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KENSINGTON -- Two weeks before two police officers pulled over an elected official in what she alleges was an act of harassment, this small town's interim police chief told her that cops had been reporting to him about the location of her car, she and others are claiming

Police district director Vanessa Cordova said Saturday that interim Chief Kevin Hart's remarks at dinner during a government conference in Monterey on Sept. 21 show she was being targeted well before the two officers stopped her in Berkeley on Oct. 7, threatened to arrest her and detained her for 45 minutes before ticketing her for not having a front license plate. She's said the officers appeared to be waiting for her on a side street.

Vanessa Cordova (Courtesy photo) ( Courtesy )

Rachelle Sherris-Watt, Cordova's colleague on the police board, said Saturday she heard Hart's comments. A Kensington fire district director, Janis Kosel, said she was also at the dinner, and Cordova was talking about Hart's remark's immediately afterward.

Neither Hart nor police board president Len Welsh answered requests for comment.

Cordova said Hart told her, "I understand your car is getting serviced." It was, but she said she found his knowledge of that disturbing. "I said, 'How would you know that?' "

Hart replied that as police chief "I know everything" and 'more than one officer' had told him where her car was, Cordova said. "It was all very awkward," she said, adding that she asked him, "Do you know where every director's car is?" Hart didn't answer, she said.


Sherris-Watt heard the exchange. "I was taken aback," she said. Hart's remarks were "unusual, inexplicable."

Cordova said she has chosen to publicly reveal the exchange now that an administrative investigation of the matter, which that been farmed out to the Richmond Police Department, is complete and in Hart's hands. Hart said at a public meeting on. Feb. 11 that he would be making "a final decision" on whether to discipline the cops involved, Sgt. Keith Barrow and Officer Manny Ramos.

Cordova said she'd been told that whatever recommendation that Richmond police made would be final. But Hart said at the meeting he will "either concur or not concur" with the findings.

Cordova said Saturday that "at the eleventh hour Hart appears to be changing the rules." Both she and Sherris-Watt called for him to recuse himself from deciding anything about the matter. Cordova said she had told Richmond police about Hart's remarks and was surprised that he apparently wasn't interviewed. Neither was Sherris-Watt, despite Cordova also telling investigators her colleague was present.

Coming nine months after this newspaper reported that Barrow's gun and badge had been stolen by a prostitute in Reno, Cordova's harassment claim further roiled politics in this affluent West Contra Costa town, where nearly all the board's business involves the 10-member police department. Hart, a Dublin councilman and a retired Alameda County Sheriff Department's deputy, took the helm of the department last year when the board cut off contract negotiations with Chief Greg Harman, effectively firing him for his handling of the Reno debacle. An audit by the Contra Costa Sheriff's Office of Harman's investigation of Barrow found it was not done to professional police standards.

But Hart is now finding himself in the Kensington hot seat. At the Feb. 11 meeting, resident John Gaccione told the board that Hart "appears to be playing politics with a director who does not support his spending policies" and "may lack the professional skills to manage sensitive personnel matters."

But others claimed the process was not being allowed to play out. Former director Linda Lipscomb said she had once gotten a ticket in Kensington for not having a front license plate. Resident Andrew Reed said the proceeding had become "a Kangaroo Court."

It is unclear when and how much of the investigation will be made public. State law blocks public disclosure of police personnel matters. Hart said he had turned the Richmond report over to district lawyers to decide what could be said about it.

Follow Thomas Peele at Twitter.com/Thomas_Peele.