The City of Redlands’ grand but short-lived experiment with Rachel Tolber as its police chief is about to end, not with a bang but a whimper, along with some costs City Hall might not have otherwise sustained, while leaving the city in essentially the same fix it was in when she was brought in to head up the troubled department three years ago.
Tolber’s ascendancy to police chief had not been anticipated. The traditionally male-dominated law enforcement profession in recent years has given way to some distaff police chiefs across the country, in California and Southern California, but Redlands did not seem a likely candidate for that particular brand of modernization. Indeed, the Redlands Police Department of the last decade of the Twentieth Century and first two decades-plus of the Third Millennium was famous, or infamous, for being, if not hostile toward, certainly unaccommodating of, ambitious woman who wanted to rise in rank and meaningful accomplishment in the field of countering criminal activity. That was something best left to the boys, was the seeming attitude. If a woman working for the Redlands Police Department truly wanted to be of service and get ahead, the best way to do that would be on her knees providing one of the department’s captains or lieutenants or watch commanders – someone who might have some sway with regard to who was to get promoted – with some oral appreciation and tension relief.
Tolber was the exception that proved the rule. She hired on with the department as a policewoman in 1998. She promoted to sergeant in 2011. In 2017, her 19th year as a law enforcement professional, she was made lieutenant. In 2019, she was promoted to commander, overseeing the special services bureau, which entailed the department’s community policing, traffic unit, parking control and field training functions as well as oversight of custody specialists, community service officers and citizen volunteer programs, including business liaison and community engagement.
She coexisted with but somehow remained aloof from the department’s “boys will be boys” ethos, putting up with, as she had no choice, that element of the department’s reputation.
Tolber’s move into the lieutenant’s billet came with the same wave of promotions that occurred around the time of the retirement of then-Police Chief Mark Garcia. Moved into Garcia’s position was then-Commander Christopher Catren. Catren’s next in command was Assistant Chief Travis Martinez. Immediately beneath them were commanders Will Goff, Sean Flynn and Esteban Valenzuela. In addition to Martinez, Goff, Flynn and Valenzuela all holding higher ranking positions than Tolber when she became a lieutenant in in 2017, there was one lieutenant, Michael Reiss, with more seniority than her and another lieutenant, Stephen Crane, with seniority equal to hers. So, while she was on a trajectory moving upward on the department’s chain of command, she there were a half-dozen competitors for the department’s future top spot who looked to be positioned more advantageously than she was. What shot she might have for making chief of police was remote and to the extent that she was in the running, it did not appear that her time would come, if it were to ever come, until late in the 2020s, at which point she would be nearing her 55th birthday, making the chance that she would grasp the brass ring more remote.
Paradoxically, it would be the testosterone-laden culture of the department that had for so long held women down, that created the circumstance by which Tolber vaulted over her rivals.
In 2018, Catren promoted Reiss to deputy chief. Reiss was closely identified with Catren. Some people thought they might be brothers. On occasion, at public events in Redlands, some members of the public confused them, thinking Reiss was the police chief. Word was that Catren was grooming Reiss to succeed him.
Others thought that Martinez, who was the grandson and grandnephew of the first two Latino members of the Redlands City Council, was the heir apparent as police chief.
By 2021, things were starting to fall apart. That year Police Officer Laurel Falconieri and Leslie Martinez sued the City of Redlands, alleging a culture of pervasive sexual favoritism and harassment involving Reiss in his former role as lieutenant and later role as deputy chief, and Officer Eddie Herrera. The city settled this case for $1.7 million in June 2023. Geneva Holzer filed a claim against the city and then followed that up with a lawsuit detailing harassment by Reiss and other officers with the department assisting him, after she obtained evidence, including semen stains on a chair leftover from a sexual encounter between Reiss and one of the department’s community service worker/evidence technician Julie Alvarado-Salcido that took place in an office at police headquarters. Holzer maintained she had been directed to destroy that evidence by Sergeant Kyle Alexander and that Stephen Crane, who by that point had promoted to commander, was complicit in the effort to conceal the evidence against Reiss, as well. After Alvarado-Salcido and another department employee who Holzer alleged had been intimate with Reiss and other male members of the department left their positions with Redlands PD, she became the object of Reiss’s sexual harassment, in which he began to pressure her to engage in a physical relationship with him. Holzer’s claim/lawsuit against the department/city was settled for $475,000 in June of this year. Alvarado-Salcido in 2022 filed a suit against the city, alleging she had been coerced into performing becoming sexual acts by Reiss and then subjected to workplace retaliation by Reiss when she discontinued having sexual relations with him. The city settled the lawsuit brought by Alvarado-Salcido for $1.2 million.
The vast majority of the department’s members, as the revelations in Falconieri’s, Leslie Martinez’s, Holzer’s and Alvarado-Salcido’s legal actions came out in dribs and drabs, believing, at the beginning stages anyway, that the story would contain itself, made calculated decisions, in keeping with the culture long inculcated into the department’s members, to stand by the department and deny that there was any pervasive problem and wait it out until things blew over. This left Tolber in a somewhat delicate and uncomfortable spot, as any hope she had that her ambition to get to the top of her profession would be fulfilled was riding on her embodying the department’s macho culture, such that joining in with her oppressed sisters would greatly jeopardize her prospect for advancement. Meanwhile, Assistant Chief Travis Martinez was one of the department’s few male members, along with Sergeant Patrick Leivas, and the only member of the department’s command echelon who came forward to stand by and assist Falconieri, Leslie Martinez and Holzer. When the scandals that were unleashed by Falconieri’s, Leslie Martinez’s, Holzer’s and Alvarado-Salcido’s mushroomed beyond control, Reiss and then Catren were history. It looked, for a brief time, that Travis Martinez was to assume the position of police chief. But before that promotion was made, other members of the department and then City Manager Charles Duggan learned that Assistant Chief Martinez, had played a key role in supporting three of the four women whose legal challenges resulting in the trashing of the department’s public image with a wide cross section of the public and cost the city what has now proven to be more than $3.3 million, ending any possibility he could be placed in charge of the department.
The candidates to replace Catren as police chief at that point came down to Goff, Flynn, Valenzuela, Crane and Tolber. Cranes involvement in the matter involving Reiss, at least as alleged by Holzer, greatly compromised his prospect of becoming police chief. While it was the consensus of the command echelon that Tolber’s depth of experience did not match that of the others, for Duggan her selection as police chief represented an excellent way of getting out front of the sex abuse scandal that Reiss’s actions had engendered. By appointing Tolber police chief, Duggan believed the public would see City Hall as taking a proactive initiative by installing a woman as police and that would address the criticisms that were being leveled at the department and the men, who were being characterized as troglodytes, who ran it.
Travis Martinez, bypassed in the police chief selection process, filed a claim against the city alleging he had been passed over for promotion, stripped of responsibilities, and publicly undermined for reporting alleged misconduct by senior police officials and raising public safety concerns and thereafter pursued a lawsuit, which the city settled for $871,956 without going to trial.
Tolber, whose three years as police chief has been characterized as a “caretaker” tenure marked by no major innovations or accomplishments, turns 50 this year, which is the youngest age at which a law enforcement officer can retire. While she had no earth-shattering accomplishments as a police officer, she did achieve the status of police chief and obtained a historical first as the first woman to serve in the capacity of Redlands police chief. Under her contract, as a law enforcement officer she is entitled to a pension equal to her highest salary – the current $290,063.45 she is paid as police chief – times 3 percent times the number of years she has been employed by Redlands. So, $290,063.45 X .03 x 29 = an annual pension of $252,355.20.
The city is now faced with the possibility that Crane, who for some, at least, is synonymous with the culture Reiss embodied, will become Redlands next police chief.