Conscious Contra Costa, Black Minds Matter 2, other organizations, and the wider community are calling for Contra Costa County Sheriff David Livingston to resign and for elected officials to withdraw their support for his 2022 re-election campaign. Since being elected on June 8, 2010 the Sheriff has shown repeated disregard for the well-being of black, brown, poor, and undocumented individuals in our county. Those working in positions of power and authority need to be held to the highest standards of honesty and accountability to ensure public trust. When a law enforcement official claims that they are above the law, public trust is irreparably broken. In the past twelve years in power, Sheriff Livingston has:

- Oversaw one of the highest numbers of in-custody deaths in history with at least 12 deaths in 2018 alone.
- Settled lawsuits for allowing incarcerated people to be assaulted while detained with no protection or intervention offered by his staff.
- Uses his dual role as Sheriff-Coroner to obstruct the timely, transparent, and truthful investigations into officer-involved fatalities. In the past he has allowed the dubious use of “excited delirium” to deem deaths accidents, when it was clear that force applied by officers led to the person’s death.
- Lied in a December 2017 statement that no mistreatment of detained people was happening in the West County Detention Facility, only for a report on jail conditions conducted by the CA Attorney General to prove otherwise. This validated the claims of multiple women who said they were denied access to bathroom and health care facilities.
- Cleared former Deputy Andrew Hall of any wrongdoing in an internal investigation into his second on-duty use of force incident which took Laudemer Arboleda’s life in 2018. A jury and judge would later find Hall guilty of felony assault with a firearm in October of 2021.
- Further, he enabled Hall to remain on the force long enough to kill a second BIPOC man living with mental illness, Tyrell Wilson, in March of 2021. The failure of his office’s internal investigation to adequately address Hall’s troubling behavior directly contributed to Tyrell Wilson’s death.
- Brushed charges from several former Contra Costa County inmates under the rug, calling the cases “ridiculous.”
- Initially refused to share misconduct reports in 2019 following the implementation of state-wide legislation (AB 1421) making such reports part of the public record. Before eventually complying, our Sheriff was one of very few who refused to obey this law, stating that it would be too much work for his staff. Other law enforcement agencies of similar sizes, and larger, didn’t make this objection.
- Put off spending any of his $266 million dollar budget (2021-22) on body-worn cameras, despite the fact that several contract agencies staffed by his deputies have been able to purchase cameras from their existing budgets.
- Let a campaign contributor and volunteer take ammunition and gun parts (which were slated for destruction) home, where they were used to construct ghost guns. This same individual has sold firearms in the past which were later used in a double-homicide.

The final insult to the families of victims and the people of Contra Costa came when the Sheriff released a memo on March 4th, 2022 directly following the sentencing, and termination, of former Deputy Andrew Hall. Rather than identify Hall as a clearly problematic officer and ensure other staff members that they must live up to the highest standards in order to earn his support, he doubled down on his unconditional support of an officer who clearly violated the humanity of Laudemer Arboleda and the law. In the memo the Sheriff distributed amongst his staff, he effectively tells them that they are above the law and that the DA’s attempts to hold officers to account is “abhorrent”. No matter what infringements they commit, lives they take, or laws they break, he says to them “I have your back”. This kind of unconditional support can be expected of mothers and fathers, but it is not appropriate for an elected official to effectively have no standards for the people in his employ. Livingston is not living up to his office and has repeatedly betrayed the public trust. He must preserve what little dignity he has and resign. If he refuses to resign, we call on the Board of Supervisors to formally reprimand him so that more members of the public can be aware that the Sheriff’s Department is underperforming and needs new direction as well as substantial oversight.