Making Santa Cruz Safer Involves Realistic Change

The past 12 months have been very difficult. Many wonderful people I know and some I have met since last May are still hurting. We're all trying to move on with our lives but the truth is we're not even close to being OK. 

Yes, we as a community have done a lot the past couple years. Many new groups and organizations have been created to bring everybody together. Even though we are being called the “Oakland of the Central Coast” and having difficult to read news stories written about our town, we continue to believe things will get better. There is a simple reason for this and I can sum it up in one simple statement from a friend of mine: “Santa Cruz is too awesome”. Of all the conversations I've had with business owners, friends and locals, these 5 words have struck something in me. We're not dealing with these issues because our city is rundown. Santa Cruz isn't a ghetto, bankrupt and broken. Our city is unimaginable strong.

But, the things that make us great have made us weaker. We've ignored the reality of being a tourist town and a destination for criminals and derelicts. Rather than focusing on making our city more attractive to tourists and less alluring to criminals we have people like Brent Adams attacking our already damaged and thinly stretched police department and demanding the construction of a homeless camp. We have Robert Norse spending all his energy and our tax dollars to gain the right to make a Nazi salute at a city meeting. Our city leaders, many new to the position, with all due respect, have failed miserably. Before being elected I asked Councilperson Micah Posner how he would reduce crime in our city and he replied “Focus on specific crimes that we can control. Bike theft is a good example”. Councilperson Don Lane's answer to the same question “More volunteerism around the community”. Councilperson Pamela Comstock never answered and sent an email asking me to donate funds to her campaign. When I was interviewed on KSCO 1080 along with Supervisor John Leopold, his answer to my questions were “Santa Cruz is not my district”. These are the people running our city and county and trying to make change. None of us want Santa Cruz to fail or continue having these horrid crimes, but we have no idea what to do. We have no experience dealing with this level of crime. Unfortunately, from what we've seen these past several months, neither do our city leaders.

Since May 2010 our city has had riots, innocent friends murdered, police killed and families terrorized. I spoke to a mother of a graduating high school senior and she is doing everything to send her daughter anywhere but UCSC because she's afraid. I get emails regularly to my site asking me how dangerous our city really is. This city is hurt and nothing is being done. The answer isn't having marches to city hall or holding signs on the corner of Water and Ocean. We need to make decisions that are realistic and difficult. We need to act like a big city and not some small hippie town. Our passive attitude is getting people killed.

We need to look into how our homeless shelters handle their services. A policy needs to be implemented refusing services unless the person has been a resident of Santa Cruz County for at least 12 months and has no violent criminal history. Handing out needles to drug addicts doesn't help anybody. We're all tired of seeing pictures online of used needles in our parks and on our beaches. We can't expect addicts to be responsible for their own clean up. If there isn't a solid and functioning rehab program than there shouldn't be a program to support addiction. Transients and squatters have killed more innocent Santa Cruz residents in the past 3 years than the 89 earthquake. Although we can't do anything to prevent a quake, we have the ability to prevent our city from becoming a mecca for transients. San Lorenzo River levee is closed to all of us after sunset, yet it's a campground for transients. We need to become more aggressive and make our city less appealing to transients. Our programs to help people in dire straights are already set up and functioning, but they should be focused on the homeless transitioning into stable housing, not to people using our city as a stepping stone. There is a huge difference between being homeless and being a transient. Since I started keeping track of stabbings in our county over 5 years ago I always get asked who commits the stabbings in Santa Cruz. The answer is always somebody from outside our city coming here to cause crime. We need to take a serious look at license plate recording systems. Documenting all vehicles coming in and out of our city will not only help our police department catch criminals, it will also deter criminals from coming here. Pacific Ave, Ocean and Mission St should be covered with surveillance cameras. There's no excuse for us not having this already. When it comes to the privacy argument, I would challenge anybody out there to avoid being on some form of surveillance recording on any given day. Every responsible store (including my own business) records the interior and exterior for protection. The reason the Boston Marathon bombers were identified so quickly was due to all the video and digital images. Locations our tourists and visitors frequent are a disaster. The first thing we present our guests is a run down Ocean St. and then the Flats. When we successfully bring them to our shopping district, they're hounded by drunk transients and aggressive panhandlers. Beautifying our city should begin with the main arteries leading in and out. Our downtown should be treated like a priceless commodity. These suggestions may sound expensive and overwhelming, but if we're a town that can get the Warriors Arena built in 70 days or have events such as AMGEN come through, we can make change for our safety happen and it's this form of change that brings in more revenue.

For the time being, do what works best to prevent crime. Talk to your neighbors, introduce yourself to local shopkeepers and keep an eye out for each other. If you see something suspicious or a nuisance, contact the police. Making our own neighborhood safer one street at a time will make our entire city better.

Of course, all of us can ignore reality and slip back into the Awesomeness of our city, pretending nothing bad would ever happen to us. Well it has and it will. Let's be the ones that act and make changes we can look back at and be proud of.