Chief Butts taken to task for perceived disconnect from residents
CITY HALL — The Santa Monica Police Department has some explaining to do.
Elected leaders this week sent Police Chief James T. Butts Jr. into the field to mend relations with parents upset over how authorities have dealt with gang violence in Santa Monica.
Though crime rates have fallen to 40-year lows citywide, problems persist in Sunset Park and the Pico neighborhood, a low-income area with a long history of violent crime. Parents there galvanized this fall after 14 rounds were fired in front of an elementary school during midday. No one was hit.
Butts defended a neighborhood-based policing strategy he created for quelling violence, adding officers work hard with all willing Santa Monica residents. Parents disagreed sharply.
“Our community lives in fear,” said Parent Teacher Association co-president Griselda de la Torre- Garces, who attacked the police chief for resisting a proposed joint safety group with the local school district. “Parents worry about their children being safe at school, about them walking the streets of the neighborhood. They don’t dare go out at night. Isn’t this reason enough to involve them (the police department) in a dialogue?...
“Why doesn’t the police chief want this group?” added de la Torre-Garces, one of six mothers to speak on the issue before the City Council late Tuesday. “What does he fear citizens will say? What does he fear citizens will learn or what does he fear the citizens will do? Is being accountable to the citizenry not part of his job?”
Council members expressed frustration over the perceived disconnect between residents and the police department, agreeing unanimously to hold a special meeting with residents and police on the issue. In the meantime, they directed Butts to increase his rapport with local residents.
“When a mother comes down here at midnight and tells us, ‘I’m scared,’ I think we have to pay attention to that,” said City Councilman Kevin McKeown, who called the Pico violence a “really glaring explanation” to an otherwise strong police record. “We’ve had half a dozen moms from Sunset Park and Pico neighborhood come down here tonight from halfway across the city. The public safety building’s right across the alley. We’re not hearing from the chief and I’d like to hear from the chief on this.
“I think it’s time to say, ‘OK, what is community policing? How is it really working?’”
A BROAD APPROACH After reviewing part of the discussion on tape, Chief Butts Thursday evening said he understood why the parents were upset over the shooting.
“As a parent myself, I totally understand, totally empathize with the fear, the angst and the frustration that a parent feels that their child’s school has been exposed to an incident like this,” he said. “I totally understand that and concurrently I have a responsibility to do the best that I can to make the entire neighborhood safe.”
Butts defended his resistance to the joint safety group, saying he invited school leaders to partner with the police in addressing the violence using systems already in place.
“Instead of wasting time on a task force designed to find out about issues that we have all the information here in-house... we offered to bring people in to sit down and assess our program,” he said.
“There is no department head that has more dialogue with this community, in general, than I do.... Meeting with people in groups in this community is what I do and what I have done for 13 years,” he added.
Butts credited a program he created called “Neighborhood Centered Policing” for decreasing crime in Santa Monica. The model calls for officers to be assigned to particular sections of Santa Monica. It also calls for regular dialogue with a variety of community groups and authorities.
Probation and parole officers, prosecutors, community and religious groups, other City Hall leaders and police work together under the intertwined strategy. Police said the blueprint for the neighborhood-based approach, introduced in 1990, was first fully used in 1998, when two homicides took place in one day. One was a gang-related shooting. The other was an unrelated homicide near the beach, when a tourist was fatally stabbed by two robbers.
While they’ve heard some about the program, council members said they needed more information and called upon Butts to explain in detail his strategy.
“I see the role of council in this sort of issue as we are the interface between the government and the members of the public,” City Councilman Ken Genser said during the 90-minute meeting. “And yet, I know the department adopted this community centered policing, but we’ve never discussed it at the council. The only reason I knew about it is because I read about it in the newspaper.”
ONGOING VIOLENCE Pico residents and police even disagree on how many people have been killed. Parents and others said there have been 29 homicides in the last 15 years. Butts pegged that number much lower, at 16. The reason for the discrepancy is unclear, but it may be partly due to the way authorities track crime. A killing is considered a homicide when solved as one person intentionally killing another.
All sides agreed, however, that the ongoing problem of gang violence in Santa Monica was serious.
Though there hasn’t been a fatal shooting in Santa Monica for more than a year, shots have been fired often on the east side of town. Less than two weeks ago, four teenagers were fired upon and two were struck while walking by Santa Monica College in Sunset Park, a neighborhood of mostly homeowners that borders the Pico neighborhood to the south. Neither victim suffered critical injuries.
“Violence in the Pico neighborhood has weighed heavily on my mind and heart for a long time,” City Councilman Bob Holbrook said. “If you can’t be safe in the Pico neighborhood, Santa Monica is not safe. Every person in our city deserves to live in a safe community and I’m willing to direct resources to see that that happens... We have been moving resources over the years into this area, but obviously we need to do more, because it will never be enough until it all stops and gets better.”
Criticizing police was the wrong approach, Holbrook added Thursday.
“How do we know what they’ve prevented? We don’t know,” he said. “All we know is what’s happened — and for all we know, they could have prevented five times more than what’s happened.”
While the idea of dedicating more resources toward violence seemed like a good one on the surface, City Manager Susan McCarthy pointed to an ongoing effort between the city and the school district to address the issue. She initially suggested the council not hold a special meeting.
“Certainly I think there needs to be a sharper focus, I think, than there has been in the past,” McCarthy said. “As to whether there should be a community meeting or a community forum, I think that you’re going to hear calls for community meetings and forums on a number of topics... Coming up in January, you could be meeting every night, and perhaps that wouldn’t be too much given the gravity of the problem, but we do have a finite period of time in January to deal with myriad of things.”
Once it became clear the council intended to push forward with the special meeting, McCarthy warned the council against vesting too much in how much progress can be made.
“I think we also need to be very clear about what the city can and can’t do,” she said. “And an objective that would not be reasonable is that that we would eliminate poverty in Santa Monica. That’s not going to be something that we can either set out to do or pretend to be able to do.”
MOVING RIGHT ALONG In the end, as the discussion dragged into Wednesday morning, the council asked staffers to return with a “road map” for improving the situation. Part of that will be a special council meeting.
Meanwhile, parents plan to meet at Edison on Tuesday to discuss traffic circulation issues around the school. A proposal was floated in the wake of the September shooting to close Virginia Avenue, which borders the school and is often used by criminals as a quick escape route onto Interstate 10.
Another meeting will be held sometime in January with McCarthy and school district superintendent John Deasy, to follow up with parents about the Edison shooting. The council meeting, which will focus on the broader issues of Pico violence and communication between residents and police, likely will be held sometime in January.
McKeown said genuine progress would require increased participation from all of those involved.
“I’ve been to enough meetings to know that there is not a level of trust between the community and the police leadership that there needs to be, and we have to own that. The police have to own that. The community has to own that,” McKeown said. “And the truth is that the police have not been as present in some of the discussions as they might be. And the truth is also, and I’ve been there, the community is not as present as it might be, because I think a lot of people in the community know what’s going on.
“There are very few people causing a great deal of problems for this city and there are people in the neighborhoods who know who they are, but the culture is such that you don’t tell the police that. But that’s exactly what the police need to know to deal with the problem.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 12, 2004. Read the original PDF.