A recent headline in the Sun reported, “Lompoc officials, community organizations respond to violent crimes through investment in public safety and youth violence prevention” (“Pieces of the puzzle,” March 17), and a follow-up editorial opined that Mayor Jenelle “Osborne does a lot of glossing over of the violence that’s happening in Lompoc”; and claimed that she was a “seasoned Democrat” (“Expert testimony,” March 17), which is an opinion and not a fact.
There is a lot more to this story than just statistics, and it begins in the state Legislature. Let’s try and take a different approach to this issue, then you may draw a different conclusion.
Before settlers arrived on the eastern shores of what is now the United States, groups of American Indians established small communities. They also established rules of behavior for their tribal members; violating these rules resulted in punishment. Thus, the first law enforcement agents and tribal courts began their work.
When European settlers arrived, they also formed communities, then cities, and they too created rules for their community to follow based on the Ten Commandments and English law and eventually had to hire, train, and equip constables, marshals, sheriffs, and police departments to investigate crime and capture the scofflaws.
Laws were created by governing bodies to address citizen concerns based on what they considered as bad behavior; assault, robbery, theft of horses and wagons, murder, and many other egregious actions were considered violations of the rules they established. Over the last couple of hundred years, tens of thousands of laws have been passed to address citizen concerns.
Courts were established to give the scofflaws a chance to defend themselves and/or mete out punishment for their crimes when found guilty.
Today, a more permissive society has begun to question many of these laws; for example, “what harm is there in breaking someone’s window or stealing a merchant’s goods if no one is hurt” they ask. Sacramento lawmakers have responded by eliminating bail and reducing the punishment for many crimes like these.
But, if it’s your window, then the harm is that you must pay to replace it, and if it’s your goods shoplifted from your business, then you’ll lose some of your income.
In September 2017 I observed in a commentary, “Broken windows; Lompoc is full of them.” This commentary was based on a theory by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 that used broken windows as a metaphor for addressing disorder within neighborhoods (see also: “Broken windows,” July 29, 2021).
Expanding on the theory, they wrote, “If the first broken window in a building is not repaired, the people who like breaking windows will assume that no one cares about the building and more windows will be broken. Soon the building will have no windows.” They argued that if minor crimes are not addressed, then criminals would be emboldened to commit more serious crimes.
There are several examples of the broken window theory in Lompoc, the state, and nationwide, and I don’t mean just broken glass; they are so called quality-of-life crimes that can rot the core of society. Failing to take care of thefts, illegal camping, assaults, malicious property damage, shoplifting, and other crimes some people consider as “minor” seems to have led to a lack of concern by some people for the impact of their lawlessness.
The Sun reported that “in 2021, the city [Lompoc] saw five homicides, 29 rapes, and 760 assaults, which is an increase from 2020’s rates of four homicides, 25 rapes, and 753 assaults.”
The Sun editorial observed, “One of the strongest ways to prevent future violent crime from happening, according to the City University of New York’s John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center, is to add structure such as jobs, extracurricular activities, tutoring, and behavioral intervention to the lives of young people. So—not more police.”
Each of those structural changes is important, but so is an adequately staffed, trained, and equipped police department. It’s a simple fact of daily life in any community that some folks are prone to break the law; some with violent consequences for their victims. When these crimes occur, rapid and decisive intervention by trained police officers in sufficient numbers is needed, and the solution is not just “jobs, extracurricular activities, tutoring, and behavioral intervention,” as the study suggests.
It’s also a fact that other manpower-intensive incidents—such as mass evacuations, significant traffic accidents, searches for at-risk individuals and criminal investigations—demand the skills of several police officers. Last year the police chief provided a presentation to the City Council showing how Lompoc trailed and lagged behind in the officer-to-resident staffing ratio when compared to the national and state average.
The Sun also reported that Mayor Osborne said, “The fallouts and downturn of the economy—it reached us in 2010—was the same time you saw law enforcement had a difficult time hiring and retaining people. By the time we hit a lack of funding and reduction in the staff, and the inability to maintain our task force … it [created] the perfect storm for drug- and gun-related crimes,” and, “It’s a growing process, and our growing process is being able to hire and recruit. We’re thrilled we’re able to send enough cadets through the academy and [get] them up to speed in our community. We’ve implemented changes in structural staffing with two lieutenants positions that can help with training and oversight.”
As I read the Sun report, I couldn’t see that Mayor Osborne was “glossing over” the violence that’s happening in Lompoc; I saw that she provided objective answers to questions posed by the reporter based on her knowledge of crime in the last decade and steps the City Council is taking to address the issue.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 7-14, 2022.