This past week, Q-line asked: “Do you feel safe in Santa Monica? Where would you not go because you feel unsafe?”
Here are your responses: ✆ “I certainly do not feel safe in this city, surrounded 24-7 by drug addicts, drunks, crazies and assorted criminals hanging out. I don’t know where the police department gets their fanciful statistics from, probably because a lot of the threats and crime goes unreported, or the statistics are juggled or sanitized like most of the statistics we’re getting out of Washington D.C. We, the people, are just to swallow all this baloney. I would not go anywhere in Santa Monica after dark, and certainly not in the early morning hours until there was a lot of pedestrian and vehicular traffic around to offset the threat of the bums and vagrants prowling around.” ✆ “First, I wish to thank the Santa Monica Police Department and other event crowd control staff in the manner they maintain crowd control safety on the Santa Monica Pier, especially on Thursdays during the summer’s Twilight Dance Series. They do an excellent job. A great amount of personal injury crimes, including shootings occur when there are ego personality flare-ups. These can occur in schools, bar rooms, churches, and anywhere else people gather. Still, crime will occur. A burglary will occur where there are the best goods, i.e. oil paintings, gold jewelry and diamonds. Do I feel safe anywhere in Los Angeles County? No.” ✆ “The Pico neighborhood — that is not a safe place to go to. Parks are certainly not safe. There are bums all over the place, garbage all over the place, either they’re drunk or they’re raving lunatics. You never know what those idiots are going to do...” ✆ “South of Colorado Avenue would be an area I wouldn’t go unless it was an emergency. The reason for this is, there is so much crime that isn’t highlighted by the police department that occurs, and any area that has high crime, I don’t want to be near. Also, it has gotten to the point where there are certain areas on Wilshire Boulevard where you know you will be accosted by the homeless and the mentally ill, and you don’t like to go to those locations. For example, the 7-Eleven on Seventh Street and Wilshire Boulevard.” ✆ “Always being skeptical of statistics, I still feel that the police department has done a wonderful job of combating crime in Santa Monica. It’s not the car chases and the bank robbers that get the adrenaline going that make the job hard. It’s the small barking dog calls, the loud neighbors and music, that constantly sap the strength and response of the police officers — that’s a very hard part of their job. As a civilian employee of the police department over 30 years ago, I can attest to how hard they work. Two areas I would not go in this town after dark would be around 20th and Pico, or 17th and Michigan. As a senior police officer once told me, ‘Whenever you have a community, you’re always going to have those who steal from others because they feel that it belongs to them.’ No, I’m not talking about rent control or affordable housing. These are crimes that even the police can’t handle.” ✆ “I think Santa Monica is the safest city you could live in, and I’ve lived here for a good, long time. But when the shades go down, you better watch out, because there is a lot crime that goes on in this once-peaceful city. But, if you need to live in the city, I think Santa Monica is the best that you can get, except for the bumpy roads, because I’m in a wheelchair.” ✆ “Well, I was born and raised in the city of Chicago. I spent most of my adult life in Manhattan and never had a problem. The day I came to Santa Monica, we parked in a parking structure, and the glass was smashed and everything that could be taken was taken. About two years later on Wilshire Boulevard in broad daylight, I was mugged, pushed down, and my purse was stolen. Where wouldn’t I go? Pretty much everywhere, and anywhere that the homeless would hang out, Pico and Lincoln. Bottom line: I don’t feel safe in Santa Monica.” ✆ “The only reason why current statistics are down in the city of Santa Monica is because the Santa Monica Police have an apparent ‘look-the-other-way’ policy toward vagrant crime. We have three examples just over the past few months. No. 1, when we go into Vons, we often see drunken vagrants buy liquor, and the drunken vagrants then take their liquor out to the alley or to the Broadway side of Vons to drink. We once tried to call the 9-11 operator who, literally, berated us for wasting precious time on 9-11 reporting a problem that should be reported to the general police line. Item No. 2 is the fact that we once passed the front of Toys ‘R’ Us when Toys ‘R’ Us was in business and there was a transgendered vagrant jumping up and down in front of the store with naked breasts and a thong that barely concealed his penis. Three different police cars passed that intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Fourth Street, and you could obviously see the police officers looking at this, but not one officer did anything about it, despite the fact that kids were going in and out of Toys ‘R’ Us and were exposed to the sight. The final example was we found a family sitting on a bus bench sharing their joints with their two young sons — smoking marijuana with their two young sons. We pointed this out to a motorcycle cop who took a look, and seemed very uninterested in the situation and drove on. So, vagrants pretty much rule in Santa Monica. Crime is down because police allow vagrants to rule in Santa Monica.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 16, 2005. Read the original PDF.