcement?

I was born and raised in San Diego, California, and I joined the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) at age 20 to be a community service officer. I grew up in the [SDPD] as my father [worked and] retired from there. I spent about eight months investigating collisions as a community service officer and then – once I became old enough – I was hired as a recruit and then went on in my sworn law enforcement career. I eventually retired in November of 2019 as the executive assistant chief of police which is the number two position of that department and responsible for running the daily operations of the [SDPD].

Throughout my career – I was there 35 and a half years – I had the opportunity to work just about every aspect of law enforcement, from patrol, traffic investigations, to administration training. I’ve been blessed to have a very broad base career. I never expected when I started that career that I would go to the FBI Academy and spend 10 weeks with law enforcement leaders and professionals from around the world to learn from them and to teach with them. I’ve been blessed. I’ve had a great career.

I was pretty happily retired, quite frankly, when I got a call from former Eureka Police Chief Andy Mills, who was a colleague at [SPD] and a longtime friend. …I was splitting my time between San Diego and a little vacation place on the Colorado River in Arizona and I was out in Arizona when I got a text from Chief Mills that said, “Hey, would you be interested in an interim job?” I said that I’d be interested in talking to someone. I talked to Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery within a few minutes and a couple days later I was going through the process to come up here. 

As I said, I retired in November of 2019 and we all know what happened a couple of months later when the COVID pandemic hit our country. A few months after that, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I started getting text messages from a lot of people that I had worked with [at SDPD] and from people from other departments around the country saying, “Chief, you’re so lucky to be retired,” but I didn’t feel that way. I felt like I have all this experience and passion for this profession and I’m sitting on the couch watching my city and other cities burn. I kind of knew then that I wasn’t done with this calling, I was just waiting for the right direction. Little did I know it would be in Eureka, California. …

How are you liking Eureka so far?

I like it. I like outdoor activities and there’s plenty to do here as far as exploring the county’s natural beauty. It’s amazing.

The people have been very welcoming. I’ve met so many nice people already internally here in the department and in the community. It seems like everywhere I go people are stopping and we’re talking. Whether it’s a clerk at a department store to people I’ve met on the street, everybody’s just a different level friendly here. I’ve appreciated that very much coming from a bigger city and after having lived in San Diego for the majority of my life.

What are some of the challenges the Eureka Police Department is currently facing? What are some of the department’s strengths?

Probably the biggest challenge that I’ve been faced with from the day I arrived is staffing. We are down 11 officer positions right now. We have three in the academy, but they don’t graduate until June and then we need to train them in the field. Best case scenario, they’re not going to be in the field until October.

[The staffing challenges] weigh heavily on the people that are out doing the job. We’ve gone to a different shift structure and they’re working a lot, they’re having to work overtime, and people are getting tired. One of my main priorities is trying to get some relief for them. We’re looking for some immediate relief with lateral officers who are looking to get out of the big city but still want to do big city type policing – which we definitely have the opportunity for here – who also want to raise their families or live in a different environment. …But staffing is probably the biggest challenge we have right now and everything else just kind of segues from that.

The strength of this department comes from the dedication of the people that work here. …A lot of our staff are from here, they grew up here, they have friends here, a lot of them know everyone by name and that is a big plus. …

I came from a big police department where I was responsible for 3,000-plus employees, and I will tell you that I am working just as hard here with 70 employees as I was with 3,000. I found that everyone here is wearing four or five hats and they are very well versed in department operations because they have four or five collateral duties, whereas in a larger department you generally have one. And so what I’m finding [here] is a whole new level of commitment. The people that are working here, this core group that’s still here that hasn’t left in the last year, are here because they want to be here and because they are dedicated to this community and this department.

I understand you worked closely with the San Diego Citizens Advisory Board on Police/Community Relations. Can you tell me about that experience?

There are two boards in San Diego, and I think you might be asking more about the review board who looked at complaints and things, but there is also a Citizens Advisory Board on Community Relations and that reports back to the mayor and I was a liaison to that board. …

I had a great experience while I was there. By attending the meetings every other Tuesday, I was then able to sit down with the chief of police on Wednesday morning and talk about the issues that were discussed the previous night. Often we were able to make immediate course corrections or changes or recommendations before they even had to go through a whole process to get to the mayor. …I think it allowed us to be very responsive to the community, much faster than I think they thought, because we kind of took some of the work away by getting it done so quickly.

The other board that I sat in on alternate Tuesdays was the Community Review Board on Police Practices [which] worked closely with our internal affairs unit and reviewed all the citizen complaints that came in. They had several different teams and each team would be assigned different complaints. They would do a thorough review, they would have all the same information that the internal affairs sergeant who investigated the complaint would have, they would have access to the same evidence, all the interviews, and then they would present to their board in closed session about what they had learned and make a recommendation on whether to accept the findings. …

It gave me a great opportunity to work very closely with some very dedicated volunteers. We did not always agree and, quite frankly, some of those meetings were pretty long because we get people with agendas and it’s not necessarily an unbiased, impartial review of police reporting. That was one thing that I talked about at the Eureka City Council meeting a few weeks ago. It’s very important as we move into that process here in Eureka that the people that sit on that board are there for the right reason. We are committed as a profession to do the right thing and we need independent civilian oversight to be a legitimate profession. I truly believe that and I said that many, many times in the meetings in San Diego and I said it at council here. I welcome it, but let’s include people who genuinely want to make this a better place, not those who have an ax to grind against law enforcement because it’s not productive.

Can you expand on how you will apply that knowledge to policing here in Eureka and what has your experience been in working with Eureka’s Citizen’s Advisory Board thus far?

I’ll take every bit of that experience that I had and try to apply it here in the most positive way. I have already been able to provide quite a bit of input to the city manager and the assistant city manager as they were beginning to draft this process and I saw a few things that I said, “Oh, maybe we can do this a little differently based on lessons I’ve already learned and experience that I had.” They were very receptive to that.

Drug use is a big issue in Eureka, specifically the rise of fentanyl use. [The Outpost] ran a story recently about the tremendous uptick in fentanyl-related overdose deaths in Humboldt County in 2021. What is EPD doing to tackle this international crisis locally?

It is an international issue but it affects everyone in this country and particularly in this county. …We still have an officer assigned to the drug task force as a special agent. That’s a force multiplier for us because it brings agents from all over the county and into Eureka when need be. We have officers in this department who are very well versed in narcotics enforcement and doing the daily.

We had 44 Narcan deployments last year. I was unable to get the number [for this timeframe last year] but I know it’s going to be a higher percentage this year already. …Thank goodness that we have it and that our officers are trained and they are aware of what’s happening. I understand a lot of our officers are even carrying it off-duty because they’re seeing people [overdosing] at the mall or wherever they are out with their families and making some saves.

We are relentlessly – as our resources allow – trying to get fentanyl in particular off the streets of Eureka because we’ve seen the damage that it does. But it’s not just a police problem, it’s a societal problem. I’m not as well versed yet in all the resources available in Eureka but I know there are a lot of dedicated people working on the addiction side of it. We’re doing our part to take as much of it off the streets as we can, and we’re making a dent, but it’s a lot. …

Was there anything else related to the prevalence of drug use that you wanted to touch on?

It’s amazingly visible here. I mean, I can’t walk into the gym without smelling marijuana. It’s a different culture up here for sure. It’s really what I would expect in a society that has less strict repercussions. It’s harder on us to get help for people when there aren’t repercussions. It doesn’t surprise me when I see people lighting up a pipe when I’m driving down the street in a police car because they know that repercussions are pretty minimal right now. …We’re working within the laws that are provided by the legislature, and I think within that vein, officers are doing everything they possibly can, but it’s a different culture up here in Humboldt County.

Another local issue is homelessness. Many of the homeless folks living in Eureka are struggling with mental illness and/or addiction. Can you talk about the strategies EPD is taking and will take to work with other local organizations to alleviate and address homelessness in Eureka?

The strategies that we’re employing right now have been going on for a bit with [EPD’s Community Safety Engagement Team] (CSET). We are asking for a little extra funding out of Measure Z to get a clinical psychologist or caseworker working with us because that’s a pretty common model in California. …

I’m very happy with the progress that has been made here and I’m impressed by the things that are happening here with some of the outreach. Having an officer assigned to the mental illness aspect of this is quite a commitment when you look at our staffing, but it’s been very beneficial when you look at the number of commitments and contacts that are made by CSET. … Right now I’m really focusing on building those relationships internally.

I’m soon going to be focusing externally on meeting with community stakeholders and finding out exactly what their expectations are of us. …I do have a lot of experience in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, and the addiction side of it in San Diego. As the Executive Assistant Chief of Police, I recommended and implemented an entire division to deal with homelessness and quality of life. We took all the officers from around the city that were working on this and we put them under one roof and we centralized the response. I learned a lot doing that and there’s some of that that we can do here on a smaller scale.

As you just said, you are still getting to know this community, but can you talk more about what you would like to contribute to this community? What is your favorite aspect of policing?

What I want to do for this community is provide leadership and direction for a very strong professional police department. I want to provide a fresh set of eyes on this police department, on this community, issues that we face and bring some of the experience that I was blessed to gain throughout my career to Eureka. What I don’t want to do is try to turn Eureka into a big city. That’s not why I’m here. The experience I had in a big city can help me here but it has to be done in a small-town manner that is acceptable by the department and the citizens we serve.

I want to bring that voice of reason to the community and I want to be a strong role model for the people that work here. I feel very, very strongly the police officers are here to serve and that’s one of the reasons I am so happy to be here. …There have been a lot of strong leaders in this department that have started programs that people probably take for granted by now because it’s always been there, but they’re making a difference. Things could definitely be a lot worse. …

You ask what my favorite part of my profession is and sometimes that really changes day to day. As a younger man, I loved being out in the field and chasing bad guys. As I progressed in my career, I really enjoyed the lifelong learning and the leadership part of it. I love leading people and trying to make people’s day better, as well as treating people with empathy and being out in the community. I think one of my favorite parts of policing right now is just getting out and meeting people and talking to people. Letting them see police professionals, not as the evil that maybe they’re seeing on the evening news every night, but human beings that care and are here for a reason.

I don’t want this to sound overly dramatic…but the “Thin Blue Line” has become a symbol of hate, unfortunately, because of some people carrying that flag, but to me, that Thin Blue Line is really those of us who have chosen this profession to stand in between good people and people that will do them harm. …It’s a noble profession and I’m honored to be back in it. …It’s important to me for people to understand that [our officers are] risking their lives every day they walk out this door and I want them to feel appreciated.

Is there anything else you’d like to add or share with our community?

I want to thank the community for not only the welcoming I’ve had here but for the way that the police department here feels supported. Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t pop in and bring something to share with the officers. Whether it’s doughnuts or a box of cookies — that means a lot to us.

I want the community to know that I have expectations of all of us, not only in law enforcement, but it’s a shared responsibility. I would really like to challenge the community to step up and to help us. If you see something wrong, let us know. I can’t fix something if I don’t know what’s broken. I’ve met a lot of people who have just popped in to meet the chief, and if I can fit them in I’m happy to do that.

Do you plan to apply for the permanent position of police chief? 

There has not been an announcement. I would certainly be interested in continuing that conversation with the city manager. I’ve really fallen in love with the department and the people in this community. Let’s keep the conversation going.