I have been a resident of Menlo Park for over 20 years and a business owner here and have felt the same thing about our police force for 20 years: our town is over-policed and services for our students are under funded. Given what’s going on nationwide in police reform I decided to look at what we as a city are doing regarding spending and I have to say I was shocked. Here are my concerns. 1. We have too many officers * 7.5 officers/square mile. That’s too many. * We have 1 officer/ 500 people — if that’s in our city charter, that charter should change. Historically police unions put it into a charter without notice. If it’s not in the charter, why the high ratio? * We have 6-7 open positions highlighted in the budget. Why hire more!? * We have an increase of 5 officers proposed for Facebook. Why isn’t Facebook relying on their own (very robust) security? And why are tax payer dollars going to protect a corporation? * Our police logs show very little crime activity (currently at 5 cases/day) Ask around in Allied Arts and you will find that all of us are constantly being ticketed for parking in front of our own homes. This practice has been going on for YEARS and continues. * Even pre SIP if you look at the data from the past budget we have an average of 2 cases/officer/day. * We have 46 officers in the patrol unit mainly tasked with parking and traffic enforcement. For 10 square miles (most being residential). * Besides traffic/parking, our secondary issue is property theft. Our conversion rate (Charges/cases) is 13%. We have officers to take the report but those detectives only find a suspected thief (this conversion only includes charges not convictions) 13% of the time. Overall conversion is 28%. That's a very low resolution rate, especially in a town full of home cameras. Clearly the officers and detectives we do have are not very effective. * We have a 29 person “Special Operations” department. On the budget only 5 people of the 29 were described (detectives). What do the other 24 do? Another huge objection. $450K spent for a Mobile police unit! Why does our town need that? I'm noting that Betsy Nash was the only dissenting vote. Thank You Betsy. Police budget as you know is the top line item for our city. The argument that it’s safe because of the number of officers doesn’t hold water when you look through police logs, annual reports and the like. They are not stopping crime, they are ticketing drivers. Do we need them? Yes. Do we need 75.5 of them on our payroll? No. 2. Our money should be spent elsewhere. As of this upcoming year we will have a deficit given the recession and SIP. Any deficit should be covered by a reduction in police funding. Going forward here are areas where funds can be directed: * Programs for children * Members of our community are constantly raising money for our schools (MPSD as well as Ravenswood). * We can subsidize child care in our town * Money can go for services that help underprivileged youth get a leg up * Shadow programs that allow kids to see the inner workings of government * Help Small businesses * We already have a blighted city and this recession won’t help us out. We have small businesses that have been denied federal loans and are struggling to stay open. Help the businesses! * I have NO IDEA why Santa Cruz ave is still open for cars. The council should have voted a month ago to close it down to traffic and allow restaurants to have more tables. That is a complete lack of leadership showing loud and clear. Close Santa Cruz and allow restaurants to expand seating. Every resident I know has felt the same - why is Santa Cruz still open to cars? San Francisco is instituting community programs whereby outreach workers are deployed instead of police in cases of homeless calls, domestic violence calls, DUI calls and many others. They are ALSO cutting the police budget by 10 - 15% across the board. We as a small town can and SHOULD do better. We don’t need $21MM for police when we are fundraising in order to hire art and music teachers and donating supplies in order to stock classrooms. We don’t need $21MM that just ends up going to idle police hands ticketing residents left and right for parking violations. We don't need $21MM when our small businesses are struggling to stay open. It’s a misuse of funds and at a time when the city’s revenue will be massively lower, the Police Budget should be the first to be cut. I hope the council’s answer to resident complaints is not to just attend meetings. We elected you because we assumed you would represent our voices. We shouldn’t all have to attend meetings for our interests to be heard. That is your role as our council. Can I get a lot of voices riled up about this? Absolutely. Can I get petitions and signatures and people at meetings? Yes. Should I have to? That’s a resounding no. You as the council should be able to look at the budget and find a clear overspend and start cutting those numbers. Let me know the next steps for decreasing police funding and closing Santa Cruz to cars. Nicole Scarborough 22 year Menlo Park resident Menlo Park business owner Received on Mon Jun 15 2020 - 13:12:49 PDT
