For years in criminal trials, Deschutes County Sheriff Kent van der Kamp misrepresented where he went to college and which degrees he holds. That’s what investigators with the Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office concluded before recently adding the county’s top law enforcement to a damning list of local officers who prosecutors deem too untrustworthy to testify.
“It’s not accurate,” van der Kamp said by phone Friday when presented with the DA’s findings. “It’s sexy, but it’s not accurate.”
The sheriff declined to answer OPB’s questions, saying he was spending time out of town with his family this week. He said he plans to release a statement on April 22. He’s waiting to respond, van der Kamp said, “because we’re trying to get some answers to some questions that we don’t understand.”
The DA’s investigation concluded that van der Kamp “failed to adhere to ethical and legal standards required of law enforcement officers,” according to a summary report released Friday by Deschutes County District Attorney Steve Gunnels.
“Sheriff Vander Kamp, while serving as an expert witness in DUII prosecutions, testified falsely about his educational background, including while under oath. This misrepresentation directly compromised his reliability as an expert in multiple cases,” Gunnels said in the report.
(In late 2024, the sheriff, who previously went by Vander Kamp, began spelling his name as three words, van der Kamp, telling OPB this year that he decided to adopt the “culturally-correct” Dutch version.)
The DA’s office found “material misrepresentations and apparent contradictions” across various resumes and testimony by van der Kamp when he served as an expert witness in drug recognition, before he was elected sheriff last November. A drug recognition expert is a police officer trained to recognize impairment in drivers under the influence of drugs.
Van der Kamp’s differing educational claims first caught prosecutors’ attention after a staffer in the DA’s office noticed that the information included in the 2024 Oregon Voters Pamphlet didn’t match up with court records from 2013.
Deschutes DA Gunnels said in his April 18 release that his office reached out to van der Kamp’s attorney about the discrepancies in November 2024, and that on Nov. 12, van der Kamp’s attorney told the DA the 2013 resume “had been prepared by someone other than Vander Kamp and that he had simply failed to read it thoroughly.”
Gunnels’ investigation found van der Kamp submitted numerous resumes and gave oral testimony repeating false claims that he received degrees from the University of Southern California and the University of Arizona.
“In 1995, I graduated the University of Southern California with a degree in business management. In 1997, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in — or a master’s degree in business management,” van der Kamp said under oath in 2013, according to court transcripts quoted by the DA’s investigation.
In another instance, in 2015, a resume van der Kamp submitted to the state before testifying claimed a bachelor’s degree, not a master’s, came from the University of Arizona. These false claims and others reoccurred through 2018, the DA found.
“Our investigation established that Kent A. Vander Kamp did not attend, nor was he ever enrolled at, nor did he receive any degrees from USC or UA. To be clear, the absence of these records and transcripts as well as USC’s and UA’s response demonstrate that Kent A. Vander Kamp was never enrolled as a student at these universities, nor did he receive any degrees from these universities,” Gunnels wrote in his report.
In his statement to Oregon voters last year, van der Kamp did not claim to have gone to either school, and instead said he received a master of business administration from Trident University, and a bachelor of science from the University of Phoenix.
The DA’s investigation led to the sheriff being added to a Brady list on April 7. The listing means prosecutors think van der Kamp is an untrustworthy witness who can’t be called to testify in future cases. It also means past cases involving van der Kamp’s testimony since he became a full-time Deschutes deputy in 2008 could be reopened, with charges potentially being dismissed or convictions thrown out.
So far, the DA’s office has identified three DUII cases in which prosecutors believe van der Kamp gave false testimony.
The sheriff said he does not plan to resign.
“I was resoundingly hired by the public to do a job and to stop the crisis at the sheriff’s office,” he said. “And I continue to do the same until we can find a time that’s best for me to transition out.”
Van der Kamp’s annual salary is one of the highest in the county government: $211,031.
Since 2008, he has risen through the ranks in Deschutes County law enforcement, from his hiring as a deputy to sergeant in 2017. He was elected sheriff by a wide margin last year, after weathering accusations of dishonesty when he was just beginning his career, and a subsequent legal battle over public records that shined a light on his past troubles with a police department in La Mesa, California.
The public records showed La Mesa officials wanted to fire van der Kamp in the 1990s, after they concluded he was dishonest about his training and certifications.
The Deschutes investigation isn’t the first time a DA has accused van der Kamp of lying. A 2018 complaint to the sheriff’s office by Wheeler County District Attorney Gretchen Ladd claimed he misrepresented the facts of and his role in a criminal case to participants at an EMT training that she also attended. The complaint triggered a Deschutes County internal investigation into van der Kamp, who disputed Ladd’s account. The investigator did not sustain the complaint.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
