SAN JOSE — A San Jose police officer who won his job back after an arbitrator ruled the police department violated his constitutional rights is now calling out his employer, describing a troubled internal affairs process plagued by paperwork questionably altered with white-out and an unwarranted determination to fire him.
Related Articles
San Jose man charged with murder in alleged weekend killing
San Jose police find 70 pounds of illegal cannabis, 40 pounds of psilocybin mushrooms at four smoke shops
San Jose cop shot in 2023 ambush sues condo owner for renting to gunman
San Jose police officer arraigned on child molestation charges
Pedestrian killed Sunday is San Jose’s 20th traffic fatality of 2025
Michael Richmond, who has been with the San Jose Police Department since 2019 after seven years with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, spoke publicly for the first time with the Bay Area News Group partly with the aim of shielding his rank-and-file colleagues from similar experiences.
“There’s a lesson learned here for everybody, the upper echelon of the San Jose Police Department and the city, to know that this is not okay and it should not happen again to anybody,” Richmond said.
“I dedicated my life to the police department. It was everything I had dreamed of. And for this to be allowed to happen to me … was something that I just never accounted for, having my career taken from me,” he added. “It was really disheartening.”
In March, retired Judge Cecily Bond, serving as an arbitrator, ordered Richmond’s full reinstatement, and later found the department owed him about $300,000 in back pay and benefits to cover the year-plus period he was off the job. That absence resulted from a protracted internal review involving him purporting himself as a sheriff’s deputy while dealing with a personal dispute.
But the most eye-catching figure within the arbitration orders was a $1.3 million award for legal fees. That amount stems directly from Bond’s finding that the police department and city violated Richmond’s Fourth Amendment rights when investigators used information gleaned from a criminal warrant — which did not lead to any charges and was ordered sealed — to underpin a separate 2023 administrative review of Richmond that ended with his termination.
In her order, Bond noted that Lt. John Barg, then a sergeant, “sent all the materials which had been gathered in the criminal investigation, including the phone records obtained by the criminal warrants to Sgt. (Kenneth) Rak,” who was conducting the administrative review. “Neither Lt. Barg or Sgt. Rak had applied to the court for an order to alter the prior sealed order.”
The constitutional violation was egregious enough to Bond that she granted summary judgment for Richmond, meaning she found in his favor before her formal review of the evidence.
“Use of this information violated Officer Richmond’s due process rights, his rights under POBR (Peace Officer Bill of Rights) and the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Bond’s order reads. “Such disregard for due process cannot be ignored or condoned.”
The city stands by its efforts to fire Richmond, with City Attorney Nora Frimann telling this news organization that they are seeking “to modify or vacate the award.” She further argued that Bond’s position — that the warrant information could not be used to predicate a related disciplinary action — is not supported by case law.
“The department and city continue to believe the officer’s termination was justified by good cause that should prevent this officer from serving our city, and we believe that the arbitrator was wrong to reinstate him,” Frimann said in a statement.
Among the evidence gathered ahead of the arbitration was a cover sheet requesting what is known as a Department-Initiated Investigation, the agency’s term for an internal conduct complaint against an officer.
The October 2022 document, which was reviewed by this news organization, has a hand-written heading of “Request for a Department Initated (sic) Investigation” into Richmond. After his arbitration matter concluded, Richmond and his attorneys commissioned a forensic examination of the cover sheet that showed the heading field had white-out tape applied to it, and that the previous heading, “Personnel Matter,” was typed out beneath the tape.
What exactly did Richmond do?
Their focus on this document is rooted in the original misconduct allegation against Richmond. As he tells it, the elderly grandmother of a friend was being exploited by a tenant renting a room in her San Jose home. At some point he was told about the situation and decided to intervene, but had trouble getting a hold of the tenant. So he left a message on the person’s voicemail box purporting to be a sheriff’s deputy to goad her into calling him back.
Richmond said that “ruse call” contained no threat of action or consequence, and that it was discovered when, during an unrelated police call involving the tenant, she played the voicemail for a San Jose police sergeant, who recognized Richmond’s voice.
The sergeant, according to Richmond’s telling, informally admonished him for the act. Richmond says he understood and considered the matter settled. Word about the act eventually made its way to a different sergeant for an administrative review; that second sergeant documented his review and marked it as “Information Only,” and did not make any disciplinary recommendation.
Six months later, in April 2023, current deputy chief and then-Capt. Brian Spears wrote in a subsequent field on the same cover sheet requesting a formal internal investigation, and the forensic examination contends that he was the one who altered the heading. In a video deposition viewed by this news organization, Spears said “I don’t recall” whether he wrote over the initial heading on his own volition or at the direction of a superior.
Richmond said, to him, the document’s alterations were an opaque move by police administrators to revive a dormant review for a resolved misconduct allegation and escalate it to termination. Why, he asks, didn’t the department just start a fresh review, instead of altering an existing document and creating potential confusion over who actually wanted a more serious investigation?
In her statement, Frimann reiterated the police department’s stance that Richmond “engaged in serious misconduct” and contends that nothing was amiss with the cover sheet: “There was a correction made to the disciplinary review document, and that change was apparent as the document was copied – it was not hidden and the change was discussed and testified to as part of the arbitration process.”
The drive to fire him never sat well with Richmond, a second-generation SJPD veteran and third-generation police officer with a strong service record including a department Medal of Honor after being one of the initial officers responding to the 2021 shooting massacre at the VTA railyard in San Jose, and over a dozen letters of commendation.
Richmond says he has yet to receive any of his outstanding back pay and benefits, and if and when he does, it still won’t make him whole.
“It doesn’t make up what they did to my career in law enforcement. Your jacket (employee file) is everything,” he said. “Everybody now knows at the department that I was terminated under a made-up false pretense, and I wanted to go into special ops. That was always a dream that’s been ruined.”
Still, Richmond says he is determined to continue working at the police department where his father served, and continue his family’s law enforcement legacy. Even if that means he has to occasionally run across the people who tried to get him out of the building.
“I did nothing wrong. So I walk through the hallways with my head held high. I go out and I work every day,” he said. “Since I’ve been back, I’m still out getting in foot pursuits. I’m still out taking bad guys to jail, and I’m still out working because that’s what I love to do.”