Law enforcement decertification won’t keep new justice of the peace from taking office

Published 5:00 pm Tuesday, December 10, 2024

CANYON CITY — The man elected to preside over Grant County Justice Court had his Oregon law enforcement certifications permanently revoked for dishonesty eight years ago — but that does not disqualify him from serving as justice of the peace.

Richard Tirico was elected JP in the May 21 primary, garnering about 54% of the vote in a three-way race against Blue Mountain Eagle columnist Dale Valade and Josh Fuller, who works at Wilson’s Welding and Fabrication in John Day.

The Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training, known as the DPSST, issued a lifetime revocation order in November 2016. The order was not contested and went into effect in January 2017.

But this story begins several years before that.

Under investigation

Tirico abruptly resigned his position as John Day’s police chief in October 2013 after a 23-year career with the department, including nine years in the top job. In his resignation letter, he cited personal and family reasons, as well as difficulties with the job, for stepping down.

In fact, Tirico was under criminal investigation by the state Department of Justice when he turned in his badge. In September 2014, the former police chief was indicted on two counts of first-degree official misconduct for allegedly directing two of his officers to falsify their time sheets so their overtime hours would be billed to a DUII enforcement grant rather than coming out of the police department’s budget.

Tirico pleaded not guilty to those charges — and went on to beat them in court.

In September 2015, on the first day of Tirico’s jury trial, Grant County Circuit Judge William D. Cramer issued a directed verdict of acquittal, ruling the state had failed to make its case. 

In court, the state prosecutor alleged Tirico had misused about $800 of a $2,000 grant that was intended to pay for drunken-driving enforcement, using the money for other police work instead.

When the state rested, Cramer determined it had not produced enough evidence to convince a jury of wrongdoing and tossed out the case.

Afterwards, Tirico’s attorney said his client had done nothing wrong and argued the terms of the grant had never been adequately spelled out.

Tirico’s resignation, indictment and acquittal were thoroughly reported at the time by the Blue Mountain Eagle.

Meanwhile, however, the DPSST was conducting a separate investigation.

Law enforcement decertification

The Department of Public Safety Standards and Training, which runs the state police academy and serves as the licensing authority for law enforcement officers in Oregon, said in response to an inquiry by the Blue Mountain Eagle shortly after Tirico’s resignation that it was aware of the DOJ investigation into the former police chief and was opening a probe of its own.

That investigation took three years to complete, culminating in a staff report that was presented to the agency’s Police Policy Committee in late 2016, DPSST records show.

The report was damning. 

The DPSST investigator’s findings are summarized in a seven-page Notice of Intent to Revoke Certification and Proposed/Final Order on Default, a copy of which the Eagle recently obtained through a public records request. Attached to the document was a certificate of service attesting that a copy was delivered to Tirico on Nov. 29, 2016.

After reviewing the report, the Police Policy Committee determined that Tirico had violated the moral fitness standards required for law enforcement certification in Oregon on multiple occasions. Among the committee’s findings were these:

• In June 2013, Tirico falsified Officer Daniel Pelayo’s time sheet by inappropriately allocating overtime spent equipping new patrol cars as DUII enforcement, which was eligible for grant reimbursement.

• The same month, Tirico asked Officer Damon Rand to write down 20 hours of overtime he worked equipping new patrol cars as DUII enforcement.

• In October 2013, Tirico admitted to using a city-owned cellphone to contact a woman his wife had accused him of having an affair with. In addition, Tirico minimized his conduct to avoid an investigation.

• Also that month, Tirico called Rand and asked him to lie on Tirico’s behalf, which Rand refused to do. “After this,” the report continues, “you asked Rand to give you a heads up if he couldn’t lie for you and you would just resign.”

• Tirico physically abused officers by pinching them “in order to intimidate them.”

Ultimately, the Police Policy Committee found Tirico’s behavior constituted five infractions of the moral fitness standards: misconduct, gross misconduct, misuse of authority, disregard for the rights of others and dishonesty.

Of those, dishonesty was deemed the most serious offense. On Nov. 17, 2016, the committee voted to revoke Tirico’s Oregon law enforcement certifications for life. The decision became final on Jan. 31, 2017, after Tirico allowed the deadline to pass without filing an appeal.

Tirico’s response

Asked about the DPSST’s findings, Tirico disputed some and acknowledged others.

For instance, he dismissed the pinching allegations as “horseplay,” adding that “no assault occurred.”

Tirico also said testimony was presented at his trial stating that the federal grant money his department received could be used for equipment or repairs as well as DUII enforcement.

“So I did not falsify any timesheets,” he said. “At the time I felt I was using the grant correctly, and there was no training saying otherwise.”

On the other hand, Tirico acknowledged having an extramarital affair and using his work phone to keep his wife from finding out.

But if he thought some of the allegations against him were false, why didn’t he appeal his decertification? According to Tirico, it just wasn’t worth it.

“At that point in my life,” he told the Blue Mountain Eagle, “I was done with law enforcement and had no interest in fighting for my certification and chose to take no action.”

No disqualification

The loss of his law enforcement certifications barred Tirico from working as a sworn public safety officer in Oregon, but it did not prohibit him from working in certain related occupations. In recent years he has been employed as Grant County’s death investigator and victims’ assistance investigator.

Nor does the DPSST’s finding of dishonesty disqualify Tirico from serving as Grant County’s justice of the peace.

Under state law, the qualifications for serving as a JP are pretty basic. A candidate for the office must be a U.S. citizen and an Oregon resident, and must live or work within the judicial district’s boundaries. Beyond that, a justice of the peace must either be a lawyer or take an approved course on courts of special jurisdiction within a year of being elected or appointed.

Justice court is separate from the Grant County Circuit Court and handles a variety of cases, from traffic tickets and minor criminal violations to certain small claims and civil actions.

The state Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability has the power to investigate claims of judicial misconduct and can recommend that a judge be censured, suspended or removed by the Oregon Supreme Court.

Oregon’s Code of Judicial Conduct makes it clear that members of the judiciary — including justices of the peace — will be held to high standards of honesty in their public and private lives. Rule 2.1 (D) states: “A judge shall not engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”

That rule, however, does not appear to apply in this case — because Tirico was not a member of the judiciary, or a candidate for judicial office, when the conduct in question occurred.

Tirico is slated to begin his six-year term as justice of the peace in January.

In a statement to the Blue Mountain Eagle, he said he believes Grant County voters were aware of his history when he ran for justice of the peace and that he hopes they will not hold the decertification — or the reasons behind it — against him nearly a decade later.

“On the human side, my wife and I have worked very hard through my mistakes of the affair and how I handled it by resigning to make our marriage stronger and better after the affair ended, when I worked for the Police Department,” Tirico told the newspaper.

“I hope the community would judge me as the person I am and the police officer I was and not by the mistakes I made in my marriage.”

Former John Day Police Chief Richard Tirico was acquitted of two counts of misusing his office in 2015 and was permanently stripped of his law enforcement certifications by the state Department of Public Safety Standards and Training in 2017.

Unlike Tirico’s acquittal, which was reported on the front page of the Blue Mountain Eagle, the DPSST’s disciplinary action was never reported in the local paper. By that time, more than three years had passed since Tirico’s resignation as chief of police in John Day, and the DPSST does not typically announce its disciplinary actions to the public.

The Eagle’s practice is to run a criminal records check on candidates for public office in its election reporting, but Tirico’s indictment does not appear on the Oregon court database. Under Oregon law, a person who is acquitted of a criminal charge can immediately apply to the court to have the official record of the charge, and the arrest or citation that led to it, expunged from the database.

The DPSST maintains an online listing of disciplinary actions taken against law enforcement officers on its website, but the list only goes back five years, and Tirico’s case does not appear on it.

For those reasons, information about Tirico’s law enforcement decertification was not readily available to Grant County voters prior to his election in May 2024 as justice of the peace.     

The decertification proceedings against Tirico only came to light after the election, when a reader contacted the Blue Mountain Eagle. The newspaper obtained details about the disciplinary action from the DPSST by filing a formal public records request with the agency.