The local government of a largely rural, desert county just east of Los Angeles is asking voters to reject “Defund the Police” in favor of “Fund the Police Forever.”
The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors has approved a charter amendment to “protect the community from potential defunding of law enforcement services” and establish a minimum level of funding for officers in the sprawling unincorporated areas of the county.
The measure, Proposition L , will appear on the Inland Empire county’s November ballot alongside Proposition 36, which has reignited a statewide debate over crime and law enforcement.
“We don’t ever want future boards of supervisors to be able to take public safety away in our very rural and remote areas of the county,” said Supervisor Dawn Rowe, a nonpartisan with Republican ties who represents the most unincorporated regions in the county.
In an interview, Rowe tied the local measure to statewide policy debates and specifically mentioned Proposition 47, a 2014 statewide initiative that classified some non-violent property crimes as misdemeanors, as a burden on the county. Rowe said the measure has driven up misdemeanors in her county.
Unlike San Francisco and San Jose, where local leaders have criticized the 2014 criminal-justice initiative as insufficiently punitive, San Bernardino’s unincorporated areas are unlikely to face any large-scale retail-theft problem.
The remote stretches of desert and mountain are usually so far-flung that they lack any consumer products to steal. (Violent crime and property crime have both fallen in unincorporated areas according to the most recent publicly available data , although rates vary significantly across the county.)
San Bernardino, which leans red, is the geographically largest county in the country, encompassing both the conservative exurbs east of Los Angeles along with the Mojave National Preserve and wide stretches of desert up to the Arizona border.
That size contributes to the real geographic and economic challenges that the county faces in policing. For years, San Bernardino County lost officers to higher paying jobs in neighboring Los Angeles and Orange counties and has often been left understaffed. Meanwhile, the sheer size of the county means officers are responsible for patrolling vast areas. (One station, in Needles, covers 5,131 square miles — roughly the size of Connecticut.) More recently, the county has upped officer salaries and, although there are still vacancies, come to something of a staffing equilibrium.
“Defund the Police” became a civil rights activist call to action following George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Although the movement has largely vanished from practical policy discussions in recent years, it still hangs over the political discourse. At least locally, the charter amendment pulls that debate back into the spotlight.
Rowe acknowledges there is little debate within San Bernardino about maintaining the current police presence, although in nearby Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass recently took flack from progressives for raising the LAPD’s pay. At present, there is no campaign building either in support of or in opposition to the charter amendment. There have been no recent pushes to cut funding for law enforcement, but Rowe said past calls for such action across the state is proof enough of the threat.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations in the municipalities around us about defunding the police,” Rowe said. “That’s not something we’re interested in. We want to say we favor public safety.”
Most Popular
Comments / 0