This comment on Take Back Santa Cruz's private Facebook page was leaked to the Santa Cruz City Council.
What makes for a fair discussion about public safety? That’s what some locals have been asking since last week, when a member of the city’s public safety task force left a Facebook comment on Take Back Santa Cruz’s page that elicited some, er, strong reactions.
“I’d be fine with junkies dying somewhere else,” Steve Schlitt wrote in a discussion about drug addiction, after a body was found in the San Lorenzo River. “Outside the county is fine by me.”
Whether Schlitt was being serious, sarcastic or insouciant, he struck a nerve, and someone took his comment from the TBSC page, which is open to members only, and emailed it to the city council, suggesting that Schlitt might not be fit for the task force. Schlitt, who’s generally seen as one of Take Back Santa Cruz’s prevailing coolest heads, isn’t thrilled someone shared the information.
“This person went into a private Facebook group and sent it in a letter to city council,” says Schlitt, adding that he doesn’t have anything to apologize for. “The comment was taken out of context.”
Activist Brent Adams, who’s criticized TBSC in the past, says the comment “lacks a realistic approach to drug addiction,” and shows larger problems too.
“The task force is tasked with getting to the root of the problems,” Adams says, “but what we’ve seen to this point is they’re not interested in the roots of problems, just the same old story.”
Schlitt says that it was a closed discussion and that people are making noise about nothing.
“What transpired in the conversation was between the people in the conversation,” Schlitt says. “It was reprehensible someone would take me out of context.”
