“You guys are my bosses.”
Incumbent Sheriff Gabe Fabrizio said that at the Bay Area Chamber of Commerce candidate forum while explaining his philosophy of accountability as Coos County sheriff.
“In my mind, in my opinion, the office of the sheriff is of the people,” Fabrizio said. “It’s you guys are my bosses. I don’t have somebody else I answer to. The governor can’t even fire me.”
It was a striking thing to hear because my experience with Fabrizio has been rather different.
When Gabe Fabrizio was running for sheriff four years ago, he was affable, accessible and willing to talk. I interviewed him. He answered questions. He wanted voters to know who he was, what he believed and what he intended to do with the office.
After he became sheriff, getting answers became considerably more difficult.
I called. I emailed. I sought information about matters involving his department, including serious questions raised by my reporting about the handling of crimes against women. Fabrizio was made aware of my reporting on the cases of Valarie Smith and Shayleen Schaffer. He never contacted me to dispute what I had reported, offer information that might correct the record, explain the department’s actions or tell me that the issues I had documented warranted another look.
Mine is not the only recent example. Jefferson Public Radio invited Fabrizio to participate in its own sheriff-candidate forum and reported that it received no response. One source familiar with the department, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, has told me that staff sometimes encounter the same lack of response.
Now Fabrizio is asking those bosses to return him to office for another four years.
The Chamber forum offered an opportunity to examine what those four years have produced and, more importantly, what kind of institution each candidate believes the Sheriff’s Office should be.
Mostly, it didn’t, but there was one genuinely useful question about accountability. Fabrizio and challenger Mike Kinnaird were asked about body-worn cameras, internal investigations, transparency and public forums. Kinnaird said that when an incident involving the Sheriff’s Office raises serious questions, he would prefer another agency to investigate rather than have the department investigate itself. Fabrizio drew a distinction: policy violations, he said, are normally investigated internally, while possible crimes are referred outside the agency.
Then came the inevitable rural-Oregon Second Amendment question.
Kinnaird said he would not go looking for reasons to arrest otherwise law-abiding gun owners. Fabrizio went further, describing the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association’s efforts to fight state firearm restrictions, including Measure 114, before adding: “As far as locally, I’m not enforcing anything. It’s unconstitutional.”
A circuit court did find Measure 114 unconstitutional, but the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in March 2025, holding that all of the measure is facially valid under the Oregon Constitution. The Oregon Supreme Court heard the appeal in November 2025 and the matter remains pending. The Legislature, meanwhile, has delayed the measure’s operative date until January 1, 2028, so Fabrizio is not presently refusing to enforce an operative Measure 114 provision.
But the larger question remains. Constitutional questions are ultimately adjudicated by courts; a sheriff does not possess final authority to settle them for himself.
A third candidate, John Cooper, who launched a write-in campaign, spoke briefly after the formal forum had ended. Like Kinnaird, Cooper said he would be willing to cut patrol staffing to expand jail capacity, raising a reasonable question about why he doesn’t just support Kinnaird. During his short remarks, Cooper did not identify a substantive difference between them on that central budget question. He also joined the other candidates in affirming his support for the Second Amendment.
What was missing from the firearms discussion was the other half of a law-enforcement leader’s relationship with guns.
The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Firearms are also involved in homicides, suicides, domestic violence and other crimes that sheriffs are expected to prevent and investigate.
Nationally, major law-enforcement organizations have acknowledged both responsibilities. The International Association of Chiefs of Police supports expanded background checks and measures aimed at illegal gun trafficking, and its policy materials have also supported limiting high-capacity magazines. Its Firearms Committee describes reducing firearm-related deaths, injuries, trafficking and criminal misuse as part of the policing profession’s public-safety mission.
None of the three candidates was asked where, if anywhere, he believes that public-safety responsibility intersects with the constitutional right each emphasized.
More important for my purposes, the forum left largely unexplored whether the Sheriff’s Office has measurably improved during Fabrizio’s four years in office. It also left unanswered broader questions about leadership, investigative quality, and how seriously the department handles crimes against women.
Leadership helps establish what a law-enforcement agency expects and tolerates, and those expectations travel downward through much of what the public actually experiences. An NIJ-sponsored study of more than 15,000 officers across 88 agencies found that officers who viewed their organizations and leaders as fair and respectful reported greater organizational commitment, job satisfaction and compliance with agency rules. Research from the federal COPS Office has similarly connected internal procedural fairness with how officers interact with the public.
Culture isn’t a mood. It shows up in supervision, training, report writing, case review, discipline, and the decisions employees make when nobody from command staff is standing beside them.
Coos County offers concrete reasons to ask how those systems are working.
During the forum’s discussion of Senate Bill 48, Fabrizio acknowledged that the office had recently “messed that up.” He said he had fixed the problem and referenced training in his response, but he did not identify the incident or explain exactly what had gone wrong. Asked separately about internal investigations, he said policy violations are generally handled within the department while potential crimes are referred to another agency.
Those answers raise straightforward management questions. What failures trigger review? Who conducts that review? How does the sheriff determine whether corrective training worked? And when a complaint concerns the performance of a trusted or senior employee, what safeguards make sure familiarity and institutional loyalty do not substitute for quality control?
The New York Times recently reported on a Cornell University case in which a student spent hours telling campus police she had been raped, only to have that interview condensed into a six-page statement that omitted her unequivocal assertion that she had been raped. That shorter statement went to the district attorney, who declined to prosecute. The prosecutor later said the statement he received did not allege that she had been drugged against her will or gang raped; according to the Times, police had not conveyed her explicit rape allegation to his office.
The question is painfully simple: What case did law enforcement actually give the prosecutor?
That question matters here, too.
In 2023, Valarie Smith reported to the Coos County Sheriff’s Office that she had been raped. She underwent a forensic exam, turned over her clothing and gave investigators a detailed account of what she said had happened, along with a GPS log documenting her movements that night.
The resulting report, prepared by Adam Slater, then a deputy and now a sergeant, omitted information Smith considered important and, in places, misstated what she says she told investigators. During one conversation, Smith says Slater told her, “Well, you were drinking and flirting.”
During the statutory window for a probable-cause arrest, Slater told Smith he had been unable to locate the man she accused. The case was later referred to the district attorney’s office. As far as the records available to us show, the DA’s office never assigned it a prosecutorial case number, and those records contain no substantive interview of the man Smith accused.
The concerns about Slater’s investigative work are not limited to Smith’s case.
Shayleen Schaffer was seventeen when she died in a crash in 2006. Slater responded to the scene. According to witnesses, while he was still taking statements, he stopped to speak with a neighbor who had not been present when the crash occurred. He then returned and told the witnesses they could leave because he knew what had happened.
Whatever conclusion Slater had reached, Loni Schaffer has said for years that he reached it too quickly. In her view, allowing witnesses to leave after deciding he knew what had happened cost Shayleen’s family their best chance to fully understand the circumstances of her death and left serious questions that were never adequately investigated.
Loni Schaffer also says that years later, after an altercation with her estranged husband left her injured outside her own home, the same deputy stood over her and yelled rather than offering help.
The point is that failures in the handling of sexual-assault reports and other serious cases involving women are not unique to one department, one state or one community. The scale of the underlying violence makes the quality of the law-enforcement response especially important.
According to the CDC’s 2023–24 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 45.1 percent of American women reported experiencing contact sexual violence during their lifetimes, a category that includes rape, sexual coercion and unwanted sexual contact. Twenty-one percent reported completed or attempted rape.
The Oregon point estimates were even higher: 57.4 percent of women reported lifetime contact sexual violence, while 26.8 percent, more than one in four, reported completed or attempted rape.
Many cases never reach law enforcement at all. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that just 23.6 percent of rape and sexual-assault victimizations were reported to police in 2024.
Reporting is only the beginning. An NIJ-sponsored study examining 493 sexual-assault case files involving unsubmitted sexual-assault kits found that no suspect was investigated in more than half of those cases.
These are national problems, but they are no excuse for inadequately investigated or critical information lost somewhere between the initial interview and a prosecutor’s desk, and it does not mean women in Coos County should expect the same.
Fabrizio took office after serving as a patrol deputy and then three years as administrative captain. Before entering law enforcement, he spent 20 years in Army psychological operations, work he described to me during his previous campaign as “combat marketing.”
It is hardly surprising that a sheriff with colleagues who possess longer institutional histories would rely on experienced staff. Sergeant Adam Slater and Captain Sean Sanborn appear to be among the employees on whom Fabrizio relies heavily. One source familiar with the office has described Sanborn as so central to its operation that employees have referred to him as the “co-sheriff.”
That characterization raises a legitimate management question: how does a sheriff independently assess the judgment and performance of senior employees on whom he also depends?
Smith’s experience provides one reason to ask.
On the anniversary of the rape she reported in 2023, Smith reposted in local social-media groups a video interview she had done with me describing her experience with the investigation.
Slater responded privately on Facebook with a message threatening legal action over what she was saying publicly. I have reviewed that message.
Whatever dispute Slater may think he has with Smith’s account, a woman who believes her rape allegation was inadequately investigated should be able to question the agency that handled her case without receiving a legal threat from the deputy whose work she is criticizing.
Law enforcement has other ways to respond. Explain what investigators did. Correct factual inaccuracies. Produce records where the law permits. Review the case. Acknowledge mistakes if mistakes were made and improve the process.
The Justice Department’s guidance for law-enforcement agencies calls for sexual-assault victims to be treated with respect, for investigators to use trauma-informed practices, for complaints to be investigated thoroughly and for agencies to prevent intentional or unintentional gender bias from compromising investigations. Crucially, DOJ says those principles must be built into policy, training and supervision.
Women who report sexual violence should be able to expect those professional standards from law enforcement, precisely where leadership culture becomes visible.
The sheriff does not personally conduct every interview or write every report. But the sheriff bears responsibility for setting organizational standards: what conduct triggers review, how supervisors evaluate investigative work, whether mistakes produce corrective action, whether trusted employees are challenged when necessary, and what message the organization sends when someone says the system failed her.
Would Kinnaird handle crimes against women more aggressively or effectively than Fabrizio? There is not enough evidence yet to say. The same is true of Cooper. Neither candidate’s brief discussion at the Chamber forum provided enough information to answer that question.
That, in itself, points to what is missing from this campaign.
We have heard plenty about jail beds, patrol staffing, drugs and the Second Amendment. But a sheriff builds the institution that makes thousands of smaller decisions in his name: whom to hire, whom to promote, what to teach, what to tolerate, what reports supervisors send back for more work, what complaints warrant another look, whether a frightened or angry citizen is treated as a problem or as a member of the public the department exists to serve.
When a woman walks through the door and says she has been raped, leadership helps determine what happens next.
Coos County Sheriff's Office isn't accredited with either the NW Accreditation Alliance or Calea. They should be at least NWAA accredited. In the minimum, someone could do a FOIA request for their policy on following state/federal laws, then use his statements to revoke his certification from DPSST. I believe state law requires Sheriffs to be certified w/in 6 months of being sworn in.
Such low standards when it comes to women really pisses me off. I worked for the judiciary, in various states, for 35 years. It’s so distressing that there is no change, and in fact, we are now going backwards regarding women’s rights.