If you remember, I posted last week re: the escalation of crime here and the impact recent politics will have. I also said I would collect stats re/crime and if we needed to approach city counsel to hire more deputies. I did what I could. I talked to a number of LE (law enforcement) including a captain and got a brief overview from a city counsel member. Great news. First, economics. Cities generate their income from retail, large corporations, taxes etc. Rancho, Ontario etc have a lot of money coming into the city. Ranchos city counsel is able to say that they want this many deputies and their response times to be under four minutes. They get that because they can afford it. Yucaipa has a budget of 16m. 7m is spent on public safety, which includes fire and EMS. I dont know what else goes under public safety, I imagine there is something. (Numbers are approximate as the conversation was informal) Yucaipa certainly does not generate the money that Rancho does....thankfully because we dont have to deal with the downside of that many people. I was able to get not only the statistics for Yucaipa but also for other similar cities in the county for comparison. Yucaipa is right up there with the other cities. There is a huge call volume for our LE and they are running calls all day. The calls per deputy ratio seems really high, but when you can see it contrasted with several other cities it is apparent that we are average and within reasonable bounds. So Yucaipa is doing very well comparatively speaking and a significant percentage of our budget goes to keeping us safe. This is the news I was hoping for. We have a responsive city counsel and police department and they are handling business. That is the upside, but we still have a problem. The politics remain the same. AB109 did release thousands of prisoners in California, a number live in our city. That happened and we have to deal with it. Prop 47 did pass which will release thousands more from prison, jails and off of probation/ parole supervision. Not only that, the drug possession and thefts are misdemeanors. Most repeat offenders couldnt care less about misdemeanors. They collect them like some people collect stamps. Because of these and the drug epidemic, the criminal behavior we are seeing will get worse. I asked a couple of the LE what we, the citizens can do. A couple of suggestions were to create neighborhood watch programs in your neighborhood. One city counsel member said that program is not just designed to watch out for each other but also to get to know each other, communicate... find out which cars are supposed to be around and which arent. Another suggestion by LE was to see about volunteering for Citizens on Patrol. They are a volunteer support staff for the sheriffs department. The advice, overwhelmingly, for securing your home is to get a dog. That is more of a deterrent than anything else. Beyond that is of course home security systems. What else? Maybe a community think tank with community members comprised of police, probation/parole, city counsel, schools, etc. that can discuss creative and unique ideas to combat the difficulties that we are experiencing?? Maybe there is one already, I have no idea. Hopefully we can figure something out. I dont know how helpful this was but at least we, as a community are talking. Maybe something good will eventually come out of it.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 04:02:56 +0000
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