More than 50 Lompoc community members spent their Friday night at the Dick DeWees Community and Senior Center on Oct. 25 to find answers to an increase in violence that’s plaguing the city. Seven homicides have taken place in the town of roughly 44,000 residents so far this year.
In response to a recent shooting that killed solider Marlon Brumfield, resident Yasmin Dawson organized a march through the city in September that hundreds of people attended. Dawson set up this Oct. 25 meeting to maintain that momentum.
People of varying ages attended the meeting, which remained solemn and hopeful. Toward the end of the meeting, resident Jeremy Ball said he believes Lompoc is “just a couple of days off a brighter future.”
Lompoc Mayor Jenelle Osborne acted as a moderator at the event, while Dawson walked, with a microphone in her hand, to and from residents interested in sharing their thoughts.
Almost all of the concerns raised were related to public safety and youth violence, but there were two recurring issues that dominated most of the conversation. Residents cited a lack of funding for the city’s police department as one of the core issues, as well as a lack of opportunities, services, and supervision for kids in the community.
Numerous residents said part of the problem is that many parents in the city live in Lompoc and work in Santa Barbara, which means parents spend a lot of time commuting and leave kids unsupervised for hours after school.
The Community Action Commission of Santa Barbara County told the Sun in August that it identified this issue in a community needs assessment of at-risk youth, and that this lack of supervision leaves kids vulnerable to gang recruitment.
In response to residents airing grievances over a lack of career opportunities in the city, community member Chuck Madson took the microphone, went to the front of the room, and informed the group about a youth center he’s working on opening called Future For Lompoc Youth.
Madson said the center would provide entrepreneurship, education, and on-the-job training to kids in the city. He said he’s in the process of securing a location for the center, which has received funding from the Santa Barbara Foundation, and he hopes to open the doors by the end of the year.
Madson echoed a common refrain that was heard throughout the night: Residents need to keep up this momentum.
“Even if the deaths stop, we need to keep moving forward,” Madson said.
Osborne is looking to continue having similar conversations at town hall meetings in each of the cities’ four districts. She’s still in the planning process but wants all of the meetings to take place in the coming weeks.
She envisions these meetings as an opportunity to speak with residents who don’t attend City Council meetings and to learn about the issues unique to each district and ways the city can address those problems.
“The recent spike in violence is the most important [issue] to address first,” Osborne said. “I really do want to get within the neighborhoods and hear from them, because I think they’re having very different experiences from each other.”
—Zac Ezzone
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 6, 2019.