by Marinee Zavala 
Born in Tijuana and raised in San Diego from the age of five, Adolfo Gonzales serves as San Diego County’s Chief Probation Officer, but he boasts one of the most impressive resumes among San Diego’s law enforcement agencies.
“It is not easy work,” Gonzalez says. He previosuly served in the San Diego Police Department for 26 years, nine years in as National City Polcei Chief, and three years as Chief of Investigations for the District Attorney’s Office, in addition to having been an FBI Executive Fellow in Washington, D.C. Now, Chief Gonzales is working to provide a police force that works for everyone, where together with the community, law enforcement and citizens can reduce crime and pull back the thousands of young people at risk.
Chief Gonzales stresses the importance of finding opportunities for young people who did not think these opportunities exist or thought they were out of their reach.
“Working with schools and biotech projects are just a few approaches,” Gonzales said. “We have to look for ways to help young people who think they don’t have a chance and get them trained, get them to see that there is a future for everyone. If they don’t dream, how are they going to become who they want to be?” Gonzalez added.
Gonzales came to San Diego in 1960, after a drunk driver caused an accident that killed his father, changing his life forever. He shared that he grew up in the streets of San Ysidro, where he got to see first-hand the difficulties in interacting with police officers.
“I had long hair and I was Mexican so the cops stopped me constantly. They would search me, ask me to get out of the car, and they even searched my friends’ cars for no reason. And that’s what I don’t want happening from here on out,” Gonzalez shared with La Prensa San Diego.
As Chief Probation Officer, Gonzales is looking for change. He says that the Probation department is where he wants to transform the lives of thousands of families, so that when the new generations face the world, they can be prepared.
“If we do nothing to help them, how are they going to have a better future?” Gonzales asks.
The overwhelming problem the Chief faces is the huge number of youth, over 2,000, under parole throughout the county, together with 12,000 adults whose drug and alcohol use, gang membership, and/or anger issues end up getting them sent to San Diego Juvenile Detention Centers and jails.
Today, more than 50 percent of the citizens overseen by the Department of Parole are Hispanic, while 18 percent are African-American, and 20 percent are non-Hispanic whites.
“We need more agents with ties to the African-American community, more Spanish-speaking Latinos. Today, 70 percent of the minors in the juvenile detention centers are Hispanic, but our officers are not 70 percent Hispanic,” expressed the Chief.
The approach used in National City, he said, was a success story. “Right now, we have 1,200 officers, and we do not reflect the way the community is composed. Same thing happened when I arrived in National City. We only had one female officer on patrol, and one more in the office. So I asked myself, how are we going to handle this? Well, we recruited eight women, and with all of them on patrol we reduced crime in the city.”
What is going to be Adolfo Gonzalez’s approach as new Chief of Probations? After only five months in the position, but with a lifetime of law enforcement experience, Adolfo Gonzales wants to turn things around and be closer to the people as far as safety is concerned.
“Things are changing,” he says; although there are great challenges such as getting parents to have a closer bond with their children who end up in Juvenile Detention and language barriers even within the home, more work needs to be done with youth, projects where they can get preparation and move out of their current environment.
“I never travelled north, for example,” he confesses. “It wasn’t until I was 21 that I realized there were things beyond Interstate 8. There are many opportunities kids are not aware of, and we will work with minors to help them find better jobs so they can experience a better quality of life.”
“I think that if we curb crime amongst young people, there will then be less adults committing crimes, but we have to start with them from an early age, so they won’t follow in the footsteps of career criminals. There is a lot of work to do in that regard.”
Finally, Chief Gonzales expressed being proud of his family – his wife and 3 children – and said he hopes that in the future he will get to know more of the country where he was born and the rest of the world. But above all, Gonzalez wants to help create better communities starting in San Diego for future generations.