California police chief put on leave in 2021 for racist post and anti-gay slurs, NAACP says
A Sacramento County sheriff’s captain who served nearly 18 months as Rancho Cordova’s police chief retired last year amid an investigation into her alleged sharing of a racist meme and use of homophobic slurs, the local NAACP chapter said this week.
Kate Adams retired in September as chief of the Rancho Cordova Police Department, which operates under a contract with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office and is staffed by its deputies.
Betty Williams, president of the Greater Sacramento chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a letter to Sheriff Scott Jones that she has been made aware that Adams was “placed on an extended administrative leave” before her retirement.
The extended leave, Williams wrote, came after Adams sent “racially charged” pictures via text message “to many other Sheriff’s Department employees.”
The NAACP letter, dated Thursday and forwarded Friday morning to The Sacramento Bee, includes a copy of the racist image in question.
It shows a white man, wearing sunglasses and holding a beer, spraying a Black child in the back of the head with a garden hose.
The caption reads: “Go be a n----- somewhere else.”
“It cannot be classified as a joke,” Williams wrote. “It’s an obvious racist depiction.”
Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Rodney Grassmann said the county hired an independent investigator to review the allegations.
“Allegations came to our attention that warranted an investigation,” Grassmann wrote. “It was the Sheriff’s decision to have county counsel appoint an outside investigator to investigate the allegation, to maintain independence and avoid any appearance of internal bias.
“Therefore, since it was not our investigation, we cannot comment further.”
A Sacramento County spokesperson in an emailed response said the outside investigation concluded, and that the involved employee retired voluntarily before the Sheriff’s Office could formally hand down discipline.
“At the Sheriff’s Office request, Sacramento County Counsel hired an independent contractor to investigate the source of the picture that is depicted,” the county said in its statement. “The investigation was completed, and the employee who was the subject of the investigation voluntarily retired before the Sheriff’s Office could determine and implement formal disciplinary action.”
The NAACP letter did not specify when the investigation into Adams began, and a county spokesperson could only specify that it started at some point in 2021.
Williams, who called the incident “abhorrent” and a “major concern,” also wrote that she had “been made aware of other ‘official’ complaints against Captain/Chief Adams involving homophobic slurs,” though her letter did not go into further detail on those allegations.
The letter requests an “immediate” response from Jones and his department regarding who made the decision to end the investigation once Adams retired, whether any other deputies were investigated in connection with the incident and whether Adams was allowed to retire “in ‘good standing.’”
Efforts to reach Adams for comment were not immediately successful.
By the time of her departure, Adams was a 27-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office, which she joined in 1994, according to the agency’s Sept. 16 news release announcing her retirement.
She became Rancho Cordova’s police chief in April 2020, after previously serving as the city’s assistant police chief from 2013 to 2017 with a stint in a different, unspecified role within the Sheriff’s Office in between.
“After 27 years of service, I begin my next chapter, but feel honored to have completed my tenure with the City of Rancho Cordova,” Adams, whose salary in 2020 was $157,830 according to state payroll records collected by Transparent California, wrote in a statement announcing her retirement.
Rancho Cordova, a suburban city of about 80,000 people roughly 15 miles east of downtown Sacramento, entered the national spotlight in the first week of the chief’s tenure, when a viral video showed a deputy assigned to the Police Department pinning a 14-year-old Black teenager to the ground and punching him.
Adams at the time said her department reached out to the boy’s family to arrange a meeting. According to news reports at the time, the family turned down the offer. The involved deputy was reassigned outside the Rancho Cordova Police Department and fired a few months later.
Capt. Brandon M. Luke, a 28-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office, was appointed in October to replace Adams as police chief.
This story was originally published March 4, 2022 at 10:51 AM.
