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Being a Pleasanton resident and a longtime leader in law enforcement, Interim Police Chief Gina Anderson said she knew she had to answer the call to action when she heard the city’s chief was departing earlier this year.
What she didn’t know is how much she would learn to love the job over these past few months and how hard it would be once the time comes for her when Pleasanton finds a permanent replacement.
“I think the Pleasanton Police Department is amazing,” Anderson said during a sit-down interview on Sept. 19. “I didn’t realize how quickly I would come to enjoy working with the people in Pleasanton … so it will be hard when I leave, but I will leave.”
Anderson told the Weekly that she is doing everything in her power to keep things running smoothly and to make it so that whoever comes in next will have an easy transition.
A career police official, Anderson said she knew she wanted to get into law enforcement at a very young age.
Born in Santa Clara, Anderson said she was exposed to policing early on. Her father was a police officer when she was growing up, which meant she was always interested in things like making science fair projects about fingerprint analysis and figuring out the speed of cars by using skid marks.
Her father also retired as a police chief, which she said made them the first father-daughter police chief combo in the history of the state.
Anderson said police officers are the ones responding to some of the worst moments of a person’s life, which is why after 30 years of being in the profession she recognizes how the police can change a community one person at a time.
“If you impact, in a positive way, one person every day for an entire career, you really can have an amazing impact,” she said.
Anderson began her career in law enforcement as a community service officer with the city of Davis in 1992. She was then sworn in as an officer the following year and was promoted to sergeant in 2002.
As she grew up, she began to recognize how policing was a way to serve her community in a positive way.
During that time, she began having second thoughts about being an officer, which is why she decided to go to law school in order to be a prosecutor. She ended up graduating with a doctor of law degree from the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law.
But she then realized the ones who really have a more direct impact on the community are first responders like police officers.
“You’re the first person on scene,” Anderson said. “You can have the biggest impact on changing someone’s life.”
In 2006, Anderson joined the Citrus Heights Police Department as a lieutenant before being promoted to police commander in 2013 and then as assistant chief of police in 2018. After that she said she felt it was time to lead her own agency, which is when she saw that Newark needed a new police chief.
Anderson was then appointed as police chief for the Newark Police Department in April 2020, which also meant she needed to relocate her family from Sacramento — that’s when she decided to move to Pleasanton.
Her grandparents had lived in Pleasanton, so she knew the schools had a great reputation, crime was really low and the community was overall great, which is why she decided to relocate there.
So when she retired from her position in Newark and heard that Pleasanton’s then-chief, David Swing, was leaving the department in March to begin his new job as executive director position at the East Bay Regional Communications System Authority, Anderson decided to step up.
“I thought I’m here, this is my opportunity to serve the community that I live in,” she said.
She said she has easily acclimated to the job over these past few months, mainly because she said the community has been very welcoming and the department has been eager to learn and has been open to new ideas.
One of the main things that Anderson has been focused on during her time at PPD has been hiring and recruiting new officers, which she said continues to be a challenge not just for Pleasanton, but for the entire profession.
“It is really challenging to get good, quality candidates that are willing to do the job, have a passion for helping people and can complete all of the steps of the hiring process,” she said.
However, she and her hiring team continue to work on finding the right people for Pleasanton.
She said doing so is important to her especially because she has been in various departments and she knows how different policing looks like in different cities. She knows the expectations for police departments are different in each community, which is why an officer’s “style of policing” – as she put it – is very important to Anderson.
She said it’s important to match what an officer wants out of their career to the values of a city’s community and their expectation of how the residents want to be policed.
“If you can match those, align those well, the employee is going to be happy in their career and the city is going to be super happy with the services provided to them,” she said.
Anderson also said that while there has been a shift in recent years where people didn’t want to pursue careers in law enforcement, she thinks those sentiments were more prominent four years ago. Now, she thinks that is changing mainly because there are more people who want to be part of the change in police agencies.
And she said it’s not just young people who want to be that change – they see people leaving other careers to become police officers because they want to improve relationships between police and their communities.
She said PPD is almost fully staffed, which is actually “pretty fortunate compared to some of our neighboring jurisdictions”.
As for crime in Pleasanton, she said that while there has been a sort of anomaly of crime that Pleasanton has been seeing over the past couple of years, the crime statistics tell a different story.
Even though robberies have not gone down compared to last year, Anderson said violent crime is down by 15%, and property crime is down 18% this year compared to the city’s three-year average.
She said violent crime was up in 2021 and down in 2022, so when the city saw homicides such as the death of Blake Mohs at Home Depot in April 2023 and the fatal stabbing of Edevion White the next month, it seemed like violent crime jumped significantly.
However, she said the amount of violent crimes last year were still less compared to 2021, which is why she doesn’t believe those two homicides last year show any consistent patterns of Pleasanton becoming a violent community.
“We’re doing pretty well and the fact that we’re almost fully staffed helps that,” Anderson said.
She said bringing on more staff helps by being able to reinstate positions and units that had to be disbanded over the last year due to staffing shortages. Examples she gave were assigning another resource officer to the school district so that each high school has one and fully staffing the investigative unit at the department.
She also said the department’s alternate response unit, which responds to people suffering from mental crises, is back to being fully staffed and they also brought back one person on the traffic unit. She said as more recruits come out of training, they will begin to deploy those new officers to fully staff that unit as well.
“It’s taken a lot of work to get here,” she said, praising the human resources department and everyone else in the city involved in the recruitment process.
But while she said she has been enjoying her time working for the department, she said the goal when she first took the job was to not come out of retirement, which is why she is not vying for the permanent position.
Anderson currently has a cap of how many hours she can work without jeopardizing her pension benefits so while it will be hard to leave, she is planning on doing so once the city finds its next permanent chief of police.
But before she leaves she said she will do everything in her power to ensure the transition for the new chief will be as smooth as possible. That’s why she said she has been spending a lot of time gathering information that will help whoever takes over so that the new chief doesn’t have to worry about taking the time to get caught up on the specifics of the organization.
“I can help them with giving them some perspective on where the various units and programs are today so that they are up and running and being effective as quickly as they can be,” Anderson said.
Pleasanton communications manager Heather Tiernan told the Weekly that the city is still working on going through various candidates and that while it is still early in the recruitment process, the goal is to hire someone sooner rather than later.
“When the new chief comes in, they (will have) a really talented community and staff so I will leave them with my best assessment of the organization but there’s certainly talent throughout the rest of the organization and … a willingness to help the new chief be successful,” Anderson added.
As for her plans after her interim duties, she said she can’t imagine not being involved in policing in some manner — she just doesn’t know what that will look like right now. Although something involving being able to have an unbiased perspective on internal issues is something she threw out as an idea.
Editor’s note: A previous version of the story included incorrect information recounted during the interview about the most recent crime data in Pleasanton. Anderson said Thursday that robberies have not gone down compared to last year, but violent crime is down 15% and property crime is down 18% compared to the city’s three-year average. The Pleasanton Weekly regrets the error.
