[Scroll down for further.]

This isn't meant to downplay other factors that contributed to what took place...but the record shows that the officer-involved needed help. He sought assistance "Code 3" (send officers with lights and sirens.) An LBFD Captain on-scene also requested LBPD Code 3 assistance.

On that day, and continuing to this day, the City of Long Beach didn't have roughly 200 citywide deployable police officers that LB previously had and doesn't have now. Two-officer patrol cars are now mainly reserved for rookie officer training or deployment in some of LB's less-safe neighborhoods...and this was a "nice" ELB neighborhood on a mid-week early evening. What could go wrong?

In 2006, Mayoral candidate Bob Foster pledged to put 100 more officers on the street in his first four years in office at the same time as he simultaneously supported pay raises -- in contracts that didn't include overdue pension reforms -- for the three major City Hall unions (including LBPOA) that had endorsed him. When the economy slowed in fall 2008, Foster belatedly sought pension reforms and recommended budgets that ended up erasing roughly 20% of LB's budgeted citywide deployable police officers.

Other cities weathered the "Great Recession" without eliminating 20% of their police strength. Few asked why LB did.

Councilman Garcia voted to enable the police reductions from the first budget on which he voted. Garcia is today one of only two remaining LB elected officials (the other is Councilman Dee Andrews) who voted for the largest reductions in citywide deployable police officers for taxpayers in the history of the City of Long Beach. The LB's Police Officers Association didn't oppose this. LBPOA's PAC voted to spend POA members' money to help advance Council incumbents who did this, including Garcia.

On taking office as Mayor in mid-2014, Garcia personally recommended a FY2015 budget that didn't restore the citywide deployable police officers that he'd voted to erase. In a fateful vote, the 2014-elected Council majority (now re-elected in 2018) approved this, effectively ensuring that a two-officer patrol car wouldn't respond and a single officer would be left to try and subdue a violent, out of control, likely hallucinogenic substance-controlled Faras Morad.

Three years later, and despite receiving $40+ million each year from "blank check" Measure A (imposing the highest sales tax rate among CA cities, tied with only a few others), Mayor Garcia and the incumbent Council restored a Belmont Shore fire engine, a NLB paramedic unit, scheduled overdue street and infrastructure repairs but have only restored 17 citywide deployable budgeted police officers out of the 208 officers erased.

At the same time, LB's incumbents spent General Fund sums freed up by Measure A to hand raises to city employee unions (including $100,000 and $200,000 city management) while refusing to restore any further citywide deployable police officers by any date certain for LB taxpayers.

Lawsuits don't provide a sufficient inducement to politicians who behave this way. The only thing we believe they'll understand is to lose future elections based on their record of failing to restore police officers that Feras Morad needed that day and the entire City of LB still needs and deserves.

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