Alameda County Sheriff's Office and District Attorney Take to Facebook to Air Charging Dispute

Updated 7 p.m. Monday

A heated dispute over the decision by the Alameda County district attorney’s office to forgo criminal charges in a stabbing case has spun out into an unusually public spat between two of the county’s top law enforcement agencies.

At the center of the conflict is a federal parole violation hearing set to be heard Monday morning in San Francisco. The defendant, Hayward resident Robert Barroca, 59, was convicted in 2005 for making methamphetamine and being in possession of a firearm.

Alameda County sheriff’s officials identified Barroca as a suspect in a January stabbing that took place in Hayward’s Meek Estate Park, the sheriff’s department said in a May 30 Facebook post. An Alameda County Superior Court judge issued an arrest warrant for Barroca, and on May 16, he was arrested by sheriff’s deputies, who presented the case to the district’s attorney’s office for charging, according to the post.

After the DA declined to charge, the sheriff’s office said deputies reported Barroca’s alleged involvement in the stabbing to Barroca’s federal parole agent.

The sheriff’s department’s Facebook post about the case garnered more than a hundred comments, many expressing support for the effort to recall District Attorney Pamela Price, whose critics have accused her of not pursuing criminal cases aggressively enough.

“This is not the first time we have pointed out that the DA did not charge something,” a sheriff’s spokesperson told KRON4. “It’s been more consistent. This is not a war on the DA’s office; this is us being honest with the public, with our community, about what’s happening,”

When reached Monday morning, Haaziq Madyun, a spokesperson for the DA’s office, said he couldn’t explain the decision not to charge Barroca because Price, who could provide that information, is away from the office at least through the end of the week, following the recent death of her mother.

“The matter was reviewed by a veteran charging deputy attorney, who advised ACSO to present the case to our federal law enforcement partners,” he told KQED.

Although KRON4 reported that Madyun said the DA’s office had reached out to federal authorities, Madyun later told KQED that the statement was incorrect and clarified it.

In a Facebook post on Friday, Price’s campaign against the recall suggested the sheriff’s office knew why the DA’s office declined to prosecute but conspicuously left that information out of its Facebook post.

The campaign’s post invited Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez to call Price.

“A call seems like an appropriate first step from one professional Alameda County law enforcement official to another,” the post said.

“To be fair, if the ACSO wants to make social media posts highlighting when cases are not charged, the community should demand that the ACSO create social media posts every time the DAO does charge on cases presented by the Sheriff’s Office,” the post continued.

On Monday afternoon, Lt. Tya Modeste, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, said the office regularly posts on social media about the outcomes of department investigations.

During May, the sheriff’s office posted five times on its Facebook page about arrests, including the post about Barroca. Three mentioned the DA’s office charging the suspect, and the fourth, regarding a series of arrests made during an operation targeting a sideshow, didn’t mention whether charges were brought.

“When the DA brings charges we say that, and when they don’t we say that,” Modeste said, adding that the sheriff’s office never goes into why a case was or was not charged by the DA.

In Barroca’s case, Modeste said the DA declined to bring charges because the victim was not entirely certain Barroca was the person who stabbed them. On a 10-point scale, the victim ranked their certainty at an 8 or 9, according to Modeste.

Madyun said the dispute, and the comments on the sheriff’s Facebook post, point to a larger issue: Most of the DA’s work happens outside of public view, and when one case gets highlighted, it’s easy for the public to think that case is representative of all of the DA’s work when it might not be, he said.

“Decisions to charge or not charge are made everyday by DA’s across the country. Individual cases are not posted on [Facebook] everyday,” he wrote in a text message.

According to the Alameda County District Attorney’s 2023 annual report, charging rates under Price have remained relatively consistent with those of her predecessor, Nancy O’Malley. The office reports it took action on 11,977 cases last year.