Key Priorities
Improve and Invest in Public Safety
Brazen street crimes are now happening on our commercial and residential areas: retail shops, individual assaults, extensive car break-ins. That is not the Palo Alto I want to live in. Council budgets need to invest in, and support, our police officers and firefighters. Citizens are really concerned about this. I have had two car break-ins outside my house.
The city has a duty to keep citizens safe from crime and maintain high emergency response times.
“When Ed advocates for ‘investing in public safety’ he knows adding more officers is not enough. In addition to hiring, he’ll push for training, policies and oversight that improve race equity, transparency, and accountability to better protect and serve all.”
Winter Dellenbach
Public Safety Advocate
Founder, Friends of Buena Vista
Tall Tree Award Recipient 2017
New and Improved Police Force
New ways of deploying officers need to be evaluated and implemented that are more effective in preventing crime. We also need to assess options for speeding up the recruiting process of new officers, which now takes an extraordinarily long time. We know we are losing new officers to other jurisdictions AND our current officers are being poached by other towns.
Announcing my vision for public safety at my campaign kickoff
Why? How can we compete to get them to choose our community to serve in? How can we attract more ethnic and gender diversity to our force? And how do we get trained officers to stay for many years after they arrive? These questions need research and action.
In prior budget cuts, police have lost their entire traffic patrols, specialty units, and some senior officers. With new Police Chief Andrew Binder – an internal hire – I think we have chosen an innovative and skilled leader. He offers continuity on the key issues as he has been leading change on many of them in the Assistant Chief’s role. But he is also committed to moving beyond “business as usual” and breaking new ground. For example, one of his goals is deeper community engagement with Palo Alto residents; he told me, “We are not doing that only because the residents deserve it, but also because our department needs it.” To say the least, this leadership position is a crucial hire with a high bar for performance. The Chief will be under a lot of scrutiny for both the changes being put in place and the resulting performance of the department.
Meanwhile, in the last couple of years, the Council and the Human Relations Commission – with extensive input from the community at large - made initial progress on changing police officer arrest procedures (“8 Can’t Wait”), retraining officers to address racial bias, and adding “civilian” staffing for duties better handled with different skills than sworn officers - notably the PERT (Psychiatric Emergency Response Team) to handle mental health situations. This cultural reform in a post-George Floyd world is still a work in progress. It will need constant and transparent updates from the new Police Chief – and the independent police auditor - to Council and the public. The new polices are good; they are on paper. The force now needs to be accountable for doing their work according to the new standards so that everyone feels safe calling the police for help in a crisis.
Fire Safety
In the pandemic budget two years ago, our fire department staffing was also cut. Big mistake.
One item of collateral damage is that the fire department has one station in “brown out” mode. This means it is intentionally understaffed, which increases response times. Similarly, the city settled for slower response time for medical emergencies!
Another example is that our fire department has a dilapidated training facility on Stanford’s campus. It is in such a state of disrepair that some critical skills cannot be taught there. And there is currently no approved capital budget to replace it. Some budget has just been backfilled for fire resources. I will push to accelerate funding for a new training structure and full replacement of what I think of as “safety gaps” in staffing so they are trained and available for any crisis.
The Council cannot risk underfunding police and fire resources at the expense of public safety.