Spending Demands Are Merely a Power Play

In Ventura County “public safety” is first and foremost a campaign slogan in an empire-building scheme that benefits the very few. Empire building by police and other enforcement-orientated government agencies has, throughout human history, been the harbinger of institutional evil, oppression and corruption that far exceed the wrongdoing of the undesirables from which those agencies claim to protect the public.

Unrestrained police power is an extreme liability. Our neighbors in Los Angeles are experiencing the consequences--both morally and financially--of ignoring history’s warnings. The signs are clear: Ventura County will one day soon face a scandal like the one now plaguing the Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In Ventura County, the Sheriff’s Department, district attorney’s office and the judge-cum-prosecutor-dominated court system have become a troika exponentially driven by the corruptive nature of power. The latest manifestation is Sheriff Bob Brooks’ opinion article “County Must Pledge to Preserve Public Safety,” Ventura County Perspective, May 28.

The Ventura County Grand Jury recently held that a local ordinance guaranteeing the public safety empire extravagant funding is illegal under California law.

Sheriff Brooks states: “Some will debate whether the ordinance can withstand a legal challenge. The real issue is not a legal one. Rather, the first consideration for the Board of Supervisors is the promise it made to voters that if they passed a sales tax, it would be spent on the county’s five primary public safety agencies, and whether they still intend to honor that resolution . . . .”

“Even if clever lawyers find loopholes, the only honorable thing to do when voters designate their tax dollars for a specific priority, based on a written promise by the board, is to spend it according to their intent, or return it. I remain willing to negotiate and compromise on our budget. I will not, however compromise the public’s safety nor negotiate to dismantle a clear promise to the public.”

If the board’s “promise” turns out to be illegal, then it cannot be kept. Period. Sheriff Brooks tells us however, that one honorable option is to go ahead and spend the Proposition 172 money as promised “according to [voters’] intent.” And furthermore, he will not “dismantle a clear promise” even if it is illegal.

“The real issue is not a legal one.” Isn’t that the kind of thinking that produces scandals like Rampart? Attitudes from the top are the genesis of police malfeasance. Cops who plant the evidence, beat the suspect, perjure themselves in court and so on are aping their superiors’ attitude about what they think the law should be.

When law enforcement’s self-granted immunity from the law eventually fails, it is the citizens who pay the price.

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The question Ventura County voters and our elected officials need to ask is how we are going to prevent the Sheriff’s Department from delivering us into an expensive mess like Rampart in the name of public safety.

Beyond budgetary considerations, the moral and ethical carnage piled upon the altar of public safety in Ventura County is a stain upon our souls. The low crime rate in Ventura County, as elsewhere, is a function of demographics, not police funding. Good policing is a function of police integrity, not of the police administration’s ability to jack money from taxpayers.

Sheriff Brooks’ statement, “The real issue is not a legal one” is an astonishing public admission for Ventura’s top law enforcement officer. The arrogance of power knows no bounds and neither does it want any. That is why it is so dangerous. And that is why it must always be held in check.