Richard "Ricky" Fischer, who pleaded guilty to seven criminal counts involving misconduct against 16 women while serving as a San Diego County sheriff's deputy, is now a chaplain with the San Diego Christian Law Enforcement Fellowship, a religious organization led largely by current and former law-enforcement officials that ministers to police officers and deputies in crisis.
The appointment, first reported by Voice of San Diego, comes after Fischer's conduct resulted in nearly $10 million in taxpayer-funded civil settlements, more than $1 million in additional public money reportedly spent defending him, a criminal conviction and a 44-month sentence from which he ultimately served only a fraction.
CLEF President Jerry Hara, himself a retired 35-year San Diego Police Department captain, doesn't dispute Fischer's past. Instead, he says it is part of what makes Fischer qualified for his new role.
"There are cops that are desperately, desperately hurting. They're in legal trouble, they've been arrested," Hara told NBC 7. "They can look to him because he has been there."
Hara told Voice of San Diego that Fischer has undergone a religious transformation, is attending seminary and was "vetted" by the organization before being selected as a chaplain. Hara said he believes Fischer now possesses "integrity and high morals," adding that CLEF itself ministered to Fischer during his prosecution and incarceration.
"Who better to minister to cops who are in trouble than a cop who has been in trouble who has now been forgiven by God?" Hara said.
What Hara describes as a troubled cop's redemption story has a considerably darker beginning. Fischer's victims included women stopped or detained by him and women who had contacted the Sheriff's Department because they needed law enforcement assistance. Prosecutors said Fischer sometimes returned to women's homes after calls had been cleared from dispatch, when other deputies were no longer around.
Deputy District Attorney Annette Irving said six of the 16 women involved in Fischer's criminal case initially encountered him after 911 calls for assistance, while eight others were women he detained or arrested. Some were handcuffed when Fischer touched their breasts or buttocks.
One woman who had called the Sheriff's Department to report a domestic-violence threat alleged that Fischer hugged her, grabbed her buttocks, placed her hand on his crotch and told her not to tell anyone. She later described the lasting consequence of asking police for help: "I will never let an officer in my house again."
Another woman described being handcuffed after a traffic stop when Fischer groped her. A woman Fischer was transporting to jail said he stopped his patrol vehicle on a dark road and asked whether she was scared; she later said she feared she was going to be raped.
Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein focused directly on the imbalance of power when sentencing Fischer in 2019.
"When you are in uniform, when you have a gun on, when you have that type of authority, there never can be consent," Goldstein said, describing Fischer's behavior as "abhorrent."
The judge told Fischer that he had "disgraced your uniform" and concluded that he had taken advantage of both vulnerable victims and the extraordinary authority entrusted to him as a law-enforcement officer.
Fischer had initially faced 20 criminal charges involving 16 women and the possibility of a substantially longer prison term. On the day his trial was scheduled to begin, he accepted a plea agreement involving four felony counts of assault and battery under color of authority, two misdemeanor counts of assault by an officer and one misdemeanor false-imprisonment count.
None of the offenses to which Fischer pleaded guilty was technically classified as a sex crime, despite sexual misconduct underlying many of the allegations. Goldstein declined to order sex-offender registration after psychological evaluations concluded Fischer did not exhibit sexual pathology, with his conduct instead described as involving an emotional motivation centered on power.
Fischer received a 44-month custodial sentence followed by supervision. His incarceration became another unusual chapter when authorities mistakenly credited him with 956 days for time he had spent on pretrial home detention, resulting in his early release. A court later corrected the error and ordered him back into custody, although Fischer appealed and remained free for a period while the dispute played out. He ultimately spent just over a year incarcerated during separate stints, according to Voice of San Diego.
The criminal case, however, told only part of the story. More than 20 women eventually brought civil claims involving Fischer, and San Diego County taxpayers paid nearly $10 million resolving them. The county also spent more than $1 million paying private attorneys who defended Fischer in the litigation, according to published reports.
Perhaps more consequential for the Sheriff's Department itself were questions about how long Fischer's conduct may have continued after warnings about him allegedly reached law enforcement. One woman, identified in court documents as K.P., said Fischer groped her during a traffic stop and that she subsequently sent the Sheriff's Department two letters complaining about him, one in March 2016 and another in November 2017. She said neither received a response. Sheriff's officials maintained that the department never received the letters.
A separate woman alleged something even earlier. A former San Diego State University student said Fischer groped her following a 2012 traffic stop and that investigators pressured her not to submit a formal complaint. The Sheriff's Department disputed having received a complaint about Fischer before the later investigation.
One alleged warning was strikingly direct.
"He's a predator, not an officer," a woman wrote in a letter she said she sent to the Sheriff's Department in 2016. Sheriff's officials said they had no record of receiving it.
The Fischer scandal ultimately prompted KPBS to investigate something larger than a single deputy: how the Sheriff's Department handled complaints from ordinary citizens. When KPBS sought the department's complaint-response records, the Sheriff's Department repeatedly refused to release them. The news organization sued in January 2019, and the county eventually settled the public-records case and produced the information.
What emerged wasn't particularly reassuring. Of 425 citizen complaints submitted to the Sheriff's Department from 2014 through 2018, 72 - more than one in six - received no response of any kind. Sheriff's officials said some unanswered complaints could have been anonymous, repetitive, impossible to investigate or otherwise deficient, but Fischer's case was among the reasons journalists began asking the question in the first place.
Years later, scrutiny of accountability within the Sheriff's Office has hardly disappeared. In 2022, the California State Auditor issued a blistering review concluding that the San Diego County Sheriff's Department had "failed to adequately prevent and respond to the deaths of individuals in its custody." Auditors counted 185 deaths in county jails from 2006 through 2020, among the highest totals in California, and identified deficiencies in medical and mental-health care, safety checks and the department's internal review of deaths.
The audit also found that San Diego's civilian oversight body had failed to provide effective independent oversight and had not investigated nearly one-third of jail deaths during the preceding 15 years. Some of those shortcomings have since been addressed, including reforms that the State Auditor now lists as fully implemented, while the Sheriff's Office says it has made substantial changes to detention staffing, medical and mental-health services and jail operations.
The issue remains current. An independent study commissioned by the Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board and completed in April 2026 again examined more than 12 years of deaths in San Diego County detention facilities and produced 15 recommendations, while emphasizing that access to Sheriff's Office data would be critical to understanding institutional risk factors. The Sheriff's Office responded that many recommendations had already been implemented or were underway.
That scrutiny is not merely historical. In July, former San Diego County Sheriff's Deputy Jeremiah Manuyag Flores was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison after a jury convicted him of violating a detainee's civil rights and falsifying records to conceal what happened. Prosecutors proved that Flores shoved a fully restrained, shackled and handcuffed 57-year-old detainee headfirst into a concrete holding-cell wall at the San Diego Central Courthouse, fracturing the man's spine, then walked away without getting him medical help and later falsely wrote that "no force was used." The detainee remained on the floor for more than two hours before another deputy discovered him.
Flores' conviction came amid another extraordinary federal prosecution involving the department. Just weeks earlier, former Sheriff's Deputy Aaron Russell was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for fatally shooting unarmed 36-year-old Nicholas Bils four times in the back as Bils fled outside the San Diego Central Jail in 2020. Federal juries convicted both former deputies of violating the civil rights of people who were under law-enforcement authority, while the Sheriff's Office terminated Flores after his conviction and said it "does not tolerate the use of excessive force or lying by deputies."
Against that backdrop, Fischer's new connection to San Diego law enforcement is closer than the phrase "Christian nonprofit" might suggest.
The San Diego Christian Law Enforcement Fellowship describes itself as a non-denominational organization conducting Christian outreach to San Diego County's law-enforcement community. Its leadership includes Hara, a retired SDPD captain; retired law-enforcement officials; and people who currently serve as chaplains for the San Diego Police Department.
Until Fischer's appointment drew scrutiny, Sheriff Kelly Martinez's photograph was also displayed on a CLEF webpage. The Sheriff's Office said Martinez did not know her image was being used and asked that it be removed after learning Fischer appeared on the site.
"Richard Fischer was terminated as a Sheriff's Office employee in February 2019," the department said in a statement. "He was convicted of crimes and behavior that are not acceptable for any member of the Sheriff's Office."
Yet Martinez's office simultaneously emphasized its continued support for law-enforcement chaplaincy, saying the sheriff "appreciates how invaluable a resource they are to our employees and the community."
CLEF has imposed at least one conspicuous limitation on its confidence in Fischer: Hara says Fischer is permitted to minister only to men. That restriction creates an unusual contrast with Hara's insistence that Fischer has been fully rehabilitated. CLEF says Fischer has been sufficiently vetted to counsel police officers experiencing some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, while simultaneously keeping him from ministering to female officers.
Dave Myers, a retired Sheriff's commander who spent three decades in the department and later ran for sheriff, sees Fischer's appointment very differently.
"He used his badge. He used his training, he used his trust, his authority to sexually assault women on duty in uniform, in his marked patrol car," Myers told NBC 7. "That cannot be trusted again in positions of trust."
The attorney who represented many of Fischer's accusers has raised another question about CLEF's redemption narrative: what Fischer has done for the women themselves.
Attorney Dan Gilleon told Voice of San Diego that Fischer had presented himself as religious even before the assaults and that Fischer and his attorneys aggressively contested his clients' accusations during years of litigation. Gilleon said he was unaware of Fischer making meaningful amends directly to his victims.
"Repenting so he doesn't burn in hell forever is one thing, but actually making amends to the victims is where the rubber meets the road and he hasn't done that," Gilleon said.
Hara acknowledged to Voice of San Diego that he has never spoken with Fischer's victims. Nevertheless, when asked how they might view Fischer's appointment, he suggested they could appreciate the work Fischer is now doing with troubled officers. That assumption is difficult to square with what at least some victims have actually said publicly.
Following one of Fischer's releases from custody, a woman identified as Jane Doe #3 said the outcome made her feel that victims "don't matter" and that law enforcement could abuse its authority without meaningful consequences. Another woman said simply, "There's just no justice."
CLEF is a private religious organization and is entitled to believe in forgiveness, rehabilitation and redemption. Fischer completed the criminal punishment ultimately imposed upon him, and there is no evidence presented here that he has committed another crime since his release.
But forgiveness and institutional trust are not the same thing. A chaplain serving law-enforcement officers occupies a position built almost entirely around trust. Officers experiencing addiction, family crises, disciplinary investigations, arrests, emotional breakdowns or other intensely personal problems are encouraged to disclose information to someone presented as a spiritual counselor.
Fischer's history is not merely that he was once a police officer who "got in trouble." His convictions arose from abusing the very attributes that made people trust him: the uniform, the badge, the gun and the authority of the government behind them.
And the institution from which he came did not escape the episode unharmed. Women said warnings went unanswered, journalists had to sue the Sheriff's Department to obtain basic complaint-response records, taxpayers ultimately absorbed millions of dollars in settlements and legal bills, and some victims said the experience permanently destroyed their willingness to trust police.
Now, seven years after a judge told Fischer he had disgraced his uniform, a Christian organization deeply embedded in San Diego's law-enforcement community has given him another title that depends upon trust.
This time, it is "chaplain."
Originally published on August 31, 2026.
