Public Comment Received Before 1100 am July 30, 2020From: John Shepardson
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2020 2:54 AM
To: Council <Council@losgatosca.gov>; Laurel Prevetti <LPrevetti@losgatosca.gov>
Cc: Wasserman Mike <Mike.Wasserman@bos.sccgov.org>; Howard Miller
<hmiller@saratoga.ca.us>; sscharf@cupertino.org; council@losaltosca.gov;
citycouncil@cupertino.org
Subject: Police Budgets (for Verbal Comments)
Madam Mayor & Council:
See below national ave. for state and local police budgets: 4 percent.
1. LG approx 20 percent of expend budget for police. 16.9/78M
https://www.losgatosca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/21571/Financial-Summaries?bidId=
2. Cupertino approx 10 percent. 15M/150M
https://www.cupertino.org/home/showdocument?id=27541
3. Saratoga approx 30 percent
6.7M/23M
https://www.saratoga.ca.us/181/Budget
(Saratoga spends approx 10M a year less in policing than LG.)
4. Los Altos Hills 18 percent 1.8M/10M.
https://www.losaltoshills.ca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/3168/UPDATED-19-20-Budget-Book-
publishing
Copy and paste from: https://www.losaltoshills.ca.gov/448/SHERIFF-SERVICES
The Town of Los Altos Hills contracts with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office for law
enforcement services. The West Valley Division, which serves Los Altos Hills, Saratoga,
Cupertino, and the unincorporated areas of the County has 77 sworn positions and 8
professional support staff. Deputies provide a full range of law enforcement responsibilities to
include Patrol, Traffic, Detectives, School Resource Officers, and Special Enforcement details.
The West Valley Division employs strategies such as community oriented policing and also stays
current on law enforcement practices such as predictive policing. A full time analyst works
directly with patrol deputies and detectives to identify crime trends and associate case data to
help bring criminals to justice.
Copy and paste from https://www.losaltoshills.ca.gov/222/Public-Safety
PUBLIC SAFETY
The Town of Los Altos Hills contracts with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department for law
enforcement and public safety services. Residents of Los Altos Hills participate in the direct
election of the Sheriff. Specific services provided to the Town are negotiated and approved by
the City Council.
“In fiscal year 2020, police departments accounted for about 14% of total budget allocations in
the 10 largest cities on average, ranging from 6% in New York to 17% in San Antonio. The same
was true for fiscal year 2019 and largely for fiscal year 2018.”
Source:
https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-06-11/how-much-the-10-largest-us-cities-
spend-on-police
Copy and paste from https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/police-
unions-are-one-of-the-biggest-obstacles-to-transforming-policing-140227
Police unions are one of the biggest obstacles to transforming policing
Philadelphia’s police union is not alone in its power to maintain the status quo. In cities and
states across the U.S., the benefits and protections afforded police have been provided by
public officials who have catered – and caved – to union demands over many decades.
Former D.C. police chief and former Philadelphia police commissioner Charles Ramsey recently
told CNN that police and their unions have “become far too powerful. They form political action
committees. They donate to district attorneys’ race or state attorneys’ race, state senators and
representatives and so forth.”
“And then we wonder why you can’t get anything done.”
Copy and paste from:
https://www.thetrace.org/2020/06/defund-the-police-city-mayors-budgets/
San Francisco Mayor London Breed plans to present a budget later this summer that would
redirect dollars from the police to city services that address the needs of black residents.
Council members in Nashville, and Denver are debating spending proposals that would divert
police funding to school coffers or alternative first responders. Portland, Oregon is moving $7
million from its Police Department to programs that benefit people of color and will disband
the force’s Gun Violence Reduction team, which drew claims of disproportionately targeting
young black men.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether she supports shrinking police forces, deflected.
“Have those debates at the local level,” she said.
Police budgets have been a third rail of municipal government, rising so routinely that
cumulative spending on state and local law enforcement now surpasses $115 billion a year.
“We need police departments that have to defend their rights to exist,” said Keesha Ha, a
former professor at Rowan College who is organizing campaigns to defund police departments.
“We don’t believe the police are serving the greater public good, so let’s see your budgets. Let’s
have you explain your worth.”
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/10593.jpeg
Copy and paste from:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2020/06/09/defund-the-police-budget-
spending-state-local-dismantle-protests-george-floyd-how-much-spent/amp/
State and local governments spent a combined total of $115 billion on police in fiscal 2017,
according to the Urban Institute, equal to about 4% of their cumulative expenditures. While
that total was up from $42 billion in 1977 (calculated in inflation-adjusted dollars), the 4%
portion of total spending is approximately the same and has remained consistent over the past
four decades.
I ask that the town allocate more monies to our ballooning long-term debt and worthwhile
community projects. The police budget must be reduced and the dollars it receives should be
more efficiently and effective deployed. A switch to the sheriff would instantly save approx. 5M
a year and we would be as safe or safer than we are now. I suggest you contact the councils for
Saratoga, Cupertino, Los Altos Hills, or Stanford University for their views on the services
provided by the sheriff.
Respectfully,
John Shepardson, Esq.
From: John Shepardson
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2020 3:33 PM
To: Council <Council@losgatosca.gov>; Laurel Prevetti <LPrevetti@losgatosca.gov>
Subject: Fwd: Police//Thomas Friedman and Van Jones on Going Big Green Now
Mayor and Council:
Below is my submittal for verbal comments for the next meeting.
John Shepardson, Esq.
Sent from my iPhone
Begin forwarded message:
From: John Shepardson
Date: June 23, 2020 at 9:09:58 PM PDT
To: council@oaklandca.gov
Cc: Activist Pamela Price <justice@pypesq.com>
Subject: Police//Thomas Friedman and Van Jones on Going Big Green Now
Dear Mayor & Council:
I care about Oakland in part because Pamela Price got me to care about Oakland.
A friend and I recently participated in a BLM peaceful protest bike ride
through Oakland. The people and the police were great.
The particulars, I’m not here to comment upon, for the structure of the police department.
I add these general comments, respectfully:
Take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and try another. But by all means, try
something. (emphasis added) Franklin D. Roosevelt
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/franklin-d-roosevelt-quotes
I do suggest moving in the direction of providing “Green” jobs and infrastructure.
Copy and past from Mr. Friedman’s book:
That may sound like a stretch, but it's not. Ask Van Jones. He's good at stretching. I met him at a
conference in Dalian, China, when he stretched out an arm to introduce himself—as he was
going down an escalator and I was going up the other side. Jones is a rare bird. He's a black
social activist in Oakland and he's as green an environmentalist as they come. He really gets
passionate, and funny, when he talks about what it's like to be black and green.
"Try this experiment," he says to me. "Go knock on someone's door in West Oakland, Watts, or
Newark and say, 'We got a really big prob lem!' They say, 'We do? We do?' 'Yeah, we got a
really big problem!' 'We do? W e do?' Yeah, we gotta save the polar bears! You may not make it
out of this neighborhood alive, but we gotta save the polar bears!'"
Jones then just shakes his head. If you try that approach on people without jobs, who live in
neighborhoods where they've got a lot better chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than
a melting glacier, you're going to get nowhere—and if you don't bring America's under class
into the green movement, this movement's full potential will never be realized. "We need a
different on-ramp" for people from disadvantaged communities, says Jones. "The leaders of the
climate establishment came in through one door and now they want to squeeze everyone
through that same door. It's not going to work. If we want to have a broad-based
environmental movement, we need more entry points."
The big question, Jones told me in an interview, is this: "How do you use the green economy to
deliver work, wealth, and health for communities who have had too little of all three? How do
you connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done, and, if
you do it right, beat pollution and poverty at the same time?"
Can we really outgreen poverty and pollution at the same time? Jones makes a strong and
impassioned case that we can—and he has been trying to prove it in some of the poorest
neighborhoods in America. Thirty-nine years old and a Yale Law School grad, he exudes enough
energy to light up a few buildings on his own. He founded the Ella Baker Center for Human
Rights in Oakland, which helps kids get out of jail and into jobs, but he moved in 2008 to run
Green for All, a new national organi zation working to build an inclusive green economy with a
specific focus on creating "green-collar" jobs for underprivileged young people.
Again, it all starts with a world that is getting hot, flat, and crowded. The more these trends
intensify, the more state and local governments will require buildings to be energy efficient and
the more work there will be retrofitting buildings all across America with solar panels, insula
tion, and other weatherizing materials. Those are jobs that can't be out sourced.
"You can't take a building you want to weatherize, put it on a ship to China, and then have them
do it and send it back," said Jones. "So we are going to have to put people to work in this
country—weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms.
Those green-collar jobs can provide a pathway out of poverty for some one who has not gone
to college." Let's tell our disaffected youth, he says, "You can make more money if you put
down that handgun and pick up a caulk gun." Remember, adds Jones, "a big chunk of the
African- American community is economically stranded. The blue-collar, stepping- stone
manufacturing jobs are becoming fewer and fewer. And they're not being replaced by anything,
except higher skilled jobs. So you have this whole generation of young blacks who are basically
in economic free fall." Green-collar retrofitting jobs are a way to catch some of them. (emphasis
added)
To this end, Jones helped create the Oakland Apollo Alliance, a coali tion of labor unions,
environmental organizations, and community groups. In 2007, that coalition helped to raise
$250,000 from the city government to create Oakland Green Jobs Corps, a union-supported
training program to teach young people in Oakland how to put up solar panels and weatherize
buildings. That was the beginning of the Green for All campaign (greenforall.org) that Jones,
backed by other environ mental activists, like Majora Carter from Sustainable South Bronx,
used to persuade Congress to pass the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which authorized $125 million
per year from the federal government to create an "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
Worker Training Program" to prepare workers for jobs in a range of green industries. (Congress
has not yet appropriated the money.)
"The big problem with the job training is that too often it is all about throwing certificates at
people, whether they get a job or not," said Jones. "[But] more often than not they come to
some school or an institute, get a certificate, and there is no job on the other side." The beauty
of a green jobs program is that there is no question whatsoever, as building codes change and
green technologies make retrofitting your home a no- brainer, that green-collar jobs will be
there waiting for anyone who gets trained to do them. And the beauty of this initiative, if it can
be made to work, is that like other forms of outgreening, you buy one and you get four others
for free.
The more we make tax incentives available for retrofitting homes to make them more energy
efficient and to encourage use of solar tech nologies, the more we strengthen the ability of
poor people to stay in their homes and secure their neighborhoods. I'll let Jones explain:
"There is a category of very vulnerable poor people who own their own homes, but tend to be
older and on fixed incomes," he says. "They are very vulnerable to soaring energy prices." If the
government, he added, put in place a program that said: "We're going to send teams in to find
out where your home is leaking energy and then install the insula tion, weatherization, and a
few solar panels," we could create jobs for un derprivileged youth, lower energy bills for lower-
income families, and add value into the homes of the most economically vulnerable sector of
the population. For a lot of underprivileged people, greening their homes may be the only way
to keep them in their homes, as fuel prices continue to soar. Those homeowners are the most
stable pillars of any neighborhood.
"Make their homes energy-secure and their kids' job secure and you stabilize the
neighborhood," said Jones. "And you get cleaner air to boot. You fix social problems and
ecology problems at the same time. You help Grandma and the polar bears stay at home."
This is an industry that is ready to take off. "If we can get these youth in on the ground floor of
the solar industry now, where they can be in stallers today, they'll become managers in five
years and owners in ten— and then become inventors," argues Jones. "The entry-level rung is
low enough, but the ladder reaches to the sun." If you green the ghetto first, he added, "and
spend $7,000 training Pookey and giving him a life skill, it is a lot better than warehousing
Pookey in a prison for $500,000. Save a watt, save a life —it's all the same principle. In a green
economy, you don't just count what you spend, you count what you save."
One thing spurring him in this project, added Jones, was the way that the big oil companies
bought ads in black-owned newspapers in Cali fornia in 2006 to help bring out black votes—by
dishonestly scaring people about higher gasoline prices—to defeat Proposition 87. Proposi tion
87 proposed a tax on oil companies drilling in California, the money from which would have
gone to develop alternative energy programs. "The polluters were able to stampede poor
people into their camp," said Jones. "I never want to see an NAACP leader on the wrong side of
an en vironment issue again."
Not surprisingly, some of the worst polluting factories, power plants, and toxic waste dumps
are located in poor neighborhoods, where people have little power to defend themselves
against such projects.
What I find most compelling about Jones's argument is something that goes to the core thesis
of this book: It used to be that the greener you were, the further away you were from ordinary
Americans. Green was all about yoga mats, Birkenstock sandals, tofu, and individual lifestyle
choices that often separated greens from average Americans. When you start to redefine green
in the way Jones does, you come closer to ordinary Americans' concerns.
"In a real green economy," said Jones, "you don't have any throwaway resources—you don't
have throwaway species and you don't have throw- away neighborhoods and you don't have
throwaway kids either . . . I have not met a white person who would not support [this kind of
approach] if they thought it could work. A green agenda brings us all together again, because
the hope at the core nourishes everybody."
The last time someone said "I have a dream" in America, it was a dream about people, said
Jones. "This is a dream about people and the planet. We need to put the two together, because
the moral power of that will give us our dream."
The Green Collar Economy outlines a “viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the
country today—the economy and the environment,” and received favorable reviews from Al
Gore, Nancy Pelosi, and Arianna Huffington.
Copy and paste from https://www.caa.com/caaspeakers/van-jones#topics
“Beyond Prisons”: Don’t Criminalize – Humanize
“Green Jobs Not Jails”: Criminal Justice + Ecology
Protest & Politics In Age Of Twitter
“Green For All”: Can Environmentalism Include Everyone?
#YesWeCode: Race, Gender & The Digital Divide
Rebuild The Dream: The Next American Economy
John Shepardson
Law Office Email
shepardsonlaw@me.com