Last week I welcomed Santa Maria Valley representatives to correct the record if I made any unfair assumptions about them after invites to Santa Maria’s first Pride event went unanswered but for a few. I didn’t hear back from any of them, but I did hear back from Sheriff Bill Brown.
I had also gotten on the sheriff’s case about not saying anything to the county Board of Supervisors for months about the jail ride program drying up, but that wasn’t what he wanted to set straight. I had said that Brown had declined to comment on the matter for our cover story that week, but he hadn’t received the Sun’s request for comment.
My bad, Sheriff Brown, but you’re not off the hook for neglecting to comment to the supes about the program going away. And now that North County detainees are taken to Santa Barbara because the Santa Maria Branch Jail is closed, it has an effect on locals, a lot like the understaffed dispatch center run by the Sheriff’s Office.
That’s a whole other complicated situation of overlapping jurisdictions, aging technology, and lack of financial resources. I don’t know the answer, but building a new dispatch center for medical and fire emergency calls sure seems like a simple, yet expensive, fix.
But according to county staff, the money for that project is already stowed away. It’s obviously a problem that’s been there awhile, if they’ve been squirreling away millions of dollars.
I can see Sheriff Brown’s point in wanting to keep that part of dispatch under the same roof: He’s got good people working there handling dire situations quickly and professionally. But why not take some of that workload off their plate, and allow the office’s dispatchers to focus on calls that need law enforcement assistance?
It’s all very complicated, but that’s why elected officials like Sheriff Brown need to make a crystal-clear case, and not neglect or ignore complex problems—that’s how you find the easy fix.
Talking about easy fixes, you’d think that President Donald Trump could have easily explained away his “many sides” comment following the violence in Charlottesville, Virg., when he actually named and condemned the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis on Aug. 14.
I know, I talked about this last week, but that was before Trump doubled down on his original statement on Aug. 15, when he said counterdemonstrators on the “alt-left” deserved blame for the violence, and that plenty of “very fine people” were marching among the openly racist demonstrators and those who came out to oppose them. He also attempted to shift the conversation on the violence over to the removal of Confederate statues, which is what attracted the Unite the Right rally in the first place, saying, “I wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?”
So, first the president equivocates white supremacists with counterdemonstrators, and then the founding fathers with Confederates?
Locals in Santa Maria and Lompoc rallied and marched recently, calling for unity. Rep. Salud Carbajal and Lompoc Police Chief Pat Walsh were both there at the Lompoc rally, holding signs and joining the chants for love over hate, and peace over violence.
You see, it’s that easy. It’s not trying to rewrite history, not trying to make excuses or shift blame, just unequivocally saying that hate and violence are wrong. Period.
The Canary doesn’t equivocate. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2017.