Richard Van Koll is a retired San Francisco Police Department officer who was recently rehired to conduct background investigations on potential recruits. The only problem: This background checker appears to have a checkered background.
According to a civil lawsuit and a police report, Van Koll stiffed his elderly parents’ two home-care workers, was in a violent incident with them, and forged a check. The former officer, who started his $128,000-a-year job in April, is also embroiled in a lawsuit against his former employer, the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office, alleging that his November 2023 termination was the result of age discrimination.
“You would not hire someone who had any credibility issue in their background.”
A former SFPD officer
Former SFPD officers told The Standard that allegations such as those against Van Koll are significant enough to keep an applicant from being hired.
“You would not hire someone who had any credibility issue in their background,” said a former officer who worked in the academy. He added that questionable hires can threaten the credibility of the department.
Ordinarily, the SFPD’s background check results in heavy pruning of applicants. It’s so rigorous that only 12% of those investigated go on to the academy. That kind of selectivity is optimized for finding the best police officers, department sources say. But when the applicant pool gets low, officer numbers dwindle. Last year, 3,008 people applied to join the SFPD, half as many as applied in 2014. The department has a deficit of 500 officers.
Issues that come up in background checks include unpaid bills, parking and traffic tickets, bad credit, lawsuits, and disputes with former employers. Any of these can be enough to sink a candidacy. But in Van Koll’s case, the issues didn’t seem to be much of a concern.
Retired officer Harry Soulette thinks that’s odd. He worked with Van Koll and remembers him as a good cop. Still, Soulette, whose work in the police academy put him in the front row for assessing candidates, said the allegations are “red flags” against both Van Koll and the SFPD.
“I see it as problematic. There’s an issue of judgment,” said Soulette. “If it were me hiring, I probably would have thought about it a little harder.”
No background check for the background-checker
Van Koll’s rehiring is part of a push by the SFPD to bring on more background investigators, in hopes of addressing what the Police Officer Association says is a choke point for getting recruits into the academy. SFPD has 35 background investigators — most of them retired officers — who play a key role in hiring for the understaffed department.
Van Koll’s rehiring may raise questions about the quality of background investigators. Van Koll is accused by Adelaida Salangsang and her husband, Eduardo, of violating a number of labor laws, including failing to pay overtime and refusing to give breaks, vacation time, or paid sick leave while the couple was caring for Van Koll’s elderly parents in San Francisco for nearly a decade.
The Salangsangs’ December 2023 lawsuit alleges that checks bounced and that other “checks were written primarily by Richard (Van Koll), who signed his father’s name.”
Van Koll did not respond to a request for comment but denied all the allegations in his response to the lawsuit.
While SFPD said it performed a background investigation on Van Koll, that investigation either didn’t find issues from his past — or didn’t deem them important. The department contends that it did look into Van Koll.
“All SFPD employees … who are retired SFPD officers returning in a part-time civilian capacity are given background checks,” said SFPD spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky.
While Sernoffsky acknowledged that a police report was generated after the alleged altercation involving Van Koll and his employees, no arrest citation or charge resulted.
The spokesperson wouldn’t say why the department didn’t see Van Koll’s “red flags,” nor whether the rehiring was the result of a vicious cycle: Without enough background checkers to vet background checkers, did one of their own slip through the cracks?