This past week, Q-line asked: What should Chief Jackman’s priorities be in addressing crime in the City of Santa Monica. Where is more focus needed? Here are your responses: ✆ “Unfortunately, Chief Jackman and the SMPD will continue to have their hands full because of crime-contributing factors outside of their control — an increasing local transients (population) from across LA County, if not the United States, many of whom are sex offenders, parolees, multiple offenders and the mentally unstable, whom are drawn to Santa Monica for City Hall’s liberal views enabling anyone who has an outstretched hand. Non-resident homeless troublemakers also spill into our school system as well. Whether it be by district permit or otherwise. I will be satisfied, if not, pleasantly surprised if Jackman and the SMPD can keep the crime rate where it is. Good luck.” ✆ “Chief Jackman has inherited an escalating mess in Santa Monica. The bum-transient criminal population is way out of control,and all thanks to the creeps in our city administration. And it is not politically correct anymore to try to undo their determined efforts to turn Santa Monica into a slum. We need the bum population off our streets and gangs, drugs and crime under control.” ✆ “They should concentrate on two main things — the gangs and the graffiti taggers, and start throwing them in jail with the drunken bums and vagrants. Lock them up. If they have to shut down liquor stores, do it.” ✆ “It’s funny that the two most important things in the chief’s resume is that the council most cares about was bums and gang violence. The chief is going to need a large amount of Chapstick around this politically correct council. There is crime, or the potential for crime, on every street in this town. The amount of bums is the result of misguided council policy and gang violence is the result, again, of the weak knees on the council, and the Pico Neighborhood not taking responsibility for its own problems — pregnancy and ignorance. Exporting gang activity through low income housing multiplies the chief’s problem to every area of Santa Monica. Good luck.” ✆ “The LA Times’ interview of Chief Jackman said — in regards to our voters’ overwhelming wishes to have pot as the lowest police priority — Jackman replied that, ‘My officers have a lot more important things to spend their time on, like tracking down murderers and rapists.’ Go get ‘em, Jackman, and let us all have a very merry pot Christmas.” ✆ “We need traffic cops. We need them to enforce the traffic laws. We have 10 million stop signs in the city, it seems, and nobody uses them.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 23, 2006. Read the original PDF.