Delusion Runs Deep in Santa Monica

Dear Council,

I'm appalled by the recent decision to not fund the five police officers our chief says is necessary to keep our city safe. This is a clueless and out-of-touch choice that belies either a deep distrust and lack of support for law enforcement, or willful ignorance of the one issue that plagues us, namely crime and disorder. You are failing our city, as this news report sums up perfectly, ending with one woman saying she doesn't feel safe on our streets. Who does at this point?

"We don't have enough uniformed officers to respond to the violence we are seeing on our streets," Chief Batista, hardly prone to hyperbole, told you at his report to council. You ignored him.

And if you needed proof of how true our chief's statement is, and how bad your decision was, right on schedule, two teens were shot last weekend while riding in a Waymo. And yesterday, the same homeless man shot an officer and created an active shooter situation in the middle of our tourism district. So once again, helicopters circled over my neighborhood as disorder, crime and violence shattered the day. Once again from the criminal, transient addict, or mentally ill population (I recognized the shooter as somebody I've seen in my neighborhood and Reed Park).

We are a small city with big city problems and we need a big city police force to address them. Almost all of the problems stem from the transients flooding our city at the rate of 100 per night, as Chief Batista stated in his report to the council about the metro influx. It's no coincidence that 70 percent of the arrests are coming from the homeless population. None of our problems are homegrown, all of them are imported. Our progressive politics also make us a sitting target for political violence, but that's not the daily gruel. Everybody who lives here except our blinkered leadership knows what it is.

Meanwhile, our interim City Manager, Elaine Polachek, talked about fiscal belt-tightening because of the "lingering economic downturn stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic impacting major revenue streams such as sales tax, transient occupancy tax, and parking revenues, which are all down or holding flat." This is pure delusion, as other cities throughout California have more than recovered from Covid. Never mentioned are the riots that we experienced and have created, along with our current lack of safety, pure brand destruction and a lingering pall over our city.

It's bad enough to be living with the staggering and unstable derelicts forcing residents to be on guard all the time, but to be gaslit by clueless city officials who somehow can't seem to solve the one problem from which all others waterfall is truly galling.

The fact that we can't even thrive without the Palisades as a nearby alternative doesn't bode well, with people choosing safer locations like Century City or the Grove. This city will NEVER recover until it has the same reputation for safety that our southern beach towns have. With an overwhelmed police force working overtime, we will continue to be a target until our leaders (YOU) get real about what's happening in our city.