Response to Ted Winterer's letter: "The Great Santa Monica Safety Debate"

Where the candidates stand

Wow, it's a bore to keep deconstructing the desperate confabulations of SMRR and their puppeteers. But somebody's got to do it! The latest is from Ted Winterer, who presided on the City Council from 2012-2020 (and as the Mayor 2016-2018), and has written a truly hilarious SMDP op-ed in which he wonders why the two incumbents running (Phil Brock and Oscar de la Torre), haven't yet created safer streets in their 3 years in office when they've been in control for 40. This is also a theme in SMRR mailers.

Well Ted, I've lived in Santa Monica for 32 years and can remember exactly when our city started its downward turn, which coincided with the arrival of you and your SMRR compatriots in 2012, destroying the Santa Monica we all knew and loved. That's not hyperbole. Your exact reign took a city that was thriving, a crown jewel with a sane 4-story development policy, safe streets, and a sophisticated beach vibe that drew people from around the world, and turned it into a chaotic husk of its former glory.

Winterer starts by writing how all the candidates said they would vote for more police. Wow, Ted, that's some really convenient campaign trail gullibility; glad you're coming around on this issue. But your SMRR slate is intrinsically anti-police: they do NOT support Prop 36, a statewide measure polling at 70% approval that will allow police to arrest chronic thieves that now get to steal everything up to $950 without consequences. And the four SMRR candidates are also supporting George Gascon, our criminal friendly LA District attorney who's about to be voted out by county residents sick of his soft on crime policies. And out-of-touch candidates Dan Hall and Natalya Zernitskaya are even against our police making traffic stops! This means that a recent arrest, one of many that resulted from traffic stops exposing drug dealers bringing Fentanyl and guns into our city, wouldn't have been made.

Winterer goes on to say a city with a 750 million dollar a year budget can't afford the 15 million dollars a year it would take to bring our police up to the 300 our police force says they need. That's a mere 2% of our budget that would more than pay for itself if the streets regained a reputation for safety instead of chaos, drawing businesses back to downtown and restoring the 26 million in taxes we're losing every year. In the meantime, maybe audit the 53 million a year the city spends on ineffectual homeless services? Or the ornamental DEI department that most cities, universities, and companies are now debunking and dismantling? You say we can't afford more police, Ted? Well, I say we can't afford not to invest in safe streets, the core responsibility of government.

Winterer goes on... instead of acknowledging our new and well-deserved reputation as an unsafe and unstable city, Ted instead blames our lack of recovery on the people pointing out the problem rather than the problem itself. He says instead we need to "Lure back the customers and businesses with a positive message, increase revenues and then enhance safety even further – that's the shrewder strategy."

Yaaas, Ted. If only people wouldn't point out the weekly rapes, murders, kidnappings, muggings, and general disorder, then surely businesses and tourism would return. Never mind that the city is making national news every week for its random violent crime, according to you it's just a PR problem! Well, as somebody who's been personally attacked twice in two years, once with a deadly weapon blocks from my house near 9th and Wilshire, I'm calling total bullshit on your gaslighting. Maybe you live in a part of town in which you're not crossing the street to avoid high and unstable transients screaming obscenities at you, but most residents are, and we'd like a bit of the compassion you and SMRR show the perpetrators. I've heard SMRR council members cite the 2023 FBI stats about how violent crime was down 2.1% nationally despite people's sense that it was rising. Well, the FBI just revised it and in 2023 violent crime went up nationally to 4.3%. Look it up. But we in Santa Monica already knew it from what we see every day.

The bottom line is Santa Monica has an active substrate of disorder that smothers tourism and our recovery. From this substrate sociopathic criminals emerge to predate on residents (and the truly needy) making the streets unsafe, which is obvious to anybody walking them. This can only be solved by proactive policing, including:

Arresting transients for the "minor" crimes of public use of hard drugs, vandalism, shoplifting, intoxication, etc.

Running them for parole violations and warrants to weed out the felons.

Simultaneously targeting the dealers by restarting our undercover unit.

Rinse and repeat until our reputation as easy pickings with soft enforcement gets turned around.

This is why we need 300 police who can apply consistent pressure on those who come here to victimize. Only this will allow people to choose Santa Monica over Culver City, where I went last week, for a day off; CC is actually safe, with none of our disorder or crime. But they have a moderate city council that passed ordinances against sleeping in public, public intoxication, etc.-something else the SMRR candidates are against that Safer Santa Monica is for (see chart). Because people, what we have now IS NOT NORMAL, as much as SMRR tries to downplay it.

This mediocre SMRR slate trying to claw back power is out of touch with the times and the moderate trend of the Democratic party in the state. SMRR (Ted) you've had your time. And your cluelessness about what really concerns Santa Monicans runs deeper than election lies. You are morally confused as to what real compassion looks like because you don't really care. You like to tell yourselves self-congratulatory stories about "our values," while allowing residents to be victimized by predators and addicts who lash out on their way down to dying on our the streets. It's NOT compassion, it's virtue-signaling. And accusing life-long Democrats of being MAGA, or screaming that rent control will be lost if Safer Santa Monica wins, are truly despicable lies.

When it comes to public safety, the only choice in this election is as clear as its name, the Safer Santa Monica Slate: Oscar de la Torre, Vivian Roknian, Phil Brock, and John Putnam. This will give the council enough votes to truly change direction. Enough is enough of SMRR and their SMDC enablers. Let Safer Santa Monica finish the job that Phil and Oscar started.

It will be a relief to stop pointing out the obvious in what is essentially the same letter I've written since 2016.