Good afternoon, In the Public Interest readers. A quick note: We are back this week with a slightly abbreviated version of the newsletter, as I and some of my colleagues were out of town last week to accept the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. In the Public Interest will return to its regular format next week, the final edition before the Nov. 5 election.
Sheriff watchdog releases first report and invites a public response
Monday night, the county’s Office of Inspector General will host the public inside the county building and present the findings of its first oversight report on the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.
The report, published last week by the third-party watchdog OIR Group, holds a magnifying glass up to the county’s law enforcement agency and examines foremost how the sheriff’s office responds to calls for service, handles internal investigations and manages the county’s jail population. Lookout first wrote about the report on Friday.
Among the 21 recommendations from the watchdog, OIR Group found that the sheriff’s office needs to update its body camera policy to ensure officers’ cameras are on “at the outset of any response to a call … prior to initiating the actual contact,” and improve how it reports and investigates use-of-force incidents.
At 58 pages, the report marks a new chapter in sheriff oversight that California lawmakers wanted to see in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Despite legislators passing a law in 2021 encouraging counties to create these kinds of oversight bodies, Santa Cruz County remains one of the few that have actually done it.
Peter Gelblum, chair of the Santa Cruz chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, was one of a handful of residents and local groups pushing the county to form an inspector general’s office. OIR Group began its work on July 1 last year and Gelblum, speaking for himself and not the ACLU, said he was surprised how long the first report has taken, but said it adds to the ongoing conversation around police policing themselves.
“There is no way the public would know any of this stuff in the report without this kind of oversight body,” Gelblum said. “The main thing I hope for is transparency, it will tell the public what’s happening in the sheriff’s office and provide some confidence that someone is watching.”
Lee Brokaw, who chairs the local ACLU chapter’s police and transparency committee, but speaking only for himself, said he felt OIR Group was “playing it cautious” in the first report, saying “if they had come out with guns blazing, they wouldn’t have gotten a renewed contract.” However, Brokaw said the report, particularly its examination of the sheriff’s use-of-force policies, is useful.
“We’ve come from no eyes on the sheriff’s documents and reports to a very large window of transparency,” Brokaw said. “The section on body-worn cameras is very illuminating. The idea that officers weren’t turning their cameras on [right away] and [instead] waiting to see if it was necessary, is bulls–t.”
The meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Community Room in the basement of the county building at 701 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. OIR Group will give a PowerPoint presentation and provide a question-and-answer session. Spanish translation services will be available, and participation via Zoom will also be available at this link.
OF NOTE
Campaign finance closer look: Political campaigns had to publish their latest finance reports on Thursday, the final look at fundraising and spending before the Nov. 5 election.
Lookout took a closer look into how the money has flowed in Santa Cruz’s Measure Z sugary drink tax, and the county supervisor races in District 2 and District 5.
The American Beverage Association-backed campaign to kill Measure Z, Campaign for an Affordable Santa Cruz, has spent more than $1.6 million on ads, political consultants and hotel stays, an expense sheet 38 times larger than the group pushing for the tax’s passage, the Committee for a Healthier Santa Cruz.
Most notably in the supervisors’ races, Kim De Serpa outspent her District 2 opponent, Kristen Brown, by about $2,000. De Serpa had been outraising Brown throughout the campaign, but Brown had been regularly outspending De Serpa. De Serpa partially closed the spending gap in the latest period.
