Cities and County Refuse to Skimp on Police

Although still skimping on some basic services, most local city councils are holding sacrosanct their most costly and valued public service--police protection.

A Times survey found that police budgets for the 10 local cities jumped nearly 14% from 1993 to 1996, while city spending for general services such as libraries and recreation rose just 5%.

At the county level, the Sheriff’s Department budget increased 53%--or $37 million--accounting for most of the three-year increase in the county’s general fund for basic services.

The increases came as crime plummeted in nearly every local jurisdiction, but also as fears of youth gangs and lawlessness topped the list of residents’ concerns in opinion polls.

“This community has essentially put its money where its mouth is,” said Mayor Andy Fox of low-crime Thousand Oaks, which boosted its police budget about 20% in three years while hiking spending for general services less than 2%.

The story is much the same in Oxnard, where general spending has actually dropped nearly $2 million since 1993, but where the City Council found $3.5 million to put 31 more police officers in uniform.

Oxnard has more crime than any other local city and has been hit by a spate of gang-related killings. But its crime rate has dropped below those of the state and the nation.

“It comes down to priorities, and public safety is truly the No. 1 priority in the city of Oxnard,” Police Chief Harold Hurtt said.

“I can appreciate the need for recreation and libraries,” Hurtt said. “But the bottom line is, you can have a nice library and a nice park, but if you’re afraid you’re going to be shot when you leave your house, you probably won’t go to the library or to the park.”

Enhanced police spending has prompted little public protest, despite city cuts in other areas.

To the contrary, cash-strapped Port Hueneme, which eliminated its recreation department and closed its cultural center, drew strong community support when it approved a half-cent sales tax to save its Police Department in 1994.

Oxnard community leaders are so sure of public support they are pushing a special tax to add another $5.25 million to that city’s $22.8 million police budget, already up $3.5 million since 1993.

And countywide, voters who have traditionally scorned tax increases of any kind approved the statewide Proposition 172, a half-cent sales tax for public safety that locally raises nearly $32 million annually--mostly for the Sheriff’s Department.

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Only a handful of critics have emerged to question whether elected officials have cut too much from other areas in trying to preserve Ventura County--repeatedly ranked the safest urban county in the West--as a haven of law and order.

“We don’t need any more damned cops,” said Oxnard attorney Oscar Gonzalez, spokesman for the Ventura County Mexican-American Bar Assn. “Oxnard is safer than it was a few years ago, but that’s not the sentiment. What you hear is, ‘It’s out of control. It’s out of control.’ And the City Council buys into that.”

Gonzalez said he would like to see more money for libraries, parks and after-school programs for children.

“And I’ve always thought it is funny when Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley make noises about crime, and they’re always on the FBI list of safest cities,” he said.

The head of Ventura County’s largest employee union also sounded an alert recently after the Board of Supervisors approved a $7-million boost in the county’s public safety budget to cover inflation, sending the county’s $522-million general fund $20 million into the red as budget hearings began.

“It’s like a cancer eating away at the budget,” said Barry Hammitt, president of the union that represents most county workers but not law enforcement officers.

The county’s spending on public safety has been borne largely by the flow of Proposition 172 dollars.

But local cities only get a tiny fraction of that new tax money--4.1%, or $1.5 million this fiscal year. And when city councils expand police services, the bill often must be paid with money that could have been well spent elsewhere.

The Times survey shows the depth of law enforcement support countywide: City councils in six of 10 local cities approved police budget increases of between 19% and 32% over three years.

Those increases in Fillmore, Port Hueneme, Moorpark, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks and Oxnard amounted to $7.9 million, about double the cities’ net increase in general funding even when the police budgets are figured into the total.

The survey also reveals a striking difference between how much cities pay for police service.

For instance, the findings show that Ojai and Ventura spend more for police protection per resident than other cities. It also found that Camarillo--the local city that spends the least per resident and has the fewest officers in uniform--was the only local community to see its crime rate increase since 1993.

And four of the five cities with the lowest police costs are patrolled under contract by the Sheriff’s Department.

That is a touchy matter in discussions with police chiefs in other cities. Some claim the sheriff does not charge contract cities fully for overhead. The sheriff responds that his department’s costs are generally lower because of the economies of scale available to the 1,189-employee department.

Contrasted with the statewide norm, every police agency in Ventura County is understaffed. They have only half as many employees and uniformed officers on average as California overall, according to the FBI.

Likewise, the county’s ratio of one officer per 1,000 residents contrasts with a national average of 2.2 officers per 1,000 residents. Indeed, throughout the nation even smaller cities--those with populations of 10,000 to 250,000--average between 1.7 and 1.9 officers per 1,000 residents.

A number of factors help explain differences in staffing and costs from one jurisdiction to another, locally and statewide.

The rule of thumb is that law enforcement costs increase with crime rates. And crime is often tied to factors outside law enforcement’s control, such as poverty, education, out-of-town traffic and street alignment, police chiefs say.

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Those elements generally favor Ventura County, where overall income is high and crime is low.

And within the county, the factors favor the new suburbs of the white-collar east over the older communities of the west, where demographic characteristics and the crime rate reflect California as a whole. Violent crime is about 2 1/2 times higher in the west county than in the east, and property crime is 1 1/2 times greater.

For instance, contrast Ventura, an older beach community that has tourist traffic, with Thousand Oaks, a newer, affluent suburban city. Although slightly smaller, Ventura has nearly twice as much crime and spends 50% more on its police.

“When I arrived in Ventura County in 1969, Thousand Oaks was a few oak trees that you kinda drove past on the freeway,” Ventura Police Chief Richard Thomas said. “It’s large, but it’s a new town, and they can get away without putting as many persons out there to deal with it.”

Because of its age, Ventura and most other west county cities have to police many through streets designed decades before cul-de-sacs and dead-ends were included in city plans as crime-prevention measures, Thomas said.

At $149 per resident, Ventura police spend well above the 10-city average of $126 per resident. The city also rivals Oxnard for the top spot locally in its ratio of police employees to population.

Because Ventura already had proportionately more police than its neighbors and stagnant revenue, Ventura officials have held police spending near 1993 levels, paring away three officers and reducing total employees from 196 to 182.

“All our departments had cuts,” Thomas said. “But our [police] budget shows that our city puts a high priority on public safety.”

Ventura’s police budget is misleadingly high, however, because it picks up perhaps $1 million in dispatch, computer, personnel and vehicle maintenance costs that really belong to the Fire Department, Thomas said.

Still, Ventura has 119 sworn officers to Thousand Oaks’ 85. And even with a spending push that added 11 police employees and 7 1/2 uniformed officers, Thousand Oaks spends only $98 per resident on police, far below the county average.

The Thousand Oaks police budget swelled by $1.79 million after 1993, while the overall general fund grew by just $650,000--this despite being the safest city for its size in the nation last year.

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Fox said he sees that as an investment in the future.

“I work in the city of Los Angeles, and I have seen first-hand what can happen when you don’t stay on top of it,” the mayor said. “Any law enforcement professional will tell you that once you’re at a point where you’re reacting to violent crime and gangs in a large sense, you’ve lost the game.”

Thousand Oaks police officials credit beefed-up anti-gang efforts with a sharp drop in serious assaults last year.

In Oxnard, which still accounts for 47% of the county’s violent offenses, police staffing has risen sharply and is now more representative of comparable mid-size cities. Struggling with 19% fewer employees per resident than Ventura in 1993, Oxnard is now slightly better-staffed than its richer and safer neighbor.

And while Oxnard no longer claims to have the worst ratio of police officers in the nation for a city its size, a department study found a need for 32 more officers to adequately respond to escalating gang violence. Officials say a special tax ranging from $60 to $100 per Oxnard household would be needed to pay that bill.

“Gang membership continues to go up, and we don’t have adequate resources to respond at this point,” Assistant Chief Tom Cady said.

Despite its low crime rate, Simi Valley outspends east county neighbor Thousand Oaks by a wide margin, and its ratio of officers is substantially higher as well. But compared with other larger cities, police spending is low.

“We’re not looking at what other cities are doing, we’re looking at what we need to do the job,” City Manager Mike Sedell said. “If the crime rate was going up, you’d see a great deal more resources from the council to stem that fast.”

In contrast with larger local cities, tiny Ojai pays a premium for its police service, not so much because of crime but because the city is so small. Even though the level of crime doesn’t warrant it, the city has to keep two cruisers on duty at all times to provide constant backup, officials said.

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Its cost of $152 per resident is the highest in the county.

“We’re at the minimum staffing level to run a department,” Ojai City Manager Andrew Belknap said. “And when you are small, you pay the price.”

Ojai does keep its sheriff’s deputies surprisingly busy with calls for help, often because of thefts that locals suspect result from heavy weekend tourism.

City officials are continually faced with choosing between other community services and police. “We’ve been squeezed in terms of library hours, for example,” Belknap said, “but law enforcement is our top priority.”

Ojai is one of five local cities policed by the Sheriff’s Department. Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Camarillo have contracted with the sheriff since incorporation, while Ojai and Fillmore dropped their own departments for financial reasons in the 1980s and signed up with the sheriff.

Contract costs in Camarillo, Thousand Oaks and Moorpark are 26% to 33% below the county average, and Fillmore’s are slightly below the average. But Ojai’s contract costs are 21% above the norm.

City officials praise both the quality and price of the sheriff’s services.

But eyebrows were raised last year when Camarillo’s crime rate surged 43% after residents reported hundreds more burglaries and thefts, and from an uptick in violence as well.

“I think we have excellent police service,” City Manager Bill Little responded. Nonetheless, the city has hired three new employees in recent years and has two more in its preliminary 1996-97 budget.

Still, even Undersheriff Richard Bryce said Camarillo may be stretching its staffing too thin by paying only $85 a resident for service. “Camarillo is the cheapest department in the county to run by far, but it’s under-policed,” he said.

The cost of maintaining small city police departments is a matter of concern in Port Hueneme, where the legality of a special tax for police is in question, and in Santa Paula, where a citizens’ group is preparing a list of recommendations to improve an underfunded department.

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Port Hueneme boosted spending for police by 32% over the past three years, more than any other local city. After residents opposed disbanding the city’s Police Department to save $500,000 a year under a sheriff’s contract, officials approved a special tax that has allowed the 21-officer department to return to full strength.

“What that says is that police services have the highest priority, but the problem is our ability to afford them,” City Manager Dick Velthoen said.

The state Supreme Court ruled last year that special taxes such as Port Hueneme’s “utility user” tax for police must be approved by voters to be legal. So officials are backing passage of a new state law that would allow cities that already have such taxes to continue to collect them.

“If that doesn’t pass, we’ve got a problem,” Velthoen said. And his city would have to reconsider the possibility of contracting services from the sheriff, he said.

“Operating a small department is very difficult because you’ve got administrative overhead you can’t spread like you can in a large department,” he said. “I don’t see how the city could afford it.”

Only slightly larger than Port Hueneme, Santa Paula was the only local city to cut police spending over the past three years. And a tight budget is forcing consideration of alternatives, including contracting with the Sheriff’s Department.

Such a move was discussed in 1990 and a group of residents has revived the issue as part of a discussion on improving service.

“I would prefer that we maintain our own Police Department,” City Administrator Arnold Dowdy said. “But finances may ultimately dictate otherwise. At the present time we’re able to balance our budget, but it gets more difficult each year.”

But many Santa Paula residents deeply resent Ventura County’s approach to matters in their neighborhood--building a jail in a greenbelt nearby and approving a 10-fold expansion of a landfill just down the road.

“With a sheriff’s contract, you abdicate your responsibility to control the service,” Police Chief Walt Adair said. “That’s a downside. You lose local control.”

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In Moorpark, similar in size to Santa Paula and Port Hueneme, and in smaller Fillmore, city officials are pleased with the policing by sheriff’s deputies. They say there is still a local touch.

“They do an excellent job,” said Richard Hare, deputy city manager in Moorpark. “They volunteer to do things in the community, and many of them live here. It’s not just a job. They’re dedicated to improving this community.”

The sheriff’s contract costs Moorpark, which has the lowest crime rate in the county, far less than the local average for police services, despite an increase of three officers to 22 in recent years.

By contracting with the sheriff, however, Moorpark loses some local control, Hare said.

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Police Costs

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Employees Officers Crimes Budget Cost per per 1,000 per 1,000 per 1,000 (millions) resident residents residents residents Camarillo* $4.93 $84.62 0.76 0.69 28.8 Thousand Oaks* $10.98 $97.99 0.87 0.76 24.8 Moorpark* $2.77 $99.86 0.88 0.79 19.5 Santa Paula $2.92 $109.50 1.46 1.12 49.2 Fillmore* $1.59 $123.89 1.17 1.09 27.1 Port Hueneme $2.82 $126.58 1.33 0.94 32.3 Simi Valley $13.70 $132.75 1.65 1.08 28.7 Oxnard $22.77 $148.58 1.83 1.17 50.8 Ventura $14.95 $149.05 1.81 1.19 46.3 Ojai* $1.23 $151.82 1.42 1.24 39.5 10-city average $78.64 $126.02 1.43 1.00 35.3

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* The Sheriff’s Department provides police service for Ojai, Fillmore, Moorpark, Camarilloand Thousand Oaks.

Source: Sheriff’s Department and cities of Camarillo, Fillmore, Moorpark, Ojai, Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Ventura

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

City Spending Changes, 1993-96

Local cities are paying much more each year to fight crime, but skimping in some other areas. Overall police spending has increased nearly three times as fast as that for all basic services.

Police and General Funds*

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Port hueneme:

Police: 32.2%

General: 19.4%

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Fillmore**:

Police: 30.0%

General: -12.5%

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Moorpark:

Police: 25.3%

General: 32.7%

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Camarillo:

Police: 23.5%

General: 18.7%

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Thousand Oaks:

Police: 19.5%

General: 1.9%

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Oxnard:

Police: 18.5%

General: -3.0%

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Simi Valley:

Police: 11.2%

General: 20.7%

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Ojai:

Police: 8.8%

General: 13.35

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Ventura:

Police: 2.7%

General: 4.0%

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Santa Paula:

Police: -3.45

General: 6.1%

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10-City average:

Police: 13.6%

General: 5.1%

* Police budgets are included in overall city general fund accounts. So increases in police spending are also reflected by the general fund increases.

** Fillmore’s general fund was inflated in 1992-93 by a $500,000 loan repayment. With that one-time expenditure excluded, the city general fund would have increased 2.4%