Commander Kevin Huddle

Commander Kevin Huddle is a 21-year veteran with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office in Southern California. He has held assignments in Patrol, Field Training, Mobile Field Force, SWAT, Background Investigation, Administrative Investigative Team, Motor Unit, and as a supervisor in the Detective Bureau’s Major Crimes Unit. While assigned to the Detective Bureau, he supervised and investigated a variety of crimes such as robbery, burglary, sex crimes, officer involved shootings and homicide. He was assigned as the primary supervisor for the Isla Vista Mass Murder that occurred on May 23, 2014, where six University of California, Santa Barbara students were brutally killed and another fourteen people were wounded either by gun fire or by being run over by the suspect’s vehicle. As a result of this mass murder investigation, Kevin is part of a three-person team that travels around the country presenting a comprehensive case debrief on this massacre.

In March of 2016, Kevin was promoted to Lieutenant. He served as the Chief of Police Services for a contract city and supervised a patrol bureau, K9 Unit, FTO Program and was the department coordinator for the CA Office of Emergency Management. Kevin’s next assignment was working for the Office of the Sheriff as a direct report to the Sheriff and Undersheriff as the Sheriff’s Adjutant. In this position, he supervised the Coroner’s Bureau, Special Projects, PIO and coordinated the county’s mental health Stepping Up Initiative. The Stepping Up Initiative is a composition of the governing bodies with a collaborative approach to carry out a six step planning process to reduce the number of adults with mental illness from cycling through the county jails.

In September 2018, Kevin was promoted to Commander and assigned to the South County Patrol Operations Division. In this assignment he oversees three patrol bureaus, which include two contract cities and the college Community of Isla Vista. Kevin is also assigned as an Incident Commander for the Santa Barbara County Fire Type III Team. He has been activated for the Thomas Fire debris flow, where 23 lives were lost, and numerous other activates related to storms.

Since 2008, Kevin has been a part-time faculty member at Allan Hancock Community College where he is an instructor for the Advanced Officer Training courses. He is a certified academy scenario rater and teaches at the Allan Hancock Police Academy.

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from the California State University at Long Beach. He graduated from the Supervisory Leadership Institute (SLI) and attended PERF’s Senior Management Institute for Police (SMIP) Session 67 in Boston. Kevin is currently enrolled in California POST Command College Class 66.