This past Sunday, Q-line asked: “Do you feel safe? Are you confident that Santa Monica is prepared to deal with a possible attack?”
Here are your responses: ■“Santa Monica is an accident looking for a place to happen. They only thing Santa Monica really knows about is tearing up the streets and feeding the homeless.” ■“Santa Monica stands alone on many issues but not during or after an attack. Santa Monica is surrounded by 10 other cities and county areas including West Los Angeles and all of Los Angeles County. Depending on the severity of the attack, there is a great deal of rolling equipment in crisis response team help from those nearby geographical areas to respond to Santa Monica’s possible crisis needs. Santa Monica needs to stand together in times of crisis.” ■“No way. We would all have to take our individual chances here. Given this city’s track record for mismanagement and over-spending, what could we possibly expect from them?” ■“The bottom line is, all the foreigners live and work in California. The money that they make here in California is sent over to the other countries to support their terrorism and attacks. So no, they are not going to attack California because there people are here sending the money over there.” ■“I don’t feel any more safe or any less safe. I feel the same. I don’t think the current situation is going to affect us. Right now however, in the long run maybe five to 10 years from now I would imagine it would get worse. We are training new generations of people that are anti-American. The more bombs we drop across the world and the more materialistic we become only creates hate for the future.” ■ “Yeah I feel safe. Santa Monica is pretty well covered by Los Angeles. I don’t think terrorists even know where Santa Monica is let alone find something here that is worthy of destroying. As a matter of fact, I noticed about six months ago in Santa Monica we started carrying M-16s in our squad cars. I’m concerned about the safety of that.” ■ “I don’t believe Santa Monica is at any great risk in a terrorist attack. Most terrorists target significant things. Los Angeles would take care of the problem. Increasingly I think the presence of illegal aliens, the undocumented work force in Santa Monica is more of a concern and should be addressed.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 28, 2003. Read the original PDF.