Santa Barbara Sheriff Resists Citizen Oversight
Supervisors Also Show No Interest for Civilian Oversight Board of Sheriff’s Office, but Praise Lower Jail Population
By any reckoning, Tuesday’s board of supervisors’ meeting to discuss the issues of race and equity in Santa Barbara County promised to be a bumpy ride. It did not disappoint.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police early this summer, the county supervisors had held two long, intense hearings in June. They got an earful from community organizers affiliated with the local chapter of Black Lives Matter — now called Healing Justice — about changes that needed to be made. This Tuesday’s hearing — which ran five hours — was to be a progress report on those efforts. Although significant progress has been made, nobody walked away satisfied.
High-ranking and well-meaning county factotums deluged the supervisors and the public with reams of reports, acronyms, pie charts, bar graphs, and statistics about incremental but significant changes that would have challenged the attention spans of even the most ardent government wonks.
