LBReport.com

Editorial

More Gunfire Reported In Wilmore City, Orizaba Park Areas...More Good Reasons to Budget And Deploy ShotSpotter



(Aug. 14, 2013) -- On Monday night Aug. 12 at about 11:53 p.m., LBPD officers were dispatched to the area of 7th St./Magnolia Ave. after residents reported hearing gunfire. At 11:56 p.m., officers were dispatched to the area of the 600 block of W. 4th St. after residents reported hearing gunfire. (A resident has independently informed LBREPORT.com by email that he believes the shots were in the area of 8th/Daisy.)

With no visible victim (person or property), officers were unable to find evidence that shootings occurred (bullet casing or the like, in the darkness with no visible crime scene like finding a needle in a haystack.) Accordingly, with no evidence of shootings, no negative crime statistic is recorded despite what multiple residents say they heard. Both locations are in the 1st Council district represented by Robert Garcia.

One night earlier on Sunday Aug. 11 at about 9:35 p.m., officers were dispatched to the 1400 block of Orizaba Ave. regarding shots heard in the area. We're unofficially informed that more than one person reported hearing the gunfire. Again, arriving officers searched the area but with no visible victim (person or property) didn't locate any evidence of crime/shooting. Again, no negative crime statistic will be recorded despite what multiple residents say they heard. The location is in the 4th Council district represented by Patrick O'Donnell.

What a great way to keep crime statistics artificially low. We don't blame LBPD for any of this. We believe the problem is at the doors of some budgeting Councilmembers who don't want to know the truth.

Re-budgeting the ShotSpotter gunfire location system -- that the Council budgeted in October 2011 and then unbudgeted a year later to cover LBPD overtime -- would disclose within seconds how many shots fired call REALLY take place and where they are.

Not only would ShotSpotter expose the true "state of certain Council districts" but it would confront the reality that more officers are needed to respond quickly enough to those SpotSpotter spotted shots-fired. That would expose the magnitude of the damage done by Mayor Foster's disastrous "proportional budget reductions" and the Council incumbents who rubberstamped them: Long Beach now has far fewer officers to respond...anywhere.

This needs to be forced into the open, and Councilmembers who don't fear facts need to make a motion and a second to bring a recorded vote on restoring budgeting for ShotSpotter. We are respectfully unpersuaded by vague verbiage to the effect that there's no system that meets LBPD's requirements at this time. It makes no sense to us when ShotSpotter is currently used in part of the L.A. County Sheriff's jurisdiction and plenty of other cities.

What sounds more plausible is that some Council incumbents have shortchanged LBPD on needed overtime (unavoidable out of shift funding for homicides, bash mobs and the like), leaving LBPD management scrambling to cover needed overtime while ShotSpotter remains a dream for the future.

Budgeting ShotSpotter was the right thing to do in October 2011 and it remains the right thing to do now. Good and decent residents of Wilmore City, the Zaferia/Orizaba Park and beyond deserve safer neighborhoods than they currently have...and it's time for their Council representatives (and others if these area's incumbents refuse) to stop pretending the gunfire that Long Beach residents hear and report didn't happen.

In the upcoming budget hearings, the Council should rebudget ShotSpotter...and direct LBPD to deploy it without further delays.


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