Transition accomplished

The day Costa Mesa got a new police chief, Steve Staveley rode off on his Harley from City Hall straight into retirement and without a single regret.

The man who until last Tuesday was interim police chief for Costa Mesa feels he has left the department on the right track after six rewarding months.

But don’t try to get him to take more credit than he feels he’s due.

“It truly isn’t rocket science,” he said.

City Manager Allan Roeder has nothing but praise for Staveley. When the 40-year police veteran turned in his badge Jan. 2, Roeder called hiring him one of the best decisions he’d made all year.

Mayor Alan Mansoor had a similar assessment.

“I think he did a great job, especially during this transitional time,” he said. “A lot was asked of him, and I think he delivered.”

Staveley, 62, signed on in July at a difficult time in the department, just after former chief John Hensley retired in the middle of a political battle over immigration enforcement, as well as during a hiring shortage. Officers were left unsure about the direction of their department, Staveley said.

“What it seemed to me to be lacking was a sense of common purpose,” he said.

The mission he said he tried to give them was “to help the community build itself into the kind of community it wants to be; law enforcement is one of the tools.”

Staveley held regular department meetings to air out differences and dispel rumors. He let staff ask any questions they wanted, and he made sure to let people feel comfortable expressing divergent views.

The interim chief combined a sense of mission and even “cheerleading” with aggressive recruiting, Roeder said.

The result?

“We are fully staffed,” Staveley said with audible satisfaction. There were 17 unfilled positions in June, a situation made worse by morale troubles that made hiring new officers a difficult prospect.

Now, every spot is filled, and recruitment is ongoing for more to replace officers soon to retire.

The debate over police officers enforcing federal immigration law is also “over,” he said, now that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent interviews arrestees in Costa Mesa jail.

“They’re doing the federal job, and we’re doing the local job,” he said. “It makes me very nervous on a number of levels when folks ask local police officers who already have one of the most complex jobs in society … why anyone would think we should ask them to do immigration work on top of that is completely beyond me.”

For the long term, Staveley believes the number of officers in the city needs to be increased.

He called staffing “adequate” and enough to meet current needs, but said the growth of Costa Mesa will inevitably change that equation.

“We aren’t flush with cops, and in my judgment, in the next few years, the city needs to hire more,” he said.

But that will be a task for the city and for new Chief Christopher Shawkey, a man Staveley sees as a great fit for the department, which is filled with top-notch officers.

“They’re utterly professional and wonderfully skilled,” Staveley said.

“They have a human heart that comes through in the work that they do. It was just a joy to work with them and see all of that.”