As in the rest of the State, if you steal under $950 you get a prize, not punishment. But this county is refusing to abide by State standards and provide the needed jails. The result? The county has 20,000 outstanding arrest warrants—people who should be jailed and there are not enough cops and jail cells for this massive crime wave.
“Another devastating factor is the decarceration movement. Decarceration is the opposite of incarceration. Instead of incarcerating criminals, naive do-gooders believe that jail is the last option for both the accused and the convicted, who they consider victims of circumstance and racism. They prefer counseling, home detention, mental health and addiction treatment therapies, and the like. They also want virtually no one detained on a pretrial basis, that is, after they have been charged but before they have been convicted in a court of law.”
While in Santa Barbara—while you are tasting its wines and viewing the magnificent ocean views, your car will be stolen, you will be assaulted and the best the police can do is offer you a bottle of water.
Steamrolling the Sheriff and District Attorney
by Andy Caldwell, Santa Barbara Current, 2/4/24 https://www.sbcurrent.com/p/steamrolling-the-sheriff-and-district?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2074654&post_id=141302503&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=x9o3&utm_medium=email
Santa Maria and Lompoc, and the unincorporated areas of the north county have the most poverty and the most crime (poverty and crime being conjoined twins). Their crime rates – including some 20,000 outstanding arrest warrants for criminals – are exacerbated by the fact that the city police and county sheriff departments are understaffed.
Several factors have contributed to this shortage of officers, including the defund-the-police movement which has cut funding for prisons, jails, and law enforcement. Then we have the aggressive trend to vigorously prosecute law enforcement personnel for errors and faults, not to mention the number of deadly attacks on police officers. All these factors have encouraged law-enforcement professionals to retire early and have also served to diminish the number of recruits seeking a career in law enforcement.
The Decarceration Movement
Then there is the soft-on-crime approach in California via Propositions 47 and 57 which completely downgraded hundreds of crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, along with AB 109, which emptied our state prisons of many serial criminals, and the elimination of death row, all of which served to gut the Three-Strikes Law that had previously put a serious dent on career criminals in this state.
Another devastating factor is the decarceration movement. Decarceration is the opposite of incarceration. Instead of incarcerating criminals, naive do-gooders believe that jail is the last option for both the accused and the convicted, who they consider victims of circumstance and racism. They prefer counseling, home detention, mental health and addiction treatment therapies, and the like. They also want virtually no one detained on a pretrial basis, that is, after they have been charged but before they have been convicted in a court of law.
Elimination of Jail Cells
Whereas, our County Sheriff Bill Brown and our district attorney John Savrnoch are more than amenable to alternative sentencing protocols, the one thing that is paramount for these elected officials is to keep the public safe from criminals. Our county supervisors (primarily Supervisors Joan Hartmann, Das Williams, and Laura Capps) however are intent on severely diminishing the number of jail cells the Sheriff is constitutionally charged with overseeing. Specifically, the Sheriff has informed the board of supervisors that he needs to maintain jail capacity at a minimum of 1,000 beds.
Alternatively, the supervisors hired a consultant to undermine the authority and recommendations of the sheriff by way of recommending the elimination of hundreds of cells. We didn’t elect the consultant; we elected the sheriff to run the jail and our state constitution gives the sheriff the sole authority and constitutional mandate to run the jail. So not only are these supervisors refusing to stay in their lane, but they are also wrong-way drivers, and the casualties are starting to pile up!
No Money to Maintain the Jail
The background of all of this is that the county supervisors, going back decades, refused to allocate the funds to refurbish, expand, and maintain the south county jail. And now they want to close it except for arraignments. And if it weren’t for the heroic efforts of Sheriff Brown, we wouldn’t have the new north county jail as an alternative, as he secured the funding from the state to build it. Hence, the supervisors are seeking to tie the hands of the courts, the district attorney, and the sheriff to put people in jail by limiting the capacity of the jail.
The irony here is that a significant number of the people in jail have some form of mental illness. The sheriff has a program to treat them while they are in jail, while the supervisors have neither the money nor the facilities to treat them outside of jail. Thereby, this current board of supervisors has the most foolish and reckless record on public safety that I have ever witnessed.
