Fired Sheriff’s Dispatcher Worked While He Was Inmate

For a while this spring, Daniel Haynes was a San Diego County sheriff’s dispatcher and a San Diego County inmate.

At the same time.

The 39-year-old veteran of the Sheriff’s Department would leave his bunk each day at the county Probation Department’s work-furlough center, where he is incarcerated on a 180-day sentence for misdemeanor battery. From there he would report to work as a senior communications dispatcher, directing sheriff’s deputies to emergency crime scenes.

That paradox lasted about a month, from early April until early May, when the department fired him from his job of the last eight years. Now Haynes is scheduled to appear before the county’s Civil Service Commission on Monday and Tuesday at public hearings in which he will ask for his job back.

Can’t Recall Precedent

“I can’t think of anyone else” who was simultaneously an inmate and a member of a law enforcement agency, said Michael Specht, spokesman for the Probation Department’s work-furlough program.

“It’s the first case that I can recall of an on-duty, active-duty law enforcement employee maintaining his job while incarcerated.”

Everett Bobbitt, an attorney who is representing Haynes in his request to be reinstated with the Sheriff’s Department, agreed that the dual role is extremely rare.

“I’ve represented police officers in the county under circumstances where they were convicted of a misdemeanor and still working, and one who is on probation now is serving as a sworn law enforcement officer,” he said.

“But I can’t think of any case I’ve handled where someone’s been incarcerated at the same time he was a law enforcement employee.”

Haynes was charged Dec. 2 with assaulting his ex-wife, Nancy Haynes, and violating a court order to stay away from her. A month later, the Lemon Grove man pleaded no contest to the charges, and, in March, was sentenced to 180 days of probation.

Free to Go to Work

But, according to court records, the probation was revoked April 7, and Haynes was ordered to serve the 180 days.

At that point, he was still a senior communications dispatcher for the sheriff. And, because he was incarcerated at the work-furlough center, that meant he could leave the lock-down complex only to go to work.

Bobbitt said the Sheriff’s Department, after investigating the assault allegations against Haynes, first recommended that Haynes merely be reprimanded. But, as the personnel matter moved up the chain of command, the level of discipline increased. A recommendation for a 15-day suspension was later upgraded to an order of termination.

He was fired May 4, almost a month after his incarceration began.

At the hearing next week, Bobbitt hopes to win back his client’s job.

“His supervisors and the department will stipulate that he was an excellent employee,” the attorney said. “He’s very well thought of down there.

“But their belief is that, if you’re an employee of the sheriff’s office, it’s incompatible with being incarcerated. I agree that that is incompatible with being a sworn deputy sheriff.

“But a dispatcher has nothing to do with enforcing laws or making law enforcement decisions. They just simply transmit radio calls over the airways.”