Dave Knopf, a retired assistant chief for the San Jose Police Division who had been the highest-profile hopeful vying to switch Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith in June, is ending his marketing campaign simply two weeks after asserting his candidacy.
In explaining his resolution to this information group, Knopf mentioned he seems to have underestimated the burden of getting into politics for the primary time.
“After painstaking consideration, I've determined to withdraw from the sheriff’s race,” Knopf mentioned Tuesday. “I'd have liked to tackle the challenges of the sheriff’s workplace, however can’t be depressing navigating the political hillside to get there.”
Knopf formally filed within the county to run for sheriff on Jan. 7, and formally introduced his run the next week. 13 days later, he expressed that he had sufficient, although he declined to enter element about what particularly drove him out of the race.
“It’s a grind. I like the problem of legislation enforcement, however the political side of it's not for me,” he mentioned. “It takes a sure individual to try this. The political course of wasn’t turning into for me.”
By advantage of his final place as performing chief for SJPD, his candidacy on paper was sturdy, given his expertise of operating the county’s solely law-enforcement company comparable in dimension to the sheriff’s workplace.
His departure leaves 4 candidates trying to get elected sheriff on the June 7 major election, or in a November runoff ought to no candidate garner greater than 50 % of the vote.
The present candidates, so as of them declaring their run, are Kevin Jensen, a retired sheriff’s captain who ran towards Smith in 2014; correctional Sgt. Christine Nagaye; present Palo Alto police Chief Bob Jonsen; and up to date entry Sean Allen, one other veteran correctional sergeant on the sheriff’s workplace who formally filed his candidacy with the county late final week.
Nonetheless looming over the race is that if and when Smith, who has first elected in 1998 because the state’s first girl sheriff, will run for a seventh time period. Smith has not publicly introduced her intent to run for a seventh time period, and he or she has not filed the required paperwork with the county and state to run for re-election; she has till mid-March to submit them.
Smith was pushed to a runoff by her former undersheriff John Hirokawa in 2018, a re-election bid linked to a swarm of corruption allegations and scrutiny of her jail administration. The high-profile controversies embody prison grand jury indictments towards an undersheriff and captain in Smith’s workplace alleging pay-to-play issuing of concealed-gun permits to political donors and an investigation by the state’s Honest Political Practices Fee into claims she circumvented gift-reporting legal guidelines in her use of a donor’s luxurious suite.
Earlier this month, Smith appeared in courtroom to reply to a civil grand jury accusation alleging a number of counts of corruption for the concealed-gun allow scandal and for resisting a civilian auditor’s investigation into her workplace’s dealing with of a major-injury jail-neglect case. That case netted a $10 million county settlement, however officers zeroed in on an aborted inside investigation which will have been politically motivated. If the civil accusation is affirmed by a trial jury, she might be faraway from workplace.
Final week, California Legal professional Basic Rob Bonta introduced that the state Division of Justice is opening a pattern-or-practice civil-rights investigation into Smith’s workplace and its administration of South Bay jails, in addition to different allegations of neglect and misconduct, stating in a information convention that “there's a deficit of belief in Santa Clara County” with the sheriff’s workplace.