Former Human Rights Commission leader arrested, along with alleged collaborator

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Former Human Rights Commission head Sheryl Davis, who was fired in 2024 after she was accused of misusing funds and failing to disclose her live-in relationship with grant recipient James Spingola, the head of the nonprofit Collective Impact, was this morning arrested along with Spingola. 

Court records show that Davis and Spingola were booked into county jail at 9:57 a.m. Both of their bonds are set at $50,000 and both are facing multiple felony charges. 

At the District Attorney’s office at noon today, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced that both Davis and Spingola surrendered on their warrants this morning. Davis has been formally charged with 17 felonies and two misdemeanors, including for improper spending and accepting prohibited gifts. Spingola is facing four felony counts of aiding and abetting Davis. 

“These are not routine charges,” said Jenkins, surrounded by her investigative team. “But I want to be clear. These are allegations that will ultimately be proven or disproven in court.” 

The District Attorney’s office’s investigation is ongoing, and it is possible that Davis and Spingola could see more charges in the future. The City Attorney’s office, after launching a probe against the department, had previously stated that Davis could be accused of bribery, and accused her department of misusing nearly $4 million in funds. 

The District Attorney’s office has stated that Davis’ charges reflect a misuse of just $350,000 in misappropriated funds from Proposition Q and the Dream Keeper’s Initiative. A charge of bribery is currently not being waged. “We have charged what we believe we had the evidence to prove,” said Jenkins on Monday.

Mission Local reported that Davis was facing a criminal investigation in August, in addition to a probe conducted by the City Attorney’s office into Davis’ alleged misuse of public funds. 

In September of 2024, two months after an anonymous whistleblower alleged that Davis and Spingola had misused public funds, public records requests to the Human Rights Commission’s office revealed that Davis spent more than $10,000 on a luxury rental at Martha’s Vineyard and that more than $1.5 million in grant funding had been directed to Spingola’s Collective Impact. Davis failed to disclose that she and Spingola were in a relationship and shared a home and a vehicle. 

The District Attorney’s investigation found that Davis and Spingola’s finances were more entangled than initially believed: Davis and Spingola shared multiple bank accounts, traveled together and paid for each others’ airfare and hotel stays, and Davis served as the signatory on Collective Impact’s bank account.

The investigative team also found additional potential conflicts of interest: Davis allocated millions of dollars to the Homeless Children’s Network, where her son was working as an independent contractor, and directed funds earmarked for an initiative she started known as MegaBlack into Collective Impact’s bank account. 

Davis and Spingola have both denied intentional wrongdoing — Davis, who sat down with Mission Local last year, called her failure to report the relationship and the misdirection of funds a “mistake.” She argued that her relationship with Spingola was “widely known,” and she didn’t feel the need to formally report the relationship. 

Davis and her lawyer, Tony Brass, have alleged that she made multiple requests to the department asking to avoid any direct, or perceived conflicts of interest in awarding grant funding to Collective Impact on the basis that she used to serve as the organization’s director — but not because she lived with the organization’s current director. 

The City Attorney’s office has stated that her former position at the organization was not a conflict of interest. Her relationship with the organization’s director however, was. 

As for the allegations of misspent funds, Davis has dismissed the claims as “mostly false.” 

A probe found that funding from Collective Impact had been used for flight upgrades for both Davis and Spingola to attend a “fundraising event’ in Martha’s Vineyard, for booking costs for Davis’ podcast, Sunday Candy, for a performance by the singer Goapale at Davis’ book signing event, along with $19,000 paid toward her son’s graduate school tuition. 

Davis has argued that the financial decision-making of her department, including determining what organizations receive grant funding, was largely not up to her. But on Monday, Jenkins announced that the investigative team found that Davis was heavily involved in the decision-making process. 

The excessive purchases were largely made on Davis’ behalf and for her personal ventures, including for the promotion of her children’s book and for her podcast. “Our investigation was very thorough,” Jenkins said. 

The team executed 50 search warrants and combed through Davis’ emails, finding evidence to support Davis’ involvement. Jenkins noted that though Collective Impact received a low score through the city’s RFP process, a scoring metric to allocate funding, and was recommended to not receive funding by a committee, it received funding anyway. 

“Now, there’s so many different allegations,” said Davis, in May 2025, after she resigned office. “There’s the conflict of interest, but then some of the other things are just the most … I can’t even think of how to respond to the allegations of bribery. Like, really? They hired someone to perform at an event, and that’s a bribe from me? If you really unpack it, it doesn’t even make sense.” 

In the wake of these allegations, funding for Davis’ former department, which provided grant money to community based organizations led by people of color, has since been halved, and the department has been merged with the Department on the Status of Women, which has also been plagued by allegations of misconduct.

No arraignment dates have yet been announced.