A federal grand jury in Reno has indicted Justin Roper, the former Chief of the Washoe County Department of Alternative Sentencing, on a single count of federal program theft. Prosecutors allege Roper embezzled $55,593.52 in federal grant money between November and December 2024, money that was supposed to fund community supervision efforts in the county.
According to the US Attorney Nevada, the indictment was unsealed after Roper was scheduled to make his initial appearance in federal court in Reno. The office says the funds Roper allegedly diverted came from a $1.3 million federal grant that the Bureau of Justice Assistance, a division of the U.S. Department of Justice, awarded to the Department of Alternative Sentencing to support community supervision and alternative sentencing programs.
Roper is charged under 18 U.S.C. § 666, the federal program theft statute that applies to agents of local agencies receiving more than $10,000 in federal benefits annually. If convicted at trial, he faces a statutory maximum of up to 10 years in federal prison.
A Resignation Preceded by Search Warrants
The indictment caps a saga that began well before this week. Roper resigned from his post as Chief in March 2025, after federal agents and local police executed search warrants at the department's Reno offices as part of an ongoing investigation into how the agency handled its grant money, according to Our Town Reno. The outlet reported that Roper had already been placed on unpaid leave before he formally stepped down.
While he led the department, Roper also owned and operated Sober Testing Services, a for-profit Las Vegas business he founded in 2021 that offered drug and alcohol testing. That arrangement drew scrutiny from county commissioners over potential conflicts of interest, since the department itself ran a county program offering similar sobriety monitoring services, the outlet's reporting noted.
Internal Audit Flagged Dozens of Problems
The federal case followed a separate, county-level reckoning. A 2025 internal review of the Department of Alternative Sentencing turned up roughly 70 operational and administrative findings, including three consecutive years of budget overspending, unauthorized traffic stops, and improper personal use of county-owned vehicles, per This Is Reno. County commissioners subsequently moved to dissolve the department altogether.
The department itself had a two-decade run before that unraveling. Washoe County commissioners established it in December 2005 under Nevada Revised Statute 211A, and it supervised an average of 2,000 misdemeanor probationers and pre-trial releasees, employing Category 1 peace officers to enforce court-ordered supervision and drug testing, according to Washoe County's own records.
Part of a Broader Federal Corruption Push
The prosecution is being handled by the District of Nevada's Public Corruption Strike Force, a specialized DOJ unit created in January 2026 to investigate and prosecute federal offenses affecting government integrity across municipal, state, and federal agencies. The case is not an isolated one; it follows another recent grant embezzlement indictment in northern Nevada, where a Reno resident was charged on July 28, 2026, with stealing nearly $400,000 in federal grant funds meant for tribal land improvements. Both cases were investigated under the same public corruption initiatives, prosecutors say.
The criminal investigation into Roper was carried out by the U.S. Secret Service's Las Vegas Field Office, working alongside partner agencies as part of the Secret Service's statutory mandate to safeguard the nation's financial systems. That involvement explains why the Secret Service, an agency more commonly associated with protective details, appeared in the same announcement as a local government embezzlement case.
