On the streets people called him officer, but out at the local golf links the female workers called him “Creepy Joe.”
Fairfield Cop Fired for Sexual Misconduct at Golf Course Was Called 'Creepy Joe'
Three Fairfield officers were disciplined in recent years for sexual misconduct, including one officer known as 'Creepy Joe' at a local golf course. (iStock/Getty Images)
Again and again, women who worked at the Paradise Valley Golf Course told investigators that Fairfield police Officer Joe Griego harassed them, public records show. He grabbed one woman by the breast and asked her if her “boobs” were real. Another worker, who was nine months pregnant, said she overheard Griego saying falsely that he was her baby’s father. He also told his golfing partners, who included current and former officers and Fairfield City Councilman Chuck Timm, that “he wanted to get a piece of her,” documents show.
Timm did not return a phone call Thursday.
Women also said he made lewd comments, slapped them on the behind and squeezed one of them on the shoulder so hard it hurt while telling her that he wanted to give her the “biggest tip of her life,” according to the documents.
The women told investigators that they dubbed Griego “Creepy Joe.”
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Fairfield released detailed documents on two separate investigations of Griego this week under Senate Bill 1421, the state’s new police transparency law. It also released records of findings of sexual misconduct by two other officers.
Facing firing in 2015 after an investigation of the women’s allegations, Griego left the department before he was disciplined. He’d already been suspended for a month without pay earlier that year after another woman, who was taking a parenting class he was teaching for the department, complained that he told her that even through she was divorced she could “still have lust.” The woman told investigators he tried to hug and kiss her, advances she resisted.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Griego called the investigations into his actions “witch hunts” motivated by complaints he made years earlier against the department for allegedly violating his privacy rights. Yet he also said,”I played some sort of role in this,” but denied touching the women and making lewd comments.
“I was buried under these allegations,” he said. “I was a target.”
Fairfield Police Chief Randy Fenn did not immediately respond to a message Thursday afternoon.
Female employees said they learned how to “deal with” Griego, and at least one changed her work schedule to avoid contact with him. But another woman refused to cooperate with investigators at all, records show.
An expert in police sexual misconduct said many women are afraid to report officers’ behavior.
“Most of the instances of police sexual misconduct and police sexual violence that occur on duty are never complained about by the victims,” Bowling Green University criminology professor Phil Stinson said. “You know the police subculture, as I call it, is a closed-door society,” he said. “It’s an us vs. them mentality. It’s a boys club.”
In two others cases, through, women came forward with complaints against Fairfield officers.
In one, Detective Zachary Sandoval was suspended without pay for a day in 2015 for an unwelcome sexual advance he made on a Starbucks barista. The woman complained about an inappropriate encounter in August 2014 with the plainclothes officer, who was a regular at her workplace.
The two had exchanged cellphone numbers, and Sandoval offered via text message to let her charge her phone in his car. Then Sandoval “asked her if he could give her a kiss,” the documents say.
“I was like, ‘I’m married.’ And he said, ‘I’m married, too.’ So I just gave him this really disgusted face and I just left the car,’” the woman said, according to a transcript of her interview with investigators. But Sandoval told investigators he couldn’t remember if he asked the woman to kiss him.
“That is a rather large thing not to remember,” an investigator said.
Fairfield also released hundreds of pages on Darryl L. Webb, a former patrol cop who was fired after posting “revenge porn” images and video on the internet of him and his ex-girlfriend.
Police searched his phone and found videos of him exposing himself in a patrol car, according to the records. Webb pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor in 2016, and was given community service, avoiding a possible sentence of one year in jail.
Nate Gartrell of the Bay Area News Group contributed to this report.
This story was produced as part of the California Reporting Project, a collaboration of more than 30 newsrooms across the state to obtain and report on police misconduct and serious use-of-force records unsealed in 2019.