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Former police chief William “Bill” Eastman, who led the Pleasanton Police Department for nearly 20 years during the city’s growth of the 1980s and ’90s, died earlier this summer. He was 85.
A transplant from Southern California when he earned the chief post, Eastman made his mark on Pleasanton as the department expanded from just 32 officers when he was hired, moved out of the small, historic police building on Main Street soon after his arrival and instituted the D.A.R.E. program under his watch. He also represented the city as president of the California Police Chiefs Association and ran for mayor in retirement.
“I accomplished a lot in my years as police chief and I think I can offer even more that will help Pleasanton for the next 20 years,” Eastman told the Weekly in 2002 when he announced his mayoral bid. “Pleasanton is still a very good town and I’m getting into the mayor’s race to keep it that way.”
Eastman, whose tenure fell amid a stretch of just six permanent police chiefs in 86 years for Pleasanton, retired in 1999 and remained in the community after his law enforcement career.
He died June 29, cause undisclosed. His family has not yet posted an obituary, beyond a death notice online through Neptune Society.
Born in St. Louis in 1940, Eastman served in the U.S. Marine Corps and earned degrees from Pepperdine University and the University of Southern California. He rose through the ranks of the Culver City Police Department before applying for – and winning – the Pleasanton police chief position in 1981, succeeding Walter McCloud.
Eastman arrived in a city in evolution, with Stoneridge Shopping Center newly opened and Hacienda Business Park on its way, in addition to new residential developments in the queue. That growth continued at various levels throughout his 18-year-plus tenure.
He was also there when infamous Pleasanton crimes made regional and national news such as the Tina Faelz murder in 1984, Tina Belt kidnapping in 1987 and Vanessa Lei Samson kidnapping and murder in 1997.Â
Five years into his tenure, Pleasanton made headlines becoming the first police department in the country to drug-screen all of its officers – and all 63 passed the voluntary tests, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. Eastman also caught eyes in 1989 when, as president of the state chiefs association, he wrote an open letter to Oakland Athletics star Jose Canseco for rampant speeding off the base paths.
He took a special interest in youth prevention programs, including launching D.A.R.E. for drug awareness, reactivating Operation AWOL on truancy, and investing resources in “Stranger Danger” and bicycle safety lessons in Pleasanton schools.
He and wife DiAnn raised two daughters through Foothill High School while he was with Pleasanton PD.
One of his final public appearances with the city happened in 2016 when he posed with three other retired top cops and then-chief David Spiller for a reunion of Pleasanton’s five living police chiefs at the time.
