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The Tri-Valley’s role in the history of Alameda County law enforcement is among the stories showcased in a recently released book from a local author who has deep connections to the region as Dublin’s city historian.
Steve Minniear is the author of the “Images of America” installment on the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which was released at the start of the year and serves as a platform for Minniear’s wealth of knowledge as a local historian.
While Minniear – who has lived in Dublin since 1990 and was appointed city historian in 2021 – said he wasn’t surprised by much in his research for the book given his familiarity with the subject, the book contains plenty that might surprise laypeople and more recent additions to the Tri-Valley.
“When you go back to 1853, when California is formed and Alameda County is formed, Alameda County is an agricultural county,” Minniear told the Weekly. “It’s like 8,000 people, and that’s it. So we forget that we had our own kind of wild west where the sheriff had to travel. Alameda County is a crossroads for people moving by land up to the Gold Rush, moving freight to the Central Valley and back, so it’s a way to pass through. It’s got all these nooks and crannies and whatnot.”
Nonetheless, he noted that the characterization of law enforcement in the county that would capture the public imagination of its “wildness” was often exaggerated at the time and ever since.
“The press back in the day would sensationalize a lot of it, so Alameda County does have that little bit of the wild west. But it’s not as exciting or interesting as a movie. Some people like to make Pleasanton out as the wild city of Alameda County and this ‘desperado’ and it’s really not the case. It’s about people trying to make an interesting story versus actual history.”
However horse thefts and other property crimes were common early in Alameda County’s history, the region having been formed from portions of its longer-standing neighboring counties Contra Costa and Santa Clara, with its widespread and rural character posing some challenges for law enforcement – if not necessarily the same challenges depicted in Western films.
While other communities in Alameda County such as Pleasanton and Oakland would incorporate and grow into their own cities early on in the county’s history, other portions of the Tri-Valley region, including Dublin, would remain unincorporated, more spread out, and with a smaller population than the county’s more metropolitan communities until well into the 20th century.
This would make the area where the city of Dublin was much later established – incorporating in 1982 – a prime location for U.S. military use during World War II, and subsequently the former site of the county jail following the county’s acquisition of the site of the former U.S. Navy’s disciplinary barracks situated along where Interstate 580 was later built.
The site was close to where Hacienda Crossings now sits, and made use of the area’s continued agricultural capacity that was characteristic of the sparsely populated region at the time.
“Gleason’s model was to make it into a nearly self-sufficient facility and not cost the county a lot of money, but it was supposed to be a rehab center, and the inmates could actually learn skills while they were in the county jail, such that maybe they wouldn’t go back to a life of crime,” Minniear said.
With nothing but large swaths of undeveloped land in the surrounding area, the location was optimal for an expansion of the county jail, which was formerly situated in Oakland. That later ceased to be the case, however, as the region began to develop and the population increased further into the 20th century.
“It was so far away from any place that it was hard to get to and even harder to escape from, but that changed as things got built out in the Tri-Valley,” Minniear said. “It was kind of rundown. It wasn’t what you would consider a modern-day prison by that time. The other thing was that the prison population swelled as Alameda County’s population had swelled after World War II.”
The facility’s minimal security and its close proximity to an increasingly populated area in the latter half of the 20th century were ultimately a disastrous combination, with the increasing number of residents living near the area calling for a change, especially following a high-profile home invasion case in Pleasanton perpetrated by an escapee of the former Santa Rita site.
“Not only was it easy to escape from, that meant people could escape and they could be right in the middle of a residential area, and that’s when it got really dicey, and that’s when a lot of crimes happened by people who had escaped from the jail,” Minniear said.
The increasing number of crimes in the surrounding residential area, as well as the outcry from residents, led to significant media coverage and ultimately yielded to the construction of the current Santa Rita jail in 1989.
Prior to that, however, the former site was the subject of another media frenzy outlined in Minniear’s book, with the jail being the first stop for victims of the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping after they were found by an off-duty ACSO deputy near the quarry in Livermore they’d been confined at.
“Three guys decided that they were going to kidnap a school bus full of kids, hold them for ransom and make lots of money,” Minniear said. “It’s a big, famous crime. These weren’t the brightest people. They had orchestrated the plan where they would stop the bus over near Chowchilla then they put these poor kids in vans and drove them – with them not being able to know where they were going – and then they dumped them in a moving van that had been dug into a hole in a quarry near Livermore.”
“It’s just very fortunate that one of the kids and the bus driver were able to find a way to dig themselves out, but as they escaped and they were found by one of the people at the quarry who has the night watchman, they called the nearest law enforcement agency which had jurisdiction, and that was the sheriff’s office,” Minniear continued.
With the victims being found just a few miles from the former Santa Rita jail, they were taken to the facility for shelter initially.
“That’s where the initial press descended on the jail and the sheriff’s office,” Minniear said. “Because the crime had been found in Alameda County, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office took the lead on the investigation. For the deputies, it was this huge story that became part of their institutional memory.”
The last major event covered in Minniear’s book is the shift to the new Santa Rita Jail site in 1989, just before Minniear first came to Dublin in 1990.
“The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office has got a long history – it’s an interesting history,” Minniear said. “These people do hard work. I can say as an author it’s a difficult subject, and one of the reasons I kind of ended it after the Loma Prieta Earthquake is history is not current events. Current events tend to get focused on the most awful things that happened, and we tend to forget who these people are.”
