If you visit the Lompoc Police Department’s website or use its smartphone app, you’ll notice five of the last six reports concern car theft. While the number may seem high for such a short span of time (10 days), Sgt. Kevin Martin told the Sun they were no cause for alarm.
“As far as the stolen vehicles, yeah we’ve got ’em like any other community,” he said, adding the crimes didn’t appear to be coordinated or involve complete vehicle breakdowns—when the tires, rims, engine, and other valuable parts are removed, typically for sale. Instead, Martin said, Lompoc’s recent car thefts are used for a more simple purpose.
“They’ll get stolen out of Lompoc and then we find them in Santa Maria,” he explained. “It’s almost like they are using them to get to different places in the county. We tend to recover our ‘stolens.'”
According to Martin, the primary kind of stolen vehicle case his department encounters involve cars that criminals use to get from “Point A to Point B.”
“They just need to get somewhere and they are taking people’s vehicles to do it instead of working and having their own vehicle,” he said.
There were 47 reported vehicle thefts in Lompoc between November 2017 and Jan. 22, 2018, according to department records. That number is down from 56 just a year ago over the same period. When comparing that three-month time span in previous years, a small jump or spike occurs in November 2016, where thefts ballooned to 56, a sharp contrast to the past three years, which saw a combined 65 thefts.
“I don’t think numbers are up in a huge way,” Martin said. “At this point, I would not say it’s a crime trend. Is it higher than we would like? Absolutely, and we’d love to do more about it, but we have our own struggles we are working through at the moment.”
Like many police departments in small municipalities, Lompoc’s administrative issues are largely staffing and budget related. Martin said the department hoped to soon fill three traffic or motor positions, which are currently vacant.
“When staffing starts to drop, we start to pull [officers] out of specialty positions and put them into the backbone of police work, which is patrol,” he said.
With no motor positions to solve vehicle related crimes, the reports filed by patrol officers instead get sent over to regular detectives, who focus on human rather than property crimes. Martin said a lot of the staffing issues should be alleviated when five officers join the department full-time this spring. He also pointed to the police union and Lompoc City Council agreeing to give officers a 9 percent pay increase over two years as a beneficial development.
“That significantly helped,” Martin said. “We’ve struggled over the last couple years with keeping officers in Lompoc.”
Capt. Joe Mariani told the Sun the pay bump makes the department almost in line with surrounding communities.
“It made us more viable and competitive,” he said. “It’s still less than many neighboring jurisdictions, but more viable.”
According to Mariani, current staffing levels for the department are 51 sworn officers, eight dispatchers, and one dispatch supervisor. Half of the dispatch positions are part-time, however, and Mariani said he hoped to find four full-time dispatchers as soon as possible. He also noted that five of the sworn officers were currently in field training.
“It’s challenging, but we are meeting our goals in terms of providing service,” he added. “We have a couple vacancies in our detective bureau—and we’re not going to fill those until we get a little stronger in patrol—but we are making some inroads toward the recent cache of new recruits that are out there and hopefully they will help us resolve this in the next year.”
Sgt. Martin told the Sun that while staffing remained a problem, one of the reasons so many stolen vehicles are reported was in part due to success with the department’s app, released in 2015. The app allows users to anonymously report crimes, and related activity, as well as respond to photos and police news releases.
Martin said more than 15,000 people had downloaded the app since its inception (for context, Lompoc’s population is around 43,000, according to the U.S. Census).
“That’s 15,000 sets of eyes,” Martin explained, adding the department receives on average 30 to 40 tips monthly from the public. “The app has really changed our way of communicating: with Nixel—[the department’s web page where it releases crime reports]—we only had one-way communication with the public; this makes it two-way.”
For example, Martin said on the week of Jan. 8 that Lompoc Police officers were preparing to drive to Los Angeles to arrest a suspect in a sex abuse case against a minor when the individual popped up on the department’s app.
“A neighbor spotted the suspect in Lompoc and reported it to us,” he explained. “So not only did we make the arrest, but also we saved the community a tremendous amount of money and overtime by not having to send officers down to Los Angeles to look for this guy.”
However, even an effective app is only one part of the public safety puzzle.
“We are quickly rebuilding staffing levels to be more proactive on the streets,” Martin said.
This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2018.