At the beginning of the month, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department launched its temporary North County jail transport unit. The two-person team receives recent arrestees from local law enforcement agencies and drives them down to the county jail in Goleta—saving valuable time and resources, and keeping police officers on the streets.
In a Jan. 6 interview with the Sun, Sheriff’s Commander Darin Fotheringham said, “The transport unit is going really well. We’ve only been doing it for five days—today is the sixth, actually—but in those five days, we’ve transported 10 people.”
Fotheringham explained that the weeks right after the holidays can be touch and go: “We see either a lot of activity and arrests, or very little,” he said.
In those first few days, Fotheringham said deputies drove “as few as one [arrestee], and as many as four [arrestees]” the roughly 60 miles to the jail.
He estimated the trip takes about 2-1/2 hours to complete when receiving and booking process is taken into consideration. If the van is full with 10 handcuffed men or women, it can take longer.
In December 2013, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to spend $272,000 on a short-term funding plan for the Santa Maria jail substation, which has been booking prisoners on a limited basis since 2011. The staffing shortage has put a significant burden on local law enforcement officers, who were forced to leave the area for several hours at a time to transport prisoners to the main jail in Goleta.
At that December meeting, Santa Maria Police Chief Ralph Martin presented statistics that estimated his officers, from June 2011 to December 2013, spent a total of 3,887 hours shuttling arrestees down to the jail, for a total of 157,220 miles driven. Other North County law enforcement agencies affected by the staffing cuts include California Highway Patrol, the Guadalupe Police Department, the Santa Barbara County Probation Department, the Allan Hancock College Police Department, and the California Division of Adult Parole Operations.
The transport unit runs during the day when the Santa Maria booking station is closed, from about 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Two Sheriff’s Department deputies work together out of a 12-seat van, although if there’s just one arrestee, a single deputy will drive his or her squad car to the jail instead. A female deputy is brought in when female arrestees are being transported.
Fotheringham said the department is in the process of recruiting both custody and street deputies.
“We especially have a need for qualified female personnel,” he said.
The unit is funded through June 30 of this year, at which point the Santa Maria jail would return to a 24-7 schedule and house up to 29 longer-term inmates along with newly booked arrestees. Sheriff’s Department officials are expected to present this proposal in detail during the 2014-15 budget hearings. However, Sheriff Bill Brown did make it clear to county supervisors last December that the Santa Maria booking station’s hours will have to be upped to some degree by July of this year.
Commander Phil Hansen with the Santa Maria Police Department said transporting arrestees “was a significant issue with our personnel in terms of morale.”
He explained that in addition to creating stress for officers, the prospect of driving down to Goleta could compel them not to make arrests if they were dealing with a “wobbler.”
Wobblers are instances when police aren’t mandated to take people into custody, such as cases of intoxicated persons or warrant arrests.
“The officer could choose to issue a citation versus making an arrest,” Hansen said.
When officers left to transport arrestees, he explained, the streets became less safe because there was less manpower available to respond to life-threatening calls.
Hansen assured the Sun that the department, which has been hiring more officers of its own, is “pushing for a more aggressive stance” on arrests.
“We’re going to be out looking for things rather than waiting for the call,” he said.
In the meantime, the commander said his officers are happy with the Sheriff’s Department’s short-term solution.
“It just saved us another trip yesterday morning,” he said. “We’re hoping to give them more business.”
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 16-23, 2014.
