Cut chains and trampled fences. Tractors with missing wheels and broken windshields. Stolen drip tape. Missing ATVs. Throughout Santa Barbara County, property crime is hitting agricultural businesses and farms hard.
“Our losses have been up to $70,000,” Hampton Farming Company partner Jim Stollberg said. “I know a lot of other growers have had much higher losses and more problems depending on their location.”
The destroyed and stolen equipment makes it difficult for employees to do their job without the tools they depend on, and the company loses money because that all needs to be replaced, Stollberg said. Farmers file criminal reports to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office, but are finding no resolutions.
“In all of our cases they found the equipment largely destroyed usually or taken apart and parted out, and they haven’t prosecuted somebody,” he said. “Even if they’ve found them, they can’t hold them. They are being released, and consequences are so low they really have no reason to [not] go and find another location and they continue on with the thefts.”
Since 2020, rural crime has increased by more than 60 percent and the total property losses or damages are worth more than $2 million, according to the Sheriff’s Office. Through July 2022, the department reported 143 crime incidents and losses of more than $500,000. To combat this issue, Stollberg and several other farmers approached the county Board of Supervisors during its Sept. 20 meeting and reached out to law enforcement agencies with the hope of finding creative solutions.
“Our goal as an agricultural community is to try to understand what we can do to help law enforcement and prosecutors to get these people off the streets,” Stollberg said. “That was part of why we went to the Board of Supervisors, to let them know this is an important problem we are having so they can enact more resources, more money to prevent the continuation of this.”
Sheriff’s Office staffing difficulties and low retention rates and a California law reducing jail sentences have been cited as a few of the barriers to achieving any resolutions, but the agencies and community members have continued to meet in order to keep the conversation going.
“It’s costing us a lot of money, and a big part of a solution is getting the services we need from the people in charge and trying to identify those things and be helpful,” Stollberg said.
The Sheriff’s Office already costs the county a lot of money, according to county supervisors, and giving the department a funding increase to create a rural crime unit—which was suggested on Sept. 20 during public comment—wasn’t an option.
“The Board of Supervisors allocates $178.5 million to the sheriff’s department, and they are not able to spend it all because they have not been able to hire enough officers,” 1st District Supervisor Das Williams told the Sun. “It’s weird for people to ask the taxpayers to pay more money when it’s already been allocated; there’s just not enough hiring going on.”
As of Sept. 28, the Sheriff’s Office had 47 funded positions available and 91 funded vacancies, and the board has already earmarked an additional $2 million for the department to hire more people than what’s allocated in the budget, Williams said.
“They have made some progress, but I’m looking at the third quarter projected variants, and at this point hiring is still not, you know, robust enough. They are projected to use about $5 million less than what we’ve given them,” he said.
Instead, Williams said he’s worked with the County Executive Office and the Human Resources Department to see how they can attract more people to these jobs and keep them filled—like looking at affordable housing projects, overtime at the Sheriff’s Office, and preventing deputy burnout. After hearing public comment, the board agreed that the discussion should return as an agenda item, but Williams couldn’t give a date as to when that would happen.
“The important thing for people to know is the Board of Supervisors cannot control the sheriff’s department, all we do is write the checks,” he said. “The sheriff has, within his authority, the ability to have a rural crime unit and allocate millions of dollars for the people necessary to staff that or any unit he so chooses to do.”
The Sheriff’s Office currently has one dedicated rural crime investigator who covers the entire county and conducts all of the investigations—primarily in North County, which experiences the greatest impact of these crimes, Undersheriff Craig Bonner said.
“The real challenge is that it’s rural. There aren’t a lot of people around to notice crimes occurring and to call us to come to the area to intervene,” Bonner said. “It’s a lot of reporting after the fact and investigating.”
A 2020 California law change that reduces certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors in order to keep people out of jail makes it incredibly challenging to hold people accountable for rural crimes, Bonner said—and it’s caused a dramatic spike since the pandemic.
“Even as an overall society, as we are coming out of COVID … what we are not seeing is a drop in rural crime,” he said. “It’s remaining.”
In 2019, there were 172 rural crime incidents reported to the Sheriff’s Office, but by 2021 that number increased to 253, and the property lost or damaged jumped to about $1.1 million in 2021 from 2019’s $480,798, according to Sheriff’s Office rural crime data.
Numbers through July of 2022 are more than halfway there with 143 incidents reported and $538,498 in property loss or damages.
“We’re looking at a number of different projects from the use of license plate readers to putting out specialized patrols to try and mitigate the impacts of this,” Bonner added. “More pointedly, we are looking at putting together a task force that involves our folks, the Santa Maria Police Department, and the District Attorney’s Office to really put a focus on these crimes.”
About 40 farmers and agricultural business owners have been meeting with the Sheriff’s Office, the Board of Supervisors, and the Santa Maria City Council to keep this issue a top priority for local leadership, said Facts from Farmers founder Lacy Litten.
“[Conversations] have been slow but productive,” Litten said. “I mean obviously rural crime has been in ag for a long time, and we haven’t necessarily asked for help either—which is a little our fault—but now we really need help, and like anything, it takes time.”
Members of Facts from Farmers, a nonprofit that works to increase trust among farmers and the community, have heard both the supervisors’ reasoning behind funding restrictions and law enforcement’s staffing issues. But, she said, at the end of the day it’s only pointing fingers and not resolving farmers’ problems.
“That’s all fine, but how can we bring all of our brains together and creatively find a solution that would alleviate this issue?” Litten said. “We aren’t going to solve it 100 percent, we know that. But at this point we’d be happy to get down to a $500,000 loss.”
Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor can be reached at toconnor@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2022.