The memorial erected to Sgt. Loran 'Butch' Baker and Det. Elizabeth Butler outside the SCPD. (Chip Scheuer)
Erik Larsen was living in the Lower Ocean area and working in Beach Flats as a community organizer in the ’90s when he got to know Loran “Butch” Baker—a smiling, jovial police officer who took a neighborhood-based approach to keeping people safe.
“He was a really good cop,” Larsen says. “Butch embodies everything anyone would want to know about a community officer. He was a really good guy, and Santa Cruz lost a really good police officer.”
Sgt. Baker, a 28-year veteran of the Santa Cruz Police Department, and 10-year department veteran Det. Elizabeth Butler were shot and killed when working an investigation into suspect Jeremy Goulet on Tuesday, Feb. 26. The suspect was also shot, after opening fire on officers called in for backup, according to Santa Cruz County Sheriff-Coroner Phil Wowak. The incident left neighbors on Branciforte Avenue in shock, dozens of bullet holes in garage doors across the street from Whole Foods and the entire Santa Cruz community reeling.
The flower-filled memorial at SCPD for Baker and Butler is just seven blocks from one for local martial arts instructor Pauly Silva, who was shot and killed outside the Red Restaurant and Bar less than three weeks earlier. Over the course of that two-and-a-half week span, there was also a mugging and attempted murder, a grocery store robbery and a home invasion robbery. After the most violent month in local memory, many Santa Cruz residents are questioning their own safety.
But looking at the scope of the crimes, there isn’t just one trend for city leaders to tackle. That means there are no easy solutions.
“Every one is so different,” former councilmember Katherine Beiers says. “There’s not one theme.”
Most baffling is the fact that the recent crimes come on the tail of a year the department managed to keep relatively under control, according to key stats, despite limited resources. Burglaries were down 11 percent compared to 2011 levels, robberies were down 8 percent and assaults were down 7 percent.
Crime was up 6 percent overall—a modest increase considering calls for service were up 16 percent. (The increase in calls includes responses to the department’s new futuristic predictive policing algorithm.) What the stats don’t show, however, is the long lines of angry residents at city council meetings who are worried the city isn’t doing enough to keep them safe.
The problems didn’t come out of nowhere. Larsen, who now lives in San Jose, says Santa Cruz has had public safety issues for decades. He worked for years to make a dent in crime and substance abuse in Lower Ocean and the Beach Flats.
“Santa Cruz has a drug and alcohol problem, and needs to figure out how to get a handle on it,” Larsen says. “People love Santa Cruz, and if you peel back some of the layers of the onion, there are things that aren’t so nice to deal with. Police officers deal with those kinds of issues that people don’t want to deal with.”
High Risk
One area of concern for the SCPD is drug use. If addicts don’t have money, they often get desperate and commit high-risk, low-reward crimes, hoping to score a few bucks. Such crimes can stretch a department’s resources pretty thin. And dealers don’t exactly come to town to play by the rules.
SCPD captain Steve Clark has for years criticized a lax and “playful attitude about drugs,” including voter-approved Measure K, which in 2006 made marijuana the department’s lowest priority. He’s said that attitude makes it harder for cops to keep Santa Cruz safe.
“I recall cautioning the community 15-plus years ago of the imminent dangers of this attitude,” Clark told Santa Cruz Weekly via email two weeks ago. “The community now stands a victim of those misguided and ignorant voices. The fact that the Street Outreach Supporters needle distribution program gives away twice as many needles as Santa Clara County, a county that exponentially dwarfs our population, illustrates the saturation of drug use in our community.”
Clark couldn’t be reached for additional comment this week, as he and other officers were working on multiple investigations, in addition to planning a two-part memorial for Baker and Butler that is expected to draw thousands to San Jose’s HP Pavilion on Thursday.
Evidence shows drug treatment, although not cheap, can lead to significant decreases in crime. The state of Maryland increased drug treatment funding 37 percent from 1995 to 2005, and federal funding for such programs climbed 15 percent in the same period. Violent crimes went down 32 percent over the same stretch of time.
The city of Santa Cruz does not currently fund drug treatment, but councilmember Don Lane suggested that Janus, a rehab facility with several city locations, apply for community program funding through the city this year.
As far as solutions go, the benefits of rehab aren’t exactly news to city leaders. “We know a lot of people want to get off drugs and want rehab,” former councilmember Katherine Beiers says. “We don’t have the money for them right now, and we don’t have the beds.”
Weird Questions
For some reason, it’s grown hard for people to talk about public safety in Santa Cruz without invoking that age-old bumper sticker adage “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.” It’s as if “weird” has come to mean the same thing as “unsafe.” In the pages of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, contributors are suggesting the famous slogan is at fault for the city’s safety problems.
“This ‘Keep Santa Cruz Weird’ marketing campaign worked well, their commercial interests thrived, but citizen safety was ignored,” Kevin Cornell wrote last week, adding, “We need to rebrand to ‘Keep Santa Cruz Safe’ and not slow down until it rings true.”
Cornell’s take isn’t unique. Last week, the Sentinel also ran a guest editorial called “The Results of Keeping Santa Cruz Weird” by Wade Garza, a UC Santa Cruz dining hall manager.
Garza lamented, “In an effort to ‘Keep Santa Cruz Weird’ and provide sanction for those with alcohol and drug addictions, we have set ourselves up to attract a certain criminal element.”
It’s hard to say exactly when people began thinking “weird” and “unsafe” are the thing or, for that matter, that a four-word sentence could be an invitation for folks to hurt others.
One thing’s for sure: it’s not a conversation that’s happening in Austin, Texas, which adopted the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan over 10 years ago, before the formula spread like wildflowers to cities around the country.
“Oh, please,” says Rebecca Melançon of the Austin Independent Business Alliance. “If a slogan could cause crime, then I think every police department in America would have come up with a slogan to keep them safe.” Melançon notes that a study released last month by CQ Press named Austin the fourth safest city with more than 500,000 people.
Nor is the discussion happening in Portland, Ore., where residents are busy trying to keep their juggler-to-unicyclist ratio in balance.
The biggest disagreement about “Keep Portland Weird,” Travel Portland’s Marcus Hibdon says, is whether or not the cliché will actually make Portland more mainstream.
Portland has its share of weirdos, Hibdon says, “but they’re also law-abiding. These are people with nine-to-five jobs, raising families, who might describe themselves as weird, but it doesn’t make them miscreants.” Last month, the Portland’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Willamette Week newspaper ran a seven-page cover story about things to do in Portland when high, tips on legalizing the drug and the like.
Here in Santa Cruz, Neal Coonerty, owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, first started selling “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” bumper stickers, mugs and t-shirts to support street performers in 2002. He’s surprised by the backlash he’s heard recently against the slogan.
“It’s about keeping it unique, keeping artists in the community,” says Coonerty, also a county supervisor and former Santa Cruz mayor. “We were talking about [accordion-player] the Great Morgani or someone on with a guitar playing ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.’ The fact that people are interpreting it as we’re supporting drugs and violence is just bizarre.”
History of Violence
Critiques of Santa Cruz’s grungier elements predate the “Weird” bumper sticker, though. If we take a page from Santa Cruz literary history for context, the debate over weirdness is really nothing new. In 1981, then-UCSC-professor Page Stegner wrote a 5,000-word essay for Esquire magazine, in which he blasted the city and residents for tolerating bad behavior.
Although Santa Cruz’s natural beauty blew Stegner away, he wrote in “The Limits of Tolerance” that the town’s laid-back attitude and liberal enforcement had allowed panhandlers to take over downtown’s Pacific Garden Mall and flung open the door to drifters. He thought Santa Cruz culture made it hard to distinguish students from bums, and good manners from bad. And somehow, Stegner worried, this had all given rise to a slew of serial killers who in the 1970s earned Santa Cruz the nickname “The Murder Capital of the World.”
“The difference between a long-haired English major in surplus fatigues and flip-flops and a blown-out meth freak with a red, runny nose in drawstring pants was not immediately apparent,” Stegner wrote. “Something ominous was slithering in the garden.”
So if something in Santa Cruz’s culture is making us less safe, it may predate the town’s most controversial bumper sticker by decades.
“In Santa Cruz, we have lost the capacity to be outraged by almost anything short of Charles Manson,” wrote Stegner.
Elusive Solutions
And yet, in 2013, there is definitely outrage. As parents gathered near the crime scene on Feb. 26, their children were in their schools on lockdown just a few hundred yards away. As they wondered when they would see their kids again, parents’ concerns went much deeper than the day’s shooting. Some said they were ready to leave Santa Cruz. Others criticized the city outright.
“What is the city doing?” Renata Russo, the parent of a four-year-old, asked. “I want everybody to ask what the city is really doing about crime. Everyone needs to protect themselves. This is the last thing I thought would ever happen. It’s just unbelievable.”
Russo and all the children who were on lockdown left the scene safely. But questions about Santa Cruz’s safety long-term remained.
Three of the city’s seven city councilmembers returned phone calls for this story, but said it was too early to suggest solutions for the problems at hand.
”We’re all just grieving,” says councilmember Micah Posner, “and we’ll all start thinking about this in a couple weeks.”
City councilmember Cynthia Mathews says the city will be looking at comprehensive solutions.
“We’re going to be looking broadly at all the ingredients that enter into public safety, certainly having to do with our emergency responders, police and fire, but also collaborating with the community. It’s vague, but that’s about as much as we can say,” says Mathews.
David Terrazas, who chairs the city’s public safety committee, redirected comments to city manager Martín Bernal.
“Sergeant Baker and Officer Butler were killed by a crazed and evil individual, and I’m not sure what we could have done differently,” says Bernal. “Nonetheless, many have rightly expressed concern about public safety, and we need to work with the community to respond. In my view, we need to honor our fallen officers by making sure that we make progress moving forward. To do this, we will need the support of the entire community, including our partner agencies at the county, state and federal levels.”
Before losing two officers last week, SCPD, with a force of 94, had eight vacancies in addition to nine officers out recovering from injuries. Santa Cruz police have already begun recruiting officers for their vacancies, but retention at SCPD has always been an issue. At a candlelight vigil last week, an emotional Capt. Clark said the police department will come out with a “unified response” next week. In her recent city council campaign, Richelle Noroyan highlighted the small size and resources of the Santa Cruz police force as something the council needs to evaluate. Some of the problem, says UCSC sociologist Craig Reinarman, has nothing to do with the city, and everything to do with societal issues—a lousy economy, failure to deal with mental health issues and a flawed prison system. “Most of the time incarceration is a brutalizing experience, and people come out with a big hole in their resume,” Reinarman says. “Even if there weren’t such a high unemployment rate still after all these years, the people coming out of prison are going to be the last to be hired.”
To hear retired SCPD cop Jim Howes put it, things are even more grim. Howes, who served with Baker on the force, wants to know why “society is falling apart.”
“The question should be asked: why are these various safety nets in society unraveling?” says Howes, currently an assistant director for the city’s Regional Occupation program. “Why are family, churches, schools, neighborhoods and communities not protecting people?”
Larsen, who now works for the the Service Employees International Union, remembers what it was like feeling scared in Santa Cruz, and he lost friends to gun violence during his time as an organizer.
“Safety and wanting to take care of your family is such a basic thing,” Larsen says. “And I’m glad we’ve had people like Butch Baker and wonderful people in the city of Santa Cruz Police Department who gave their lives to keep us safe.”
