The Santa Clara County sheriff’s system for granting concealed weapons permits is so inconsistent — and the record-keeping so fragmented — that it is difficult to discern any public-safety rationale behind a process the District Attorney’s Office is investigating over allegations of political favoritism.

Sheriff Laurie Smith’s office, by its own admission, does not keep a tally of how many applications for concealed firearms are received each year, and it has refused to answer questions about what the criteria for approval might be, making it difficult to get an idea of how the applications are evaluated.

A law-enforcement source said there is only one essential criterion: whether Smith or one of her top commanders wants to grant the permit.

Donald Kilmer, a local Second Amendment attorney who sued the Sheriff’s Office in 2011 over the issue, said the evidence of a slipshod process was not surprising. “She might as well be using tarot cards and flipping coins,” he said of Smith.

Earlier this month, as part of its investigation, the DA’s Public Integrity Unit served a search warrant and seized computer equipment from the office of Undersheriff Rick Sung, Smith’s second-in-command. At least three other supervisors have also been served with warrants related to the probe.

Smith, who in 1998 became the first woman sheriff in the state and has been re-elected five times, has long been criticized for a lack of transparency over the so-called “concealed carry” weapons, or CCW, permits, and was hit with Kilmer’s lawsuit in 2011 that sought to discover how her office decided who would be granted a permit. A corresponding investigation by this news organization found that Smith’s political donors represented a quarter of civilian permit holders. The investigation also found that a permit was issued to an Eggo waffle heir who lived outside of the country, in violation of longstanding state practices.

The DA is exploring whether Smith’s office favored campaign donors in doling out the coveted permits, with investigators paying particular attention to a single, $45,000 donation made by an executive at a private security company to an independent expenditure committee that backed Smith’s re-election bid last year. That security executive, Martin Nielsen, and a number of his colleagues at the firm were granted permits in March.

But the agency’s sparse record-keeping has made it difficult to determine what logic governs who gets a permit.

So far, the only information the Sheriff’s Office has released in response to public records requests after the DA investigation became public in August are the names of individuals granted permits each year since 2014, and 15 applications for permits granted in late 2017 and in 2018.

When this news organization requested CCW records in fall 2018, in the heat of Smith’s last re-election bid, the office refused to release any documents, despite having done so in 2011 in connection with reporting on the federal lawsuit.

Asked recently about the number of applications the Sheriff’s Office receives each year, the agency could not provide even an estimate.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Michael Low told this news organization the paperwork for rejected applications is shredded annually. But the county’s posted records retention schedule requires that CCW applications be kept at least two years before they are destroyed unless they are the subject of litigation.

The law-enforcement source, however, said there is no consistent process for retaining or purging applications, adding that the only thing successful applications had in common was a green light from Smith or one of her top commanders. Rejected or non-processed applications, the source said, often go into a drawer and aren’t looked at again.

The Sheriff’s Office declined to answer any additional questions about permit figures or about the evaluation process.

Other counties are keeping count

In contrast, when information was requested about their concealed weapons permits, at least three neighboring counties provided it within a week’s time. In San Francisco County — where the Sheriff’s Department is known for granting virtually no concealed carry permits — the department received two applications in 2017 and none in 2018, said spokeswoman Nancy Crowley. No permits were granted either year, and there are no active permits, she said.

Detective Rosemerry Blankswade, of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, said the office received 398 new requests or renewal applications in 2017 and 2018 combined, of which 196 which were granted.

Alameda County received 103 new applications in 2017 and 2018 and granted 64 of them. Also, 227 permits were renewed and, as of this month, there were 259 active licensees countywide, records show. Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly noted that requests for information about concealed weapons permits are quite common.

In San Francisco and San Mateo counties, all applications for permits are retained indefinitely, the spokespersons for the offices said. Alameda County keeps rejected applications for two years before they are destroyed, and applications for expired permits or revoked permits for six years.

The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office did not provide permit information in time for this story.

CCW permits in California are issued at the sole discretion of the state’s sheriffs and police chiefs, and their willingness to grant permits varies widely. Santa Clara County issues relatively few permits compared with the state’s other 58 counties, especially outside the Bay Area.

Currently, only about 150 such permits have been issued or renewed in Santa Clara County since 2014, records released by the agency show. In comparison, Sacramento County, which has 20 percent fewer people than Santa Clara County but is similar in its urban and suburban mix, has more than 5,000 such permits issued to residents.

In 2011, Kilmer, representing Tom Scocca, a former Shasta County sheriff’s deputy and a reserve officer with the San Jose Police Department, sued Smith’s office in federal court after Scocca was denied a concealed weapons permit. In 2016, the parties agreed to Scocca receiving a fresh permit evaluation, but he said that never happened. Scocca also said that before he moved to Santa Clara County, he had no problem getting approval for a CCW permit.

“I couldn’t even get them to look at my application for six months,” he said of Santa Clara County. “In Shasta County, I put in my application, and with my training, got a permit in a short amount of time. Less than three months.”

A wide range of processing times

The only available summary data released by the Sheriff’s Office in Santa Clara County shows the number of permits annually approved by the department has varied over the last six years, from 33 in 2014 to 72 in 2015.

From 2014 to 2019, 150 individuals had permits renewed or issued by the department, at least 37 of whom have donated directly to Smith’s campaign. The donations ranged from $100 to $1,000 and some of the civilian permits date back decades, before Smith was elected sheriff.

Despite the small sample of applications that have been released, they provide a glimpse of the varying levels of attention given to the process: State law requires a decision on an application within 90 days. In the release sample, it took anywhere from a few days to as long as six months for applications to be approved.

The Sheriff’s Office has blamed such delays on a backlog, but at the same time, the office maintains that it has no figures for how many applications are in the queue.

The latest applicant to legally question the process is Timothy Schreiner, a retired Stanford University Department of Public Safety officer and reserve deputy, who sued the office in August over the denial of a permit.

Schreiner held a concealed weapons permit as a condition of his employment with Stanford from 1988 until he retired in 2007, said his attorney, George Lee. In 2015 and again in 2018, Schreiner requested a retiree identification card with an endorsement for a CCW permit, but both were denied.

Lee pointed to language in the penal code that says law enforcement agencies “shall” grant their active or retired deputies concealed weapons permits, so long as they retired in good standing and have not violated laws or major department rules. In a response letter, the county argued that Schreiner is not entitled to a permit because he was not employed or supervised by the county or a public agency.

Lee is not alleging that Schreiner was denied a permit for political reasons, but he’s waiting to see how other applications, especially for Stanford deputies, have been handled.

“I do believe (the investigation) illustrates a systemic problem when you give sheriffs complete discretion to grant or deny CCWs,” Lee said, “and they start to see it as a favor they can issue.”