Q&A

| Q&A Willing to Serve

After eight years as Deputy District Attorney, Dan Dow is seeking a promotion. In what is shaping up to be a close race in the June election for the office, Dow and his colleague Tim Covello will square off to replace District Attorney Gerald Shea, a 16-year veteran of the 95-person SLO County department.

So, Dan, how did you get your start? I joined the Army and they said, “We need linguists right now and we think based on your scores you’d be good at learning languages. We want you to be an Intelligence Cryptological Linguist and we’re going to teach you a foreign language.” So, after getting my security clearance stuff done, they sent me to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. They said, “We’re going to assign you a Category 4 language,” which happened to be Korean. I was there for a year. It was studying eight hours a day. The language is fascinating, but I never, as a youngster, would have said, “Hey, I want to go learn Korean.” I just wasn’t exposed to it. But because of the Army, it opened up a whole new set of life experiences and it was very rewarding.

What do you remember about your time in Korea?

I grew up in Maine—Korea was like Maine, probably even colder though—quite a bit colder, but an absolutely beautiful country. The elderly people, particularly way out in the villages where they still remember the Korean War, would treat you so well being an American soldier. I remember one time when we broke down in the middle of an extremely cold winter night. The trailer that we were pulling behind our truck had the wheels lock up; they were literally frozen shut. So, we found a discarded tin can on the side of the road and filled it with diesel fuel. Our idea was to light it on fire and place it underneath the axle, thinking it might warm it up enough to unfreeze so we could then start to roll again. It took forever, but we finally got it lit. My partner then stood up quickly and slipped on some ice and the flaming diesel fuel went flying out of his hand and landed in the rice paddy next to the road. So we’re jumping around in the field trying to stamp it out when this elderly woman—it must have been about 3 o’clock in the morning at this point—comes out of this little house wearing only a nightgown; it was probably 15 or 20 degrees below zero. She brought us a hot pot of coffee and proceeded to thank us for our service. Here we were practically setting her crop on fire and she’s making us coffee and thanking us.

When were you first exposed to the criminal justice

system? I was 32 and in my second year of law school when I received a 24-hour notice that I was being deployed again. They told me initially that I was going to Iraq; but the Army said, “No, we’re actually going to send you to Kosovo.” I was on a human intelligence team. We were responsible for finding war criminals, looking out for people that had been previously identified and had never been brought to justice. So we were looking for them, actively going out into the communities, talking with the Serbian population, talking with the Albanian population, developing friendships and relationships, and all the while, hopefully, collecting good information so that we could find the bad guys, the people who had committed the war atrocities. We were also looking for other crime that was tangentially related to that, like the smuggling of weapons into the country. We would be gathering intelligence so that we could track and, hopefully, find these people, while also doing our best to maintain the peace between the Kosovar Albanians and the Serbian populations that lived there.

In the DA’s office you have developed a reputation for your work on sexual assault and domestic violence prosecutions. Why focus on these areas?

These are very, very serious and important cases; and I find them rewarding because they’re challenging. But, I also know that you can’t make anything better for the victims, so you do everything you can to vindicate what happened and support the family, support the victims that are there, help ease the burden that they have, and make sure that their rights are protected; and make sure that the process goes forward and you achieve a just outcome. And a lot of prosecutors don’t really care for those cases because they’re complicated. And when I say complicated, it’s because they have so many different competing dynamics. If you think about it, a victim of an intimate partner crime is often so emotionally tied to the perpetrator that they have a hard time separating themselves from the abuser. You’re dealing with people at a very critical time of need in their lives.

But, your work in this area was interrupted a few years

back, correct? Yes, if somebody is in the National Guard or the Reserves, and they get called up, you’re subject to a Federal Order. So, in 2010 I had orders from the President of the United States that said, “Captain Daniel Dow, you’re being ordered and called to active duty and you have to drop everything else you’re doing and go off to war.” It was a tough year for my family. My daughter, Chloe, was five years old, and my son, Jed, was three. We did a lot of Skype, and I missed them like crazy. My wife was 100% supportive, and has been for the 21 years we’ve been married. It was definitely an experience. You know, I wouldn’t necessarily say anybody wants to go off to war, but when you’ve been trained to do what you do and you know that your comrades, your brothers and sisters at arms, are overseas doing what they’re doing, you feel like that’s where you can contribute the most. So I’m glad, in that context, that I had the opportunity to serve. I’m eligible to retire from the Army in June, so no more deployments for me. My commitment is here to this office.