News of the Week
July 14-21, 2016
pau l wellm an
by KELSEY BRU RUgg ggER ER @kelseybrugger, @kelseybrugger, LÉNA gARCIA @lenamgarcia,, KEIT EITh h hA hAmm mm,, TYLER hAYDEN @TylerHayden1, and NICK WELSh, with Independent STAff
city
news briefs LAW & DISORDER Juan Aguilar Perez, 56, of Santa Barbara was arrested on 7/15 for the hit-and-run death of 88-year-old S.B. resident Miguel Gutierrez-Vargas. CHP investigators said that early on 7/14, Perez struck Gutierrez-Vargas while he walked across San Lorenzo Drive east of San Felipe Drive in a neighborhood near Goleta. Perez, driving a blue Silverado Chevrolet, was arrested just one block away from the site of the crash. The early-morning sighting of an estimated 10-foot great white shark feeding on a seal or sea lion off Carpinteria Beach on 7/15 prompted lifeguards to post caution signs along the beachfront and cancel junior lifeguard swim and paddle competitions. With water contact off-limits, upward of 1,500 junior guards — coming from as far as Avila Beach and Leo Carrillo State Beach — focused on soft-sand relay races, distance runs, and flags.
CITY LOCKSTEP: Chief Lori Luhnow became a cop 27 years ago after watching her twin sister go through police training at the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Meet Chief lori luhnow
She Talks Homelessness, Implicit Bias, and Training Guardians, Not Warriors
M
by T y l e r H ay d e N
onday afternoon in front of a packed City Council chambers, Lori Luhnow, a 27-year veteran of the San Diego Police Department, was sworn in as Santa Barbara’s new chief of police. Her officers clapped loudly alongside councilmembers and public safety brass as her fiancé pinned the chief’s shield to her uniform. Luhnow thanked her Eastside neighbors for their warm welcome and teared up as she talked about the support of her three brothers and sister in the audience. Luhnow becomes Santa Barbara’s top cop at an intensely volatile time for law enforcement. A block away at the downtown post office, the flag flew at half-staff for the three officers killed in Baton Rouge on Sunday. Less than two weeks earlier, the stars and stripes were lowered after the murder of five Dallas officers. But Luhnow, who oversaw investigative and training divisions during her decorated San Diego career, believes earnestly in community policing as a way to bridge the expanding gulf of distrust between the public and police. It’s more than a buzzword, she said; it’s a measurable method of law enforcement that humanizes both sides of the thin blue line. Luhnow sat down with The Santa Barbara Independent shortly before she took the oath
of office. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
in addressing the problems before they become crises.
What exactly is “community policing”? Have you personally seen its results? It is effectively policing based on a community’s priorities. A perfect example is when I was a young patrol officer in a rough part of San Diego. Everyone was earning respect by working drugs and gangs, and I was determined to get a good drug or gang project. So I started knocking on doors at an apartment complex, and person after person I talked to deflected me to a chop shop in their alley. It operated at night and kept their families awake. Because of the number of people it was impacting, I couldn’t walk away. It wasn’t a sexy problem, but I really was able to change the quality of life for these people. That created trust, and later on, those same people provided information on other cases.
How did you address homelessness and mental-health issues in San Diego? I think a program that the department has which would be very effective here is the HOT team —the Homeless Outreach Team. It’s putting psychological clinicians with officers. It’s a comprehensive response and working within a team from day one when contacting the people who need help the most.
What Santa Barbara priorities will you be working on? I know there is a lot of concern about the increase in the homeless population. That’s something we need to address. I have to get our staffing where it should be so we can get more resources to deal with all the social issues of homelessness. It’s not a criminal problem; however, we are tasked with taking on the criminal aspects. I really would like to pull in all the county and social agencies and have us work more cohesively
How have you seen the profession change since you became a police officer in 1988? Do you see it continuing to evolve? Post-9/11 you saw that warrior mentality come out. We really ramped up from a tactical perspective. But we have started to shift from “We’re trying to create warriors” to “We’re trying to create guardians.” People are questioning the legitimacy of our actions, so we’re working hard to train the hearts and the minds of our officers to recognize that we’re all humans first. We come in with biases and experiences that filter our interactions. The more we can train to those, the better. The awareness is the first step. Implicit bias is something you may not even be aware of. You can’t control it. But you can control the explicit bias. We have strong policies and procedures, and we don’t tolerate any perceived bias. It’s just letting cont’d page 10
8
THE INDEPENDENT
JULY 21, 2016
INDEPENDENT.COM
Continuing its counterattack against Santa Barbara’s opposition to short-term vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods, advocacy group Save the Rentals has released a pair of reports claiming that the impact of short-term rentals on long-term housing and neighborhood tranquility has been overstated. While one report concludes that shutting down short-term vacation rentals would only produce a half-percent increase in the long-term rental stock, the other finds that, based on complaint records, short-term rentals “do not result in heightened nuisance issues.” Both reports, available at STRSantaBarbara.org, were authored by the California Economic Forecast.
COUNTY Facing dozens of people wearing “I Love Ziplines” T-shirts, the county supervisors green-lighted a zipline project in the Santa Ynez Valley on 7/19. After the project was approved by the Planning Commission in January, a neighbor quickly appealed, citing concerns about access to the site, as well as noise and environmental impacts. This week, project applicant Stuart Gildred pledged to give 80 disadvantaged kids per month a free ride. Prices otherwise are $110 for adults and $85 for kids. Supervisor Janet Wolf opposed the project, saying, “This is potentially setting a precedent in our ag land.” The 805 is encountering “area code exhaust,” said John Manning, senior director of North American Numbering Plan Administration. To meet the need for more telephone numbers, the California Public Utilities Commission is taking the first step toward adding an additional area code. The new area code options — adding it only to new numbers, which is preferred by phone carriers, or adding it to a small region of existing users — both require dialing the