Here's what LBREPORT.com editorialized at the time, plus factual matters of public record below on what followed.
(November 24, 2011) -- We pose this question in its Golden Rule sense: that one should do unto others as one would have others do unto them.
Would you or your family feel safe living in the part of Long Beach where Mayor Foster raised money to help Habitat for Humanity build a house for a deserving family? That family currently lives in an apartment a few blocks away. Under the rules, they'll have to live in the new house; they can't flip it or rent it to others; to own it, they have to live there.
The house is in the area between Magnolia and Pacific Aves. and between Anaheim St. and PCH in the 1st Council district. On the map below compiled as of Nov. 23, 2011, each Red X shows 2011 murders to date; each Brown X shows 2010 murders; each Blue X shows a shooting since Aug. 2, 2011 (the date the Mayor and his City Mgr. proposed cutting add'l police officers to balance City Hall's spending budget) and each Green X is where shots were fired but didn't hit someone (the latest incident last week hit a house).
So...would you or your family feel safe in the area where that family now lives and will live?
About a week before Mayor Foster held a photo-op at the house, a teenage boy was fatally shot in the area of Anaheim St. between Magnolia and Pacific Aves. The night before, a man was shot in a drive-by shooting about a block away. Last month, there was another murder in the same block of Anaheim St. About two weeks ago, a shooting took place roughly three blocks south of the new home's site.
These are the conditions that currently prevail in the 1st district under Councilman Robert Garcia, who has held office for the past two and a half years. His district, along with the adjacent 6th district (where Councilman Dee Andrews has been in office since May 2007) collectively accounted for over half of LB's murders in 2010.
Garcia, who headed LB's Young Republicans and lived in the 3rd district, moved into the 1st district (upper Pine Ave.), changed his party affiliation to Dem and used campaign contributions from outside the district (much of it from zip 90803) to tell 1st district residents that he'd make public safety is top priority. On taking office, he voted (Sept. 2009 and Sept. 2010) to "balance" City Hall's spending budget by cutting 140 budgeted sworn officers.
Those Council votes (9-0 both times) left LB with a citywide deployable police level that's roughly the per capita equivalent of cutting over 25% of L.A.P.D.'s officers. Mayor Foster, elected in 2006 after telling voters he'd put 100 more officers on the street in his first four years in office, has instead overseen the decimation of LB police levels to roughly where they were when Mayor Beverly O'Neill took office in 1994.
Last year, Mayor Foster named Councilman Garcia to chair the Council's "Public Safety Committee." This year, Councilman Garcia then held no hearings on the Mayor's proposed FY12 budget that advocated cutting additional officers.
On that Sept. 2011 budget vote (6-3, Schipske, Gabelich and Neal dissenting), the Council failed (for the third year in a row) to fund a replenishment police academy class, effectively ensuring police staffing will fall further in 2012.
It doesn't have to be this way. Elections can change this type of Council behavior, but only if candidates step forward in districts 2, 4, 6 and 8 and offer voters a meaningful choice by stating plainly that they disagree what this Mayor and his current Council majority did on police (and other items not itemized here) and will move to undo those actions.
A private group that builds new homes in challenged neighborhoods is a beautiful thing, but self-serving politicians who pretend this substitutes for doing their elected job -- providing taxpayers with police levels that Long Beach did before they arrived and other cities still do -- deserve to be shown the door.
Long Beach should be one city, but it isn't, as long as good and decent families and hard working businesses in some parts of town endure crime levels that we wouldn't wish on ourselves.
