habitatkeys Would you or your family feel safe living in the part of Long Beach where Mayor Bob Foster raised money to help Habitat for Humanity build a house for a deserving family? We pose this question in its Golden Rule sense: that one should do unto others as one would have others do unto them.

The  family received the keys to the house Nov. 18 during a press/publicity event that involved closing a public sidewalk and street. The residence is in the 1st Council district represented by Councilmember Robert Garcia—Foster’s appointee as chairman of Council’s “Public Safety Committee”—in an area between Magnolia and Pacific Aves. and between Anaheim St. and Pacific Coast Highway. Under the rules, they must live in the new house; they can’t flip it or rent it to others—to own it, they have to live there.

But about a week before Mayor Foster starred in that photo-op, a teenage boy was fatally shot in the area of Anaheim St. between Magnolia and Pacific Aves. The night before, a man was shot in a drive-by shooting about a block away. Last month, there was another murder in the same block of Anaheim St. About two weeks ago, a shooting took place roughly three blocks south of the new home’s site.

LBReport.com has been monitoring official reports of gunfire in this area since Aug. 2, 2011, the date Foster and City Manager Pat West proposed to balance City Hall’s spending budget by cutting officers from the Long Beach Police Department—a plan that was approved a month later by a 6-3 Council vote that was aided by the fact that Garcia held no Public Safety Committee hearings on the Mayor’s proposal.

A map on the LBReport.com site illustrates the number of 2011 murders as of Nov. 23, the number of 2011 shootings with victims and the number of shootings that did not hit anyone, as well as the total number of  2010 murders.

These are the conditions that currently prevail in the 1st district under Garcia, who was first elected 2 1/2 years ago promising to put public safety first.  Instead, the 1st district and the adjacent 6th district—represented since 2007 by Councilmember Dee Andrews, who attended Foster’s dedication publicity event—collectively accounted for over half of Long Beach’s murders in 2010.

CONTINUE READING ON LBREPORT.COM

So, again: would you or your family feel safe in the area where that family now lives and will live?

These are the conditions that currently prevail in the 1st district under Councilman Robert Garcia, who has held office for the past two and a half years. His district, along with the adjacent 6th district (where Councilman Dee Andrews has been in office since May 2007) collectively accounted for over half of LB’s murders in 2010.
Garcia, who headed LB’s Young Republicans and lived in the 3rd district, moved into the 1st district (upper Pine Ave.), changed his party affiliation to Dem and used campaign contributions from outside the district (much of it from zip 90803) to tell 1st district residents that he’d make public safety is top priority. On taking office, he voted (Sept. 2009 and Sept. 2010) to “balance” City Hall’s spending budget by cutting 140 budgeted sworn officers.
Those Council votes (9-0 both times) left LB with a citywide deployable police level that’s roughly the per capita equivalent of cutting over 25% of L.A.P.D.’s officers. Mayor Foster, elected in 2006 after telling voters he’d put 100 more officers on the street in his first four years in office, has instead overseen the decimation of LB police levels to roughly where they were when Mayor Beverly O’Neill took office in 1994.
Last year, Mayor Foster named Councilman Garcia to chair the Council’s “Public Safety Committee.” This year, It doesn’t have to be this way. Elections can change this type of Council behavior, but only if candidates step forward in districts 2, 4, 6 and 8 and offer voters a meaningful choice by stating plainly that they disagree what this Mayor and his current Council majority did on police (and other items not itemized here) and will move to undo those actions.
A private group that builds new homes in challenged neighborhoods is a beautiful thing, but self-serving politicians who pretend this substitutes for doing their elected job — providing taxpayers with police levels that Long Beach did before they arrived and other cities still do — deserve to be shown the door.
Long Beach should be one city, but it isn’t, as long as good and decent families and hard working businesses in some parts of town endure crime levels that we wouldn’t wish on ourselves