Safe and Clean Efforts | City of Ventura attempts to Clean up its Public Spaces
As part of the City of Ventura’s ongoing efforts to respond to concerns from the community as well as business merchants regarding illegal behaviors in the parks and surrounding areas of the downtown corridor, 4000 block of E. Main St, and the Victoria corridor, the Ventura Police Department, partnered with allied agencies, conducted enhanced patrols in the those areas on May 9, 2018 between the hours of 1200 and 1600 hours.
The goal of the City of Ventura’s Safe and Clean Initiative is to ensure safe and clean public places for the entire community to enjoy. One of the core elements of this effort is to direct and leverage limited resources to better address illegal activity and quality of life behaviors in public spaces.
As a result of this effort a total of 13 arrests were made in the focus areas:
4 arrests for being under the influence of a controlled substance (misdemeanor)
1 arrest for possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia (misdemeanor)
1 arrests for possession of a controlled substance and possession of a dangerous weapon (Felony)
6 arrests for violation of probation
1 arrest for a possession of a stolen vehicle warrant (Felony)
The locations of these arrests included:
1 at Plaza Park, 600 E. Santa Clara St.
2 at Mission Park, 190 E. Main St.
4 at Promenade Park, 398 Figueroa St.
6 at various other locations in the downtown corridor
The City of Ventura is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for the community by making a concerted effort to support the Safe and Clean Initiative.
Get Citizensjournal.us Headlines free SUBSCRIPTION. Keep us publishing – DONATE
I like to hear this. Ventura needs to adopt a zero tollerance for vagrency.
Watch for our interview of Police Chief Corney, coming out Monday eve.
So once again we will have an enforcement effort. Vagrants will be picked up for the various minor or major offenses they commit. They will be sentenced to 30 days in jail with credit for time served which will probably result in immediate release and so in about seven to ten days they will be back out on the streets. The enforcement effort will probably continue for about a month at which time the C.o.P. and various council members will declare the effort a success citing all the arrests made and things will go on the same way they were before the enforcement effort until another major event starts the cycle all over again.
Back four or five chiefs ago the C.o.P. had several monthly meetings with the merchants downtown because they were complaining about crime downtown. He showed up one night with his charts indicating that crime wasn’t that bad downtown. I tried to tell him that statistics weren’t what convinced people, it was perceptions and the perception was that crime was rampant downtown. He was unconvinced until he went home and complained to his wife about us not buying into facts. He, honestly, reported the following month that we were correct, that his wife had informed him that downtown was a hotbed of crime and she would never go downtown at night and didn’t like going downtown even during the day.
Upshot was we got a foot patrol downtown, two cops walking side by side around downtown. When I commented to the chief that was a waste of manpower, that the cops should patrol separately on separate streets to provide twice the coverage, his reply was that it was for officer safety. Well, how does that play to the 70 year old woman when police officers, strapping young men armed with handguns, mace, saps, a hide-out gun, steel-toed boots, a baton, handcuffs, a Spyderco hideout knife, a radio to summon assistance, cut-resistant gloves and helmets have to patrol together for safety reasons. Whereas the 70 y.o. without any of the paraphernalia that the patrol officers have and has to scream for help — how does she perceive safety downtown?
I noticed shortly thereafter that the cops were patrolling separately for a while. Pretty soon it was two by two again and then the foot patrol was discontinued because now downtown was “safe”. So I suspect having witnessed this cycle more than once that we will see it once again.
With both the legislature and the voters passing laws that make more crimes less punishable the cycle will continue to repeat. When people complain about the cost of confining criminals, they never consider the cost to society of allowing the criminals to continue their depredations. Actually, I have a suspicious mind and I suspect that part of the problem is that the continuous petty crime has been allowed to continue partly due to providing job security for all those involved in what laughingly is called our criminal justice system. Consider how massive that system is, from the cops on the street to all the administrative personnel required to keep them on the streets, to the court system with its judges, attorneys, clerks, bailiffs, court reporters, probation officers, more administrative personnel, court commissioner with his extensive staff on up to the state system, prisons, parole officers, parole boards, more administrative personnel, the appellate court system with more administrative personnel — the list is mind boggling. And that’s just the state system. It doesn’t even contemplate the federal system.
I read recently that when our founding fathers got together to form the government there were only seven felonies: murder, rape, arson, theft, incest, treason and one other that I can’t recall offhand. Now, according to a book called “A Felony A Day” federal prosecutors joke that they can charge anybody in the country with a felony a day. All they have to do is search through the massive federal code and they can find some felony to charge anybody with. If you haven’t been indicted by a federal grand jury it is just because you are beneath the notice of the local Assistant U. S. Attorney General.
I could go on and on, but a famous preacher once said, “There are no souls saved after twenty minutes,” so I will stop here.