A veteran San Diego police lieutenant was recently named to the state board that recommends whether law enforcement officers should permanently lose their badges under a new California law.
In some ways, it’s a role he’s been training for his whole 24-year career.
From his two stints in the San Diego Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit to his participation on local law enforcement oversight boards, Lt. Charles Lara has learned a thing or two about the importance of accountability — and the way it benefits both communities and departments.
The appointment, announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom last month, is an honor, Lara said. And an opportunity.
“You feel the weight of the responsibility,” the 52-year-old lieutenant said. “It’s about credibility. It’s about policing even beyond your own role in your department. It’s about the reputation of the profession.”
Senate Bill 2, passed in 2021, created a hard-fought path to decertifying officers who commit serious forms of misconduct such as excessive force, sexual assault, and demonstrating bias based on traits including race, sexual orientation and religion.
At the time, California was one of only four states that didn’t have a way to strip cops of their certification. This allowed certain officers to hide a track record of misconduct by hopping from the department where they faced issues to another that might be unaware of their past misbehavior.
Six San Diego County officers and deputies are currently on temporary suspension or have been found ineligible to serve as a peace officer under the new law, according to state records.
In one case, a Sheriff’s Department deputy was suspended after taking prescription drugs from a drop-off box at a Vista substation. He pleaded guilty to a felony count of burglary in September. In another, a sheriff’s deputy was suspended after pleading guilty in October to possessing drugs on jail property.
The most severe finding is decertification. Once an officer is stripped of certification, he or she can’t be a cop in California and is added to the National Decertification Index, which tracks decertified officers across state lines.
Officers can contest the findings against them. That’s when the board Lara will be serving on gets involved.
The nine-member Peace Officer Standards Accountability Advisory Board is kind of like a court of appeals, Lara said. It reviews an officer’s case and then makes a recommendation based on a majority vote over what action should be taken. The Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST for short, which a San Diego sergeant was recently appointed to, makes the final determination.
It’s a new process, but one that can build trust between communities and police departments if deployed correctly, the lieutenant said.
“No good cop wants to work with a dirty cop or a brutal cop or a racist cop,” he said. “We get a lot of authority to detain, to arrest, to search, to use force — up to lethal force — and the public should have the expectation that the people who can do those things operate with the utmost ethical behavior.”
Lara is one of two law enforcement officers on the board and will be serving alongside academics and community leaders with experience in police accountability. He said he isn’t interested in weighting the scale in favor of police but emphasized the importance of safeguarding an officer’s due-process rights.
It’s unclear whether Lara will be required to recuse himself in a case involving a San Diego officer, but he said it would make sense to sit out so “there’s no appearance of impropriety.”
Two San Diego officers have so far been impacted by the new decertification process, according to state records.
Former officer Trevor Sterling was found ineligible to be a peace officer in October, a finding that came after he pleaded guilty in March in San Diego Superior Court to assault with a deadly weapon.
The July 2021 incident happened outside Moonshine Beach, a bar on Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach. Deputy District Attorney Frederick Washington said Sterling, who had been kicked out of the bar, pulled out a gun and pointed it at a patron in line in what amounted to a random and alcohol-fueled act. Police said Sterling had a personal firearm, not a department-issued gun.
Another former officer, Cesar Alcantara, had his certification placed on temporary suspension in May. Alcantara resigned from the department in 2022 amid allegations that he staged his own suicide, shot a gun off in his home while his girlfriend was present and solicited sex during work hours. The department determined Alcantara had engaged in criminal and immoral conduct and had been untruthful about the incidents in question. There is no record of the department disciplining him before he resigned.
According to the state’s POST Commission, officers and deputies are placed on temporary suspension when they are arrested or charged in criminal matters, discharged from an agency for serious misconduct, or leave a department while allegations of serious misconduct are being investigated. The commission decides at a later date whether the officer should lose his or her certification.
Lara has years of experience in evaluating allegations of officer misconduct.
He’s worked twice in the department’s Internal Affairs unit — as a detective sergeant and a lieutenant — which investigates potential employee misconduct. During his stint as a sergeant, he was also the liaison to the city’s Community Review Board on Police Practices — now the Commission on Police Practices — a group charged with evaluating allegations of serious officer misbehavior.
“I believe in oversight, and I know how to work collaboratively with oversight bodies,” Lara said. “Obviously, we didn’t always agree, and I stood my ground when a policy, procedure or law allowed an officer to do what they did.
But when we were wrong, we were wrong.”
Doug Case, who has for more than a decade worked with the city’s police oversight groups, said he couldn’t think of a better person for the state’s new board.
“I found him to be very collaborative, open minded and transparent,” said Case, who is a vice chair with the Commission on Police Practices. “There are some (department) members who are very defensive of officers’ actions. (Lara) was always willing to look at the other side — another point of view. He was empathetic to the complainant and the concerns of the (Community Review Board.)”
Lara has also been teaching police officers across the state about everything from search and seizure laws to laws of arrest to emotional intelligence for decades. And over the last two years, he’s worked with the department unit that handles California Public Records Act requests, including the release of police misconduct files recently made public under state law.
“Transparency and accountability work has been in my DNA since the beginning of my career,” Lara said. “The last two years of my career have been steeped in that.”
Lara was born in Santa Cruz and raised in San Mateo, a suburb outside of San Francisco, by his first-generation Mexican-American parents. The young couple didn’t speak English when they first immigrated to the United States decades ago but were determined to give their children a better life.
Lara got his bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Cruz and then a law degree from UC Berkeley. “I’m both a bear and a banana slug,” he joked, referring to the mascots of the two universities.
The longtime lieutenant thought he might want to be an FBI agent or a corporate litigator, but after a few summers at a large firm in San Francisco, he decided the attorney track wasn’t for him.
Law school was far from a waste. Because of his background, he has a deep understanding of laws and how to interpret them. It’s also where he met his wife of 25 years.
When she got a job in San Diego, he went with her.
The lieutenant said he loves being an officer and might be among a select few who describe police work as something that should be done elegantly. He’s well known for his work ethic — one of the many lessons he said he learned from his immigrant parents. They aren’t “excuses people,” he said with a smile.
“They truly are my heroes — my greatest inspiration,” he said. “My parents are very wise. Their work ethic and grit, their courage, is something I look to when something stressful is happening at work — what they overcame to get their little bit of the American Dream.”
Lara heard his first few cases on Thursday.
