The Battle Over Bear River

Josh Bates clearly recalls the exact moment he realized his professional life was spiraling out of control through no fault of his own. A graduate of the College of the Redwoods Police Academy, Bates says it was early March of 2022 and things were going pretty well.

He’d recently resigned his post as an officer with the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria Police Department; he says he’d planned to leave anyway, but frustration with inner-tribal dynamics and the tribe’s handling of a harassment complaint he’d filed spurred him to make the move sooner than expected. But he was now confident his application for a post with the Cal Poly Humboldt University Police Department would be approved, and he’d step into a position with a $10 hourly bump from what he’d made at Bear River — calling it “a life-changing amount of money” — as well as a retirement plan and benefits. Plus, he says, his wife worked at the university, so if their family ever wanted to move out of the area, they could look to make lateral transfers to another California State University.

Bates says they had $40,000 saved and were looking to buy a house as soon as he landed the new job. Things, he says, we’re looking up. Then his phone rang on March 11.

It was UPD Sgt. Andy Martin calling to inform Bates he’d failed his background check, that the California Department of Justice’s Criminal Records Depository indicated Bates had been suspected of numerous felonies — serious ones.

“This must be a mistake,” Bates recalls saying, adding he’d never been in any trouble with the law in his life.

Martin assured him it wasn’t a mistake but directed Bates to the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office for more information. Three days later, Bates and then Bear River Police Chief Dana Norton met with DA Chief Investigator Kyla Baxley, who informed them that the blemishes on Bates’ record stemmed from two separate incidents in 2020, when Bates had detained suspects while on patrol with Bear River. Believing the tribal department’s officers were overstepping their authority to police non-Native people, the sheriff’s office had filed reports requesting then DA Maggie Fleming charge Bates with a host of crimes, including kidnapping, false imprisonment, robbery, assault and impersonating a police officer.

Fleming had declined to prosecute Bates “in the interest of justice,” but the referral remained in the DOJ database, Baxley told them.

Thus began Bates’ 18-month effort to clear his name and his record. While that effort was ultimately successful, his law enforcement career is over, he says, as his certification has now lapsed and the experience has forever altered his view of law enforcement and criminal justice.

“I put all my eggs in this law enforcement basket and all my opportunities were shut off,” he says. “And everything I’ve done is 100-percent by the book what I was taught in the law enforcement academy. What this did was completely derail the trajectory of where my life, my family’s life, was going. It’s just been very, very difficult.”

Bates never dreamed of becoming an officer as a kid growing up in McKinleyville, joking that he was “closer to ‘fuck the police’ than wanting to be a cop.” He dedicated himself to mixed martial arts, competing at the highest local levels, before defending his belt and retiring as a champion in his mid-30s.

He then found work as a personal trainer, helping private clients meet their fitness goals, while working nights as a bouncer at Arcata bars. Bates says he made decent money, but it was a constant struggle and, starting a family, he needed something more stable. Through his work as a bouncer, he developed relationships with some Arcata officers who he says first encouraged him to consider a career in law enforcement. One, Bates recalls, asked what his favorite part of being a trainer was. When Bates said he liked helping people, the officer said he could help people daily as a cop.

Bates says the conversation stuck with him and he enrolled in CR’s academy in 2017 and became one of 28 graduates that year.

In late 2019, Bates interviewed with Dana Norton, the former Hoopa Valley Tribal Police chief who’d recently been hired to start a department for Bear River. Bates says he’d read about Norton’s situation in Hoopa — he’d been let go at the end of an 18-month probationary period amid allegations of nepotism and he and the sheriff’s office had butted heads over a cross deputization agreement. Bates thought Norton had gotten a “raw deal.”

Bates says he and Norton, a body builder, hit it off right away and he agreed to accept a job as one of the fledgling department’s first officers. Bear River had once funded a resident deputy sheriff’s position, but the tribal council reportedly grew frustrated when staffing shortages reduced the amount of time the deputy spent patrolling the reservation and canceled the agreement, ultimately deciding to start its own department.

For his part, Norton says he was “really happy” with Bates, saying he had a great work ethic, a positive attitude and proved a quick learner. Things moved fast, both men say, with the department beginning patrols in December of 2019 as officers applied for special law enforcement commission (SLEC) status from the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Office of Justice Services.

Tribes in California exist in what’s been described as a law enforcement “jurisdictional morass” under Public Law 280, which was enacted by Congress in 1953 and moved jurisdiction over tribal lands from federal to state law enforcement in six states, including California.

In a roundtable discussion convened by state Assemblymember James Ramos early last year, Carol Goldberg, an Indian law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Law and Order Commission in 2010, said the law has a “very problematic origin story.” She noted it was part of the federal government’s termination policy, which denied Native sovereignty and promoted the forced assimilation of Native people by subjecting them to state law. Further, she said, the law was based on “racist assumptions” that tribes could not enforce public safety in their own communities and posed a threat to non-Natives.

The law also imposed an unfunded mandate on state law enforcement, particularly sheriff’s offices. And with tribes free to start their own departments — either independently or with federal certification or cross-deputization agreements — the law also created jurisdictional confusion that tribes say has fueled the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People epidemic.

Speaking to the Journal, Goldberg says tribes in California have the sovereign authority to create police departments to enforce tribal ordinances and laws on Native people on Native land. To enforce state or federal law, she says, they typically need certification from the BIA or a cross-deputization agreement. But plenty of gray areas exist between these distinctions, including the extent to which tribes can police the conduct of — or detain and search — non-Native people.

Many of these issues — including whether tribal police can carry weapons off tribal land, whether they can travel in vehicles with lightbars on them off reservation and whether they can search or detain a non-Native person without first determining whether they are non-Native — have been left to courts to decide, with mixed results.

It was 8 p.m. on Jan. 30, 2020, when Bates was patrolling the Bear River reservation near the tribe’s gas station when he spotted a red Toyota Tacoma with a towing hitch that was partly blocking its rear license plate and decided to pull the car over. Bates contacted the driver and his passenger, and asked the tribe’s dispatch center to check for active warrants. He learned the passenger, Tim, who requested the Journal use only his first name to be interviewed for this story, had a warrant for failing to commit to jail after a DUI conviction some 18 months earlier. Bates says he called the sheriff’s office non-emergency number to confirm the warrant.

“I asked them, ‘Do you want him?'” Bates says. “They put me on hold, came back and said, ‘Yes, we do. Transport him to the department and we’ll have a deputy come down to transfer custody.'”

Bates says he then asked Tim, 65, to get out of the car. Tim complied and Bates put him in handcuffs and into the back of his patrol car, driving him several blocks to the department’s station, where he would wait for a Humboldt County sheriff’s deputy to come take custody of him, officially arrest him and transport him to jail, acting as “the Uber,” as one deputy put it.

Former Deputy Jordan Walstrom arrived and took custody of Tim and left to make the 15-mile drive to the jail. Bates says he thought little of it, returning to his shift. During the drive north, Tim says Walstrom indicated the sheriff’s office was “concerned about the situation” in Bear River, saying transporting Tim from the site of the traffic stop to the police headquarters elevated the contact legally from a “detention” to an “arrest,” which tribal police didn’t have the authority to do.

“He said I should probably seek counsel because this was fairly out of the ordinary,” Tim recalls. “He said, “We don’t think they have the jurisdiction.'”

Tim was released that night after he wasn’t medically cleared to be booked into jail — he says he’d recently had an eye procedure done that required regular eye drops. As he left, Tim says he was again “strongly recommended” to talk to an attorney about what happened that night, adding that he received several follow-up phone calls from the sheriff’s office but didn’t have phone service at his home, so they never connected.

What Bates and others at Bear River say they did not know at the time was that frustrations had been mounting within the sheriff’s office surrounding the belief that the tribe’s officers were overstepping their authority, particularly with non-Native people.

Then sheriff’s office Lt. Peter Cress had first raised the issue about a month earlier, on Dec. 27, 2019, in an email to command staff seeking “clarification as to the scope of Bear River tribal PD’s authority,” calling it a “time sensitive matter,” according to emails obtained through a request under the California Public Record Act. Capt. Bryan Quenell responded the same day that the department’s officers “do not have any formal peace officer powers.”

“Essentially, they have citizen’s arrest authority and that is it,” Quenell wrote, adding he would reach out to tribal leadership to discuss the matter.

(Goldberg, for her part, says courts have repeatedly ruled tribal officers have more authority than ordinary citizens, likening them more to an officer who crosses state lines into a different jurisdiction.)

Quenell then emailed Sheriff William Honsal saying he’d like to meet with tribal leadership “before it turns ugly.”

(Dozens of Journal attempts to reach tribal leadership over the course of months of reporting this story were unsuccessful. Tribal Chair Josefina Frank initially responded to a Journal email saying she was out of town and would respond the following week, but failed to do so, or to reply to any subsequent emails. Similarly, Frank answered one of the Journal‘s calls to say she was in the middle of something but would call right back. She never did, nor did she respond to subsequent Journal voicemails.)

Norton, for his part, said no concerns about the tribe’s jurisdiction or authority had been brought to him at this point, saying that wouldn’t happen until after the traffic stop with Tim and Bates weeks later.

But frustrations continued to simmer within the sheriff’s office.

On Jan. 10, 2020, Lt. Greg Musson emailed Honsal and other command staff after an unspecified incident: “It appears our friends at Bear River are once again acting outside the scope of their authority. … I think someone from the DA’s office should be involved as well. I’m inclined to start arresting these Tribal ‘officers’ if they kidnap, falsely imprison and impersonate a peace officer. Of course, that would be after a directive from you, but this needs to stop.”

Four days later, Honsal emailed Quenell, the undersheriff and Musson that he was working to set up a meeting with the tribal chair to discuss “some jurisdictional issues.”

On Jan. 31 — the morning after Bates pulled over the truck carrying Tim over — Honsal again emailed his command staff, saying he was made aware of the “incident” and contacted Norton to discuss it. He said he learned that while Bear River had applied for federal deputization, it had not yet received it.

“Until they are deputized under BIA … they are not recognized as federal peace officers,” he wrote. “The tribe does not have jurisdiction over non-Natives.”

Honsal wrote that he and Norton discussed the law and tribal authority, and he felt Norton’s interpretation was a “stretch of the law,” noting he’d cautioned Norton against the department taking “any enforcement action against all non-Natives” until federally certified.

“We want to be attentive to the public safety needs of the tribe,” Honsal wrote in the email to his command staff. “We have had a good relationship with them in the past and I want to continue to have that into the future … Until otherwise directed, stay professional and work as partners with the tribe. However, we will not compromise on our authority or allow constitutional rights to be violated.”

If the hope was the situation would blow over before Bear River attained its federal deputization, it did not.

It was shortly after midnight and drizzling on Jan. 2, 2020, when Bates was on a patrol and stopped at the Bear River Rancheria Pump and Play gas station to check in with security there. The security guard directed him to Pump No. 9, saying a man later identified as Cody Christiansen had been parked there for 45 minutes, acting suspiciously, adding he’d asked the man to leave earlier in the day and he’d returned. As Bates approached to inform Christiansen he had to leave the property or would be considered trespassing, he says he noticed Christiansen was holding a stack of what appeared to be gas or credit cards.

In a police report documenting the incident, Bates wrote that Christiansen appeared uncomfortable and avoided eye contact. Bates asked what Christiansen was doing, to which Christiansen responded a friend had given him the pre-paid gas cards, so he was checking “if they have any gas on them,” according to the report. Bates wrote that he replied that the Pump and Play doesn’t accept pre-paid cards and asked Christiansen for his ID, and whether he had any active warrants or was on probation. Christiansen replied that he was on searchable probation.

Bates says he then noticed dozens of old syringes in the bed of Christiansen’s Chevrolet pickup truck and asked him to move to the rear of the vehicle. At this point, Bates says Christiansen said something to the effect of, “Don’t do this, I can’t do this again,” and seemed agitated. Bates says he then asked Christiansen to turn to the rear of the vehicle “just for officer safety,” and Christiansen started moving back toward the truck’s open driver-side door.

“I informed him he was defying a lawful order and I told him to put his arms behind his back because he was not complying,” Bates wrote in the report.

“I was trying to make clear to him he’s being detained,” Bates says to the Journal, adding that he then grabbed the cuff of Christiansen’s jacket. “That’s when it was on.”

Video of the incident shows the two men struggle briefly at the driver’s-side door of the truck before they disappear from view inside. The struggle lasts another five-and-a-half minutes, mostly obscured from the camera’s view. The video shows the truck rock back and forth a bit after the two men enter, and its hazard lights flicker on after about 30 seconds. At one point about a minute-and-a-half into the confrontation, the car lurches forward a foot or two. Eventually, the video shows Bates emerge from the driver-side door first, then pull out Christiansen, who is armed with a screwdriver.

Bates says Christiansen managed to stab him in the leg with the weapon before Bates was able to take him to the ground. The struggle continued there and, according to Bates’ report, Christiansen continued to be non-compliant, and the officer used several elbow blows to his head and got the help of a bystander before being able to force Christiansen’s hands into cuffs.

Bates says the struggle inside the truck’s cab was violent, with Christiansen trying to get the car started to drive away. Bates says at one point he pulled the keys from the ignition and threw them onto the passenger-side floor. He says he tried to pin Christiansen against the seat while pushing the horn with his foot to summon the security guard for help, though he never came. Bates says Christiansen grabbed a foot-long screwdriver and began stabbing him with it, hitting him multiple times in the torso and the left side of his back, before Bates pinned him in a different position.

“I wasn’t panicked,” Bates says, adding he followed what he was taught in the academy and relied on his MMA background, to use only enough force to overcome resistance.

Once Christiansen was in cuffs, Bates called the sheriff’s office and reported he had him “detained for the assault,” requesting a deputy respond to arrest him, according to his report. Around the same time, Bear River Sgt. Joey Jackson responded to the scene, took photos of Bates’ injuries and took his statement as to what transpired.

According to the report, Bates then took some photographs to document the location of the screwdriver, which he’d thrown aside after prying it from Christiansen’s grip. As he was doing this, he heard deputies who’d arrived on scene speaking to Jackson in “a hostile manner.”

“I heard Sgt. Jackson say to them, ‘This seems pretty racist,'” he wrote, adding that Jackson soon advised him to clear the scene and return to headquarters to begin writing his report.

Norton says he recalls getting a call from Jackson that night reporting the responding deputies had been caustic, saying things like, “Who are you guys?” and “We should be arresting you.” Norton says he tried calling the sheriff but didn’t get ahold of him, then he talked to Lt. Kevin Miller, who assured him “everything is going to be OK.”

Christiansen wasn’t arrested that night, but driven off the reservation and released. Eighteen days later, however, he was arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm and giving false information to an officer. Already on probation for convictions of felony domestic violence in 2019 and evading a peace officer in 2018, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve three years in prison. He’s currently incarcerated at Wasco State Prison, serving a separate nine-year sentence for assault with a firearm and child abuse. Attempts to reach him for this story were unsuccessful.

While Norton says nobody in Bear River had any idea the sheriff’s office would try to have Bates criminally charged for what happened at the gas station that night, he says the fact deputies would turn loose a suspect who had stabbed one of his officers with a screwdriver was devastating.

“I was pretty pissed,” he says. “It devastated the morale of the department.”

The day after Christiansen stabbed Bates with the screwdriver, Honsal emailed his command staff to report that he’d spoken with Norton and then Tribal Chair Barry Brenard regarding his concerns over “detaining a county probationer” and asking them “to please stand down until we can get these questions answered.” He concluded by urging his staff to use “an abundance of caution” when dealing with the tribe.

“We have a fine line to walk with tribal police and law enforcement authority,” he wrote. “What is very clear in public law 280 is jurisdiction. The Sheriff is responsible for all STATE CRIMES.”

The following day, Honsal emailed a pair of assistant U.S. attorneys under the subject line: “URGENT: Bear River Tribal Law Enforcement.”

“We have some serious issues to address regarding Bear River Tribal Police violating the Civil Rights of non-Natives,” he wrote. “I have attempted to address this with the tribal government, and I did not get any assurance that this was going to be resolved. … Can we please set up a conference call ASAP?”

It’s unclear whether the conference call happened, but the following day, on Feb. 5, 2020, the sheriff’s office sent a report to the DA’s office asking that it file criminal charges against Bates for the incident with Tim, specifically asking he be charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, robbery and impersonating a police officer.

On Feb. 11, Honsal forwarded Norton an email he’d sent his administration detailing his view of what was and wasn’t within Bear River’s authority, saying he’d like to meet with Norton to work on a memorandum of understanding “regarding working together” and wishing Norton a good week.

Three days later, Honsal’s office sent the DA a report related to the altercation with Christiansen, asking that Bates be charged with impersonating a police officer, kidnapping, false imprisonment, criminal threats, battery, assault and vandalism.

Bates and Norton say they were never notified and just kept working.

Speaking to the Journal and looking back at the entire situation, Honsal says the criminal referrals stemmed from Tim and Christiansen telling deputies they didn’t believe Bates “had the authority” to do what he did.

“And what it came down to was our deputies agreed that they did not have the authority — or Josh Bates did not have the authority — to detain this person for the offense he thought they were committing,” Honsal says, adding the deputies “ran it by the sergeant” and decided, “We’re going to refer this to the DA and they can choose to do with it what they want.”

Asked by the Journal whether he personally signed off on the incredibly rare step of referring a local law enforcement officer to be prosecuted, Honsal says he did.

“I was aware of it,” he says. “I could have stopped it if I didn’t believe there was probable cause.”

In interviews with both Honsal and Norton, two things become apparent: They do not like one other, and both have very strident views of what seems to have been a very gray area of law.

Norton, for his part, notes that he and Honsal clashed when Norton was in Hoopa and the tribe was considering a new cross deputization agreement with the sheriff’s office. Norton says he didn’t like that the new agreement being instituted under Honsal required tribal officers to wear the sheriff’s office patch, write reports in its case management system, turn evidence over to the sheriff’s office and train under its field training officers. Perhaps worst of all, he says, the agreement stipulated that if there was a crime scene on tribal land, any officer responding from the sheriff’s office would outrank tribal police on scene, meaning a new deputy could be placed in charge over a tribal police chief.

So, Norton says he pushed back against the agreement when he was in Hoopa and had no interest in pursuing it when he arrived in Bear River. In fact, Norton says he’s not sure anyone informed the sheriff’s office that Bear River was starting its own police force.

“I did not inform the sheriff’s office because I did not have to,” he says. “Should we have a relationship? Sure. But I already had that conversation with him and I don’t need his permission to have a police department.”

Norton says he knew the law and ran the Bear River department “the way POST would have wanted to see it run,” noting he understood his officers could not make arrests but was confident case law outlined they could detain non-Native people when they suspected they’d committed a crime or were a threat to the health and safety of the tribe.

Honsal, for his part, notes things “had gotten pretty contentious” by the time Bates was referred to be prosecuted and lays most of the blame on Norton for “trying to convince people at the tribe that he had more authority than the law allows.”

“We tried to tell him, ‘This is the law,'” Honsal recalls. “‘We’ve researched it. We understand you have a different interpretation, but there’s nothing on the books that indicates the law is to be interpreted the way you’re interpreting it.'”

While a 2021 U.S. Supreme Court ruling has leant some clarity to the issue of whether tribal police authority extends to non-Native people absent a cross deputization agreement, Honsal says at the time he understood the law to be clear.

“Tribal police could not stop non-Natives on tribal land and detain them longer than necessary to determine whether or not they are Native and committed a crime on tribal land,” he says. “If there’s something readily apparent that a crime is occurring, they can detain that person on tribal land and then turn them over to the correct authority.”

Norton points out that other jurisdictions have different interpretations, noting the Sycuan Tribe has an agreement with the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office that allows it to directly file reports and make referrals for violations of state law. Honsal recalls that at one point Norton even put him on a Zoom call with Sycuan’s police chief.

“We asked them, what case law gives you that authority? How can you enforce state law?” Honsal recalls. “He said, ‘We have this agreement.’ I said, ‘Well, I understand you have this agreement, but what’s the statute that gives you the authority to detain?’ ‘Well, it’s an agreement.’ ‘Yeah, it’s an agreement between you and the DA, not the person who’s being stopped.'”

Norton says he doesn’t understand why Honsal pushed so hard against Bear River’s efforts to increase community safety.

“I don’t know why the sheriff really has a hard stance on this,” Norton says. “I see us as an asset. I went to the same academy as he did, not too many years after he did. All our officers hold the same credentials.”

Similarly, Honsal says he still doesn’t understand Norton’s approach to the issue, noting he feels like he has positive working relationships with other local tribal police departments, adding that Bear River is the only one still operating without a cross deputization agreement with his office.

“With Dana, it was contentious the entire way and he just did not take my word for it,” Honsal says. “As far as this case goes, I believe Dana misinformed his people on what their authority could be and officer Bates was caught in the middle of this.”

Legal experts consulted by the Journal say there are gray areas and ambiguities in the law, but use terms like “curious” and “unusual” to describe one law enforcement entity seeking to have another’s officer prosecuted over these types of disagreements.

Rory Little, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, says there is ambiguity and uncertainty with tribal law enforcement jurisdiction and authority, which leads to inevitable conflicts between local authorities with adjacent jurisdictions “with an almost invisible black line between them.” But Little dismisses the notion that there’s a marked legal difference between putting someone in handcuffs and waiting for a deputy to arrive compared to putting them in handcuffs and driving them a few blocks to wait somewhere else for a deputy to arrive.

“You put someone in handcuffs, you call it whatever you want, you’ve effected a Fourth Amendment seizure of that person,” Little says, adding that this situation seems to be a “power play” between local officials. “It’s a case where someone above them has to walk in and say, ‘Come on guys, get out of the school yard and settle this.’ It does seem extreme the sheriff’s office would refer these for prosecution based on the little I know, and it does seem right that the district attorney would decline to file charges.”

On July 20, 2021, Fleming, then district attorney, wrote the sheriff’s office a letter indicating she was rejecting both cases referred against Josh Bates “in the interest of justice.” Her successor, Stacey Eads, says she cannot comment further on the decision, citing “attorney work product privilege.”

As such, it’s unclear if the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of United States v. Cooley, handed down June 1, 2021, played a factor, but it’s not a stretch to think it could have. Applauded by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and other Native groups, the unanimous decision affirmed tribal police have the authority to temporarily detain and search non-Native people on a reservation.

While Bates was never charged with a crime, he says his life fell into a bit of a tailspin after that call from Martin in March of 2022. As he worked to come to grips with the fact that his law enforcement career was likely over, Bates says he depleted the family’s savings while looking for work. He says he also struggled to hold down a job, saying he’d start a new position and things would go OK and then the “wheels would just kind of fall off.”

He says he went into therapy and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I had to come to terms with law enforcement not being a part of my life anymore,” he says, adding it took some work to get to the point where he could maintain a positive outlook.

He also had to work to clear his name. In the immediate aftermath of that call with Martin and the subsequent meeting with the DA’s office, Bates says he requested his case records from the sheriff’s office but was denied. He says he then received a call the same day from Baxley, the DA investigator, saying Honsal told her he would sign the necessary paperwork for Bates to clear the charges from his record.

So on June 6, 2022, Bates submitted a petition to seal and destroy arrest records for the two cases to the sheriff’s office, following staff’s direction of how to do so. Checking in a few weeks later on the status of the request, Bates says he was told he hadn’t filled out the forms correctly, so he resubmitted them June 29. About a week later, he says he got a call notifying him that the sheriff’s office had denied his petition, citing only its “discretion” to do so.

Frustrated, Bates then reached back out to the California Department of Justice and even called then Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office seeking assistance. Finally, he was connected with California Indian Legal Services, which agreed to take his case even though he is not Native, as he was working for a local tribe when the incidents occurred.

Directing Attorney Denise Bareilles then filed new petitions seeking to have Bates’ records sealed and destroyed on May 1, 2023. Six weeks later, Bates received a letter from Honsal saying he’d been “deemed factually innocent of the charges,” and the case was being sealed and destroyed pursuant to California penal code.

Asked about the apparent change of decision, Honsal says he’s not sure why Bates’ first petition was denied, saying they usually go to the records bureau manager for review. The second, he says, “got escalated to my level because an attorney was involved,” adding that he felt it appropriate to grant the petition.

It does not appear Bates’ second request went through the channels outlined in the sheriff’s office’ policy 804 governing the records division, which outlines a process for considering petitions for determinations of factual innocence and the destruction of records.

“Petitions should be forwarded to the Administration Supervisor,” the policy states. “The Administration Supervisor should promptly contact the prosecuting attorney and request a written opinion as to whether the petitioner is factually innocent of the charges. … Upon receipt of the written opinion from the prosecuting attorney affirming factual innocence, the Administration Supervisor should forward the petition to the Major Crimes Division Supervisor and County Counsel for review. After such review and consultation with the County Counsel, the Major Crimes Division Supervisor and the Administration Supervisor shall decide whether a finding of factual innocence is appropriate.”

Eads, the current district attorney, says she doesn’t believe her office was consulted “regarding the determination of factual innocence.” If the request was forwarded to the Major Crimes Division or county counsel for review, that was not reflected in documents released to the Journal in response to its California Public Records Act request.

In the years since Bates’ case was referred for prosecution, Honsal has chaired the California State Sheriffs’ Association’s committee on tribal issues and been a vocal proponent of several bills by Ramos, the state assemblymember, that would allow tribal police departments to become state certified and enforce state law on tribal lands. Norton, meanwhile, was separated from employment with Bear River in 2023, when Jackson took over as chief, and now works as a school resource officer in the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District. (Jackson, the sergeant who responded to the Christiansen incident, also repeatedly declined to comment for this story.)

Meanwhile, Bates, has now landed a solid job doing human resources work at a nonprofit based in Cutten. Ironically, he says, the job has a lot of parallels to law enforcement, saying it’s all about following policies and procedures. He says he’s at peace with where he is but the road getting here has been hard.

“Things were going well before this and since it’s been a constant struggle to stay afloat,” he says. “Looking back at my situation, fuck, I really struggled for a while trying to find my footing. It took some time before I could string enough consistent good days together.”

Bates pauses, adding, “I know I was a good officer and I followed the law.”

Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or thad@northcoastjournal.com.

This article appears in The Battle Over Bear River.