Police chief’s comments are hard to accept
The June 9 article titled, “Scotts Valley Police Chief Says Gung-Ho Recruits Reason for Increased Arrests,” and the comments by Chief Walpole were disturbing for two reasons.
First, the Chief boasted both that crime overall decreased significantly and that arrests increased by an enormous 34%. That doesn’t make sense. Why would arrests increase if crime decreased? Perhaps the answer lies in the Chief’s statement that his officers were looking for people to arrest.
I’m curious how many of those arrests were for serious matters, and how many resulted in convictions. An arrest can have a devastating impact on the person arrested, sometimes making it difficult for them to find employment and housing. The SVPD should not be arresting people just to make their enforcement numbers look good.
The second troubling aspect of the article was the information that SVPD officers made traffic stops of non-white drivers at far higher rates than those drivers’ proportion of the Scotts Valley population—25% of stops were Hispanic people compared to 11% of the population being Hispanic; for Black drivers, 3% vs. 1% of the population.
The Chief attempted to explain these glaring discrepancies by saying that “officers aren’t acting in a biased manner when it comes to race, if you factor in that people from out of town are also present in the municipal boundaries,” according to the article. “Scotts Valley is only about 3% of the county,” Walpole said. “We’re a commuter location. So, there’s a lot of people that drive through our city.”
This explanation is hard to accept. It’s unlikely that many people come to Scotts Valley from South County, the only part of the County that is heavily Hispanic, or even from Santa Cruz.
Black people do not make up 3% of any place in the County. The San Lorenzo Valley, which may provide many Scotts Valley visitors, has similar demographics to Scotts Valley—about 80% white, 12% Hispanic and less than 1% Black.
More people of color may drive through Scotts Valley on Highway 17, but that is CHP’s jurisdiction, not SVPD.
SVPD needs to look at its practices more objectively and make the changes necessary to more fairly police the City, and the City Council needs to exercise more effective supervision.
Peter Gelblum
Boulder Creek
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