Chief Word has 30 years of law enforcement experience. He formally began his law enforcement career at the Oakland Police Department in 1984 and rapidly rose through the ranks to become Oakland’s youngest Chief of Police in 1999. As Chief, he commanded a force of approximately 1,200 total personnel, including over 700 sworn members, with a budget exceeding $160 million. In his first year as Chief, Oakland saw its lowest number of homicides in over 30 years. In 2004, Chief Word joined the Vacaville Police Department as its Chief of Police, where he served until his retirement in 2013. In 2014, Chief Word served as the interim Chief of Police for the Pinole Police Department. He also served as President of the California Police Chiefs Association in 2007, and he continues to teach both the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training certified Basic Internal Affairs Course and the Supervisors Course at the Sacramento Regional Public Safety Training Center. Chief Word has conducted several police misconduct investigations, and he has served as a police procedures consultant for several law enforcement agencies.
Throughout Chief Word’s career, he has responded to, participated in, supervised, and reviewed major crowd control and protest/civil unrest events. He has also continually endeavored to build community trust, support, and confidence in the agencies he has commanded. Some of these efforts include the establishment of a police and corrections team at the Oakland Police Department. Such a team worked closely with State Parole, meeting with newly released prison inmates to direct them to local services to ensure their successful reentry into the community. In Oakland, Chief Word also included community members on police hiring and promotional panels, and he maintained several minority community police advisory groups. In Vacaville, the Police Department employed a number of Master Social Workers and Family Support Workers who worked closely with police detectives assigned to a Family Investigative Response Services Team and police officers assigned to Vacaville’s public schools.
Chief Word holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from John F. Kennedy University and a master’s degree in Public Administration from Golden Gate University. Chief Word is also a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the FBI National Executive Institute.
“I am very much appreciative of Citygate’s comprehensive view of all the issues. And you have been very candid and very forthright in the problem areas that you have identified and we appreciate that. Quite often sometimes people choose to gloss over those issues and therefore we never can get a real good handle on the problem to resolve it. And I very much appreciate your insight and your intuitive natures that you have all experienced in your government services and trying to identify where our problem areas are so we can identify for the public. I very much appreciate the idea and the comments that you made that we are talking about the citizens who come to the planning Department as customers. And so you’ve done a great service for us and we are certainly appreciative of all your efforts.”
Commissioner Jackson County
“Thank you so much for this training. This was the best PIO training I’ve ever received.”
S-403 Information Officer class participant
“I think this is one of the most comprehensive reports and I think probably one of the best presented reports I’ve seen in my years in government service. I want to start off by commending you for that and acknowledge that the work that you were able to do with cooperation from all of the different firefighting agencies in this region was second-to-none.”
Supervisor First District San Diego County
“We work with consultants, obviously, all the time, but the work that Citygate did on this report is some of the best I’ve seen in my tenure here.”
Retired Chief Administrative Officer San Diego County
“I was absolutely thrilled with the report because it was very comprehensive, very detailed. I call it the ‘time-in-motion study’ almost and some of the aspects [are] ‘how does your paper flow? How can you make your processes better? . . . As a government agency, how can we provide better service to the constituents?’ And to us we think that this study identifies those things down to all of the small paper processes and flows.”
Retired City Manager City of Vista, CA
“[Stu Gary’s] knowledge, expertise, and demeanor were invaluable in our efforts to ferret out a fair agreement with the City. I could go on and on about Stu, but you already know all of the superlatives.”
AAE, General Manager Monterey Regional Airport
