Deputy Les Gacia – a cops’ cop – is retiring the end of December as the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s public information officer after nearly four decades in law enforcement.
Garcia has served in patrol, on a canine assignment and in reporting to media throughout Northern California and into some foreign countries with the bigger stories out of San Joaquin County.  His law enforcement career took him from the Tracy Police Department to San Joaquin County Superior Court and then to the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office.
“This is my 36th year – some of today’s deputies weren’t even born when I started,” he mused.
As a kid, he grew up in project housing in South Stockton. He said the high point of his career was being given the opportunity to become a law enforcement officer seeing the best and the worst in the communities he served.
“We all have choices.  I could have gone the other way but I was given opportunities by several people that put me in a position several different times where I could make a difference,” he said. 
Early in his career, he was hired as a Tracy officer by then Chief Cloyce Brookshire. A year later he attended the first Delta College Police Academy. He said he would work four hour shifts on the streets of Tracy and then go to the extended academy for four hours. He spent nine months at the academy.
Garcia was assigned to patrol upon graduation and was given a canine assignment.  His German shepherd was named “Cora,” who became so proficient at catching bad guys that a dog park section in the Pescadero Park was named after her, in appreciation by the community.   He recalled she had several arrests to her credit and she had once discovered several balloons filled with heroin in the mouth of a suspect.  Garcia went on to become a Field Training Officer (FTO), training new recruits at the Delta College academy for some six years.  That training job was the most rewarding during his career,  besides arresting the bad guys, he said.
When coming across some of his early day rookies he had mentored in recent years, he said he was surprised to find some had become lieutenants and captains over the years.
While in Tracy he was also assigned to the San Joaquin County Narcotics Task Force, known as CRACKNET.  After his stint in narcotics, he was promoted to corporal and later on to sergeant retiring in 2000.  Shortly after leaving Tracy, Sheriff Baxter Dunn offered him a per diem job in the Superior Court in Stockton at a time when police agencies were having a difficult time finding applicants that could pass the entry exams. 
He said he was soon asked to go full time and hired as a Sheriff’s deputy and spent six months as a Field Training Officer.  The deputies knew of his experience and treated him with respect out in the field, Garcia said, working for a short time in the Tracy area on patrol because he was familiar with that area.
His career then took him to work as a court liaison officer with the district attorney’s office handling criminal complaints.  It wasn’t long before the then Sheriff Robert Heidelbach sent him a note to meet him in his office.  He was looking for a public information officer (PIO)  – noting he had been looking for a woman to fill the spot.
“I can’t help you there,” Garcia remembered, chuckling.  “He broke out in a big laugh and then he hired me.”
Garcia was the official PIO the following Monday morning, serving the remainder of Heidelbach’s term as sheriff and three terms under Sheriff Steve Moore.  Whenever the Sheriff is seen in public, Garcia is not far away.
Dealing with the news media wasn’t new to him because when he was working in Tracy he had to keep in contact with the local papers such as the Tracy Press, The Tri-Valley Herald and the Stockton Record and occasionally television and radio stations depending on the depth of the news release.
In the Sheriff’s realm,  he has been responsible for members of the print, radio and television media for all of northern California including Tracy, Manteca, Lodi, Stockton, Modesto and the Contra Costa Times, the LA Times, Associated Press and Reuters News Service – along with the Internet that he says has been the most challenging.  The Sheriff’s Office added Twitter and Facebook recently.
He said the Shermantine digs that involved finding bodies in abandoned wells near Linden drew requests to his office from Australia, China, Japan and Canada in addition to media outlets from across the country. 
“Working with the media and informing the public has been rewarding and at times challenging,” he said.
Garcia is retiring soon and says he doesn’t want a party – just hoping to “ride off into the sunset” in one of his old Porches.  He has a 1973 model 914 and a 1983 model 928S.
“Out of all the years I’ve been in law enforcement, I have to thank my wife Barbara for putting up with the challenges being an officer has caused in not being able to attend kids’ functions and family gatherings,” Garcia said of his wife of 40 years.
They have two daughters and one son. His wife has worked at Kaiser Hospital in Manteca as a business representative while raising three kids, all graduating from Sierra High School. 
Devany and her husband Kris Dee are both officers in Antioch.  They have given the couple two grandchildren, a boy and a girl.  Daughter Lisa and her husband Jake Carpenter live in San Diego where Lisa is a Probation Officer with one young son.  Garcia added that they have been together since high school.   Son Michael and his wife Katie live in Modesto with their two girls.  Michael is a conductor/engineer with the ACE train.
Les and Barbara have just purchased an RV. Their first trip is to visit family in San Diego.

To contact Glenn Kahl, email gkahl@mantecabulletin.com.