Santa Barbara city officials seemingly blundered again on Tuesday in their understanding of the demands of community organization Healing Justice Santa Barbara.
The city’s three-member Finance Committee, made up of chairman Eric Friedman, Meagan Harmon and Alejandra Gutierrez, were scheduled to talk about implementing the demands of Healing Justice, first presented in May, in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis.
The city staff, however, did not discuss its list of proposals before presenting them to the committee on Tuesday. Officials proposed developing a community center, a co-response agreement between the Santa Barbara Police Department and Santa Barbara County Behavioral Wellness, conduct a resource allocation study of the police department, and evaluate the feasibility of moving parking enforcement from the police department to downtown parking.
In addition, the city wants to spend $100,000 to hire a consultant to conduct a “resource study” to see which “nonessential services” could be shifted from the police department to other city departments, nonprofit organizations and the county.
Members of Healing Justice made several demands of the City of Santa Barbara in a protest and rally on May 31. Tuesday’s meeting of the Finance Committee was the city’s first formal response to those requests.
“There’s been very little public dialogue. Actually, there’s been zero public dialogue,” activist and community member Chelsea Lancaster said. “It sounds like there’s been a lot of dialogue with the police department, and we have been in meetings with various folks, and nobody mentioned that this was happening today.”
Among the city’s suggestions was to put out a request for proposals.
“There’s also been zero dialogue about race in this conversation,” Lancaster said. “You all are putting out an RFP for folks whose skillset includes good communication skills, but zero conversation about how this person needs to have an explicit, anti-racist, anti-oppressive lens. They need to understand the root of policing, which started as slave patrols to protect white male property.”
Simone Ruskamp, one of the original organizers of Healing Justice, also was upset with the city staff’s presentation. She said she heard about the item on the agenda through a KEYT news report, but not city officials.
“I was incredibly disappointed that the qualifications listed did not include a background in working with systems, specifically confronting anti-blackness and racism in policing,” Ruskamp said. “We are not just here about money. We are here about human lives. We are here specifically about black lives, the same black lives that you did not include or consult in creating this meeting.”
Some of the qualifications sought by the city for the position include communication skills, public engagement experience, “a track record of completing work on time and on budget,” and experience conducting similar studies. Staff would like to release the request for proposals in May and have a final report by March. The city plans to use general fund reserve dollars to pay for the study.
Ruskamp also said that the city staff had mistakenly identified the name of the resource center that Healing Justice suggested.
“It’s not the African-American Resource Center,” she said. “It is the Black African-American Cultural Resource Center.”
She said “black” must be included because it also applies to blackness not included in the United States.
Police Chief Lori Luhnow also seemingly upset members of the public by deciding to move forward to hire a “crisis intervention co-response officer” to team with a Behavioral Wellness mobile crisis worker. They will respond in partnership, in the same car. They will be trained in de-escalation and be capable of making referrals.
“The goal of that is to prevent some incidents that require a law enforcement response,” she said.
Luhnow also said she was excited to say that “we have already taken action to create and post that job description internally within our organization.”
She said the department will conduct interviews with the county and will make a hire this fall.
The Police Officers Association has declined to open negotiations regarding moving parking enforcement from the police department to downtown parking. Police union leaders said they would be willing to discuss a transfer of resources at the end of the contract in 2022.
“We did reach out to the Police Officers Association,” said Matt Fore, senior assistant to the city administrator. “They respectfully declined to undertake that at the current time, under the current agreement, but it is certainly something the city can revisit in 2022 when the POA agreement expires.”
Gutierrez said the police department’s outreach employee should have spread the word about the Finance Committee.
“I am really surprised that Healing Justice did not know about this agenda item because I know the police department has an outreach person that does media releases, and I do feel like the organization Healing Justice, who we have been in communication with, should have been on that media release,” Gutierrez said. “I just would really like to encourage the police department chief to make sure that in the future, agenda items like this are a priority and that the word gets out there.”
Friedman said there will be lots of opportunity for discussion in the future.
“We will do a better job as a city,” he said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
