Salinas Police Chief Adele Fresé announces pending retirement; Roberto Filice named as interim chief.

At the launch of a morning press conference April 28 to announce the pending retirement of Salinas Police Chief Adele Fresé, Mayor Kimbley Craig started out by reading a list of the things Fresé accomplished in her five years on the job.

Eight minutes later, she stopped reading the list, although she hadn't nearly finished it.

Fresé, who joined the Salinas department in 2016 after 20 years with other law enforcement agencies and seven years in the U.S. Marines, dropped the news on her staff the afternoon of April 27 that it was time for her to move on. The exact date has yet to be determined—"I'm meeting with my CalPers representative this afternoon," Fresé said at the press conference—but she's looking to finish around July 1.

"There are a couple of opportunities out there in the public and private sector I'm exploring, but for now I want to finish my time here," she says. 

Back to those accomplishments.

When Fresé took over the role vacated by Kelly McMillin, the department was grappling with a scathing U.S. Department of Justice report that included 110 recommendations for how to improve its frayed—bordering on fractured— relationship with the community. From March to July of 2014, Salinas officers had killed four men, all Latino, leading to marches and protests. McMillin asked the DOJ to come in and take a look at the department.

One of the big recommendations of the report: more diversity in hiring. While 68 percent of Salinas residents have Spanish as their primary language, only 23 percent of the department's sworn officers were Spanish-speaking.

Fresé, Craig said, designated a recruiter to woo new officers "and created a significant shift in diversity of the police department." There's been a 45 percent increase in the number of Spanish-speaking officers and a 143 percent increase and 63 percent increase in the number of female officers and Hispanic officers hired, respectively.

"It's very critical we have a police department that is reflective of our community, and Adele has changed that," Craig said. 

Additionally, under her leadership, there has been an 89.4 percent drop in the number of homicides in the past four years, and a 67 percent reduction in shootings. Fresé also created a homeless outreach position with a sworn officer working with the unsheltered community; developed new relationships with federal law enforcement agencies; ensured all officers receive crisis intervention training; created a cold-case unit and rebuilt the motor unit for traffic enforcement.

Those items, Fresé told the group of media, city staff, police commanders and firefighters who gathered for her announcement, "were not my ideas.

"The role of the police chief is to gather everyone together and make sure we are all on the same team," she said. Hired by former City Manager Ray Corpuz, and with retired Salinas homicide detective Joe Gunter, who died last year, as the mayor for most of her tenure, she was given four areas on which to focus: implement community policing, examine and further implement the DOJ recommendations; reorganize the department and reduce violent crime.

"I needed to build a team. We had to make sure we were all on the same page because transformational leadership is the toughest of all," she said.

She's been a popular chief (and the department's first-ever woman chief) with the community, but her relationship with the rank-and-file hasn't always been so smooth. In 2019, 47 members of the Salinas Police Officers Association issued a vote of "no confidence" in Fresé, with a claim she wasn't properly addressing staffing shortages. Less than half of the SPOA's membership participated in the vote, which came just after protracted and bitter contract negotiations ended in the city imposing a contract on the union's membership. 

One of the team members she brought in, Assistant Chief Roberto Filice, formerly a popular commander with the Marina Police Department, was named interim chief, a job that will start when Fresé departs. Details of the recruitment process for a new chief are yet to be revealed.