The Sheriff's Election Season Shuffling of the Cars

There's a couple interesting reports out by Scott Herhold on an issue near and dear to our hearts. The Santa Clara Sheriff's Office fleet of vehicles. Okay, not the fleet, there was only mention of the Sheriff's vehicle, but we can begin with Mr. Herhold's painfully obvious need to only address part of the story and move on. Maybe he forgot the Sheriff has access to an entire fleet of vehicles to shuffle, or maybe he forgot that she's running for Sheriff with a growing number of accusations of ethical abuses from misuse of public resources (helicopters) to violation of the FLSA. Why not add cars to the list he and Webby choose to ignore. But we won't.

It seems the Sheriff has recently downgraded to drive amongst us common folk in her hand-me-down "green" car, a 2007 Toyota Camry hybrid. Sweet, a Sheriff who cares about the environment empathizes with the plight of the world and does the right thing. Let's hope the brakes have been upgraded on the Toyota recall because we're going to slam our foot on the brake pedal right here on this wool being pulled over our eyes.

The Sheriff was driving a gas-guzzling Dodge Charger, not a gas saving, enviro-friendly green car, until other candidates filed to run for her office. The Sheriff's Office Public Information Officer, Rick Sung, is now driving that vehicle and the rumor is that this was done to keep the car in the Sheriff's fleet so it could be returned to her after the election. Can you tell us what the PIO needs a Dodge Charger, never mind a take home vehicle, what crimes does he respond to in an emergency again? And her vehicle choice prior to that? Green? Efficient? No, to supplement her then $200+K salary she drove a large SUV, you may know it as a Jeep Grand Cherokee. When she was finished with that it was assigned to a Sergeant who is assigned to County Council (We've been completely unable to determine why this position requires a take home vehicle at this time). Strange how quickly patterns change when an election battle is under way.

Speaking of elections and her "under budget" accomplishments that she's mentioned, let's talk about the rest of the Sheriff's fleet, who gets what and how much it costs the taxpayers and is it a fair deal for the tax payers?

The Sheriff's Office has an interesting salary perk and an interesting accounting assignment to avoid employees having to pay taxes on it as a salary supplement. Every single Commander, Captain and Lieutenant in the Sheriff's office has a take home vehicle and has their gas tank filled on the County (your) dime. Under the table, this is said to be a salary enhancement for them because they do not get paid overtime in these positions. A salary enhancement is taxed though. So, on the table, these vehicles are called "take home cars" and a necessity to their job in the event they should need to respond to an event from their home during their off-hours. We've been trying to find a source to tell us how many times a Commander, Captain or Lieutenant has been on an off-hours call out over the past 5 years, but none of our sources could stop laughing at the idea of any one of these people getting out of bed for anything less than "The Big One." We were told by two sources that even when they're required to call someone during off-hours to give them a status update, most times they won't even answer the phone.

The Commanders, Captains and Lieutenants of the Santa Clara Sheriff's office thank you for their free ride. Literally. We know there have been cuts at the Sheriff's office to training and equipment budgets over the years. I ask you, the taxpayer, which do you feel your money should be going to? Better trained and equipped officers on the street or the Commanders $10K, tax free, salary supplement that has absolutely no value to Public Safety?

So let's talk public safety? How is the "take home vehicle" used there? We were only able to find a few, but that's what we expect. We don't feel take home cars should be a common requirement. Judiciously used, they can speed response time to address Public Safety when necessary. We found though, that many of the take home cars have some strange situations around them.

Crime Scene Investigations gets take home cars, in the event they are called out in the evening. This makes sense, rather than staffing, it's less expensive to have an on-call situation if the numbers allow this. Which they do. We give kudos to this decision. However, a take home vehicle, in our opinion as we stated, is to speed the response time to deal with Public Safety. CSI must respond to the office to leave their take home car there and take the van with all their equipment. (???) Why is the investigator not taking the van home, or packing a basic investigation kit into the take home car? What's the point of the take home car? A waste of time? A political perk from the past? We were unable to find out the roots of this story, but ultimately we found the CSI take home car another sorry mis-use of taxpayer funds. Perhaps this can be rectified; it seems like a simple and even helpful fix for a time when we're trying to cut as many corners as possible.

Which brings us to the next vehicle we found; again a situation we found we initially agreed with. The Violent Crimes/Homicide Detective take home vehicle seems appropriate. It seems a good area to have an improved response time in, particularly when time can be of the essence in a violent crime such as, say the De Anza rape case. Did you just feel one of the wheels of that take home vehicle leave the pavement? Let's drive a little further in this one to see what's going on. There were 2 homicides in the County jurisdiction in 2009. It seems there's little rush to get to these in most cases, victim is dead, scene is closed tight as a drum and nothing moves if they get there in one minute or one hour; and two cases, not a significant number to buy into a benefit alone. Violent crimes, a different story, where time and speed could be of the essence in getting evidence. Not to mention they're also a more frequent occurrence by all accounts. But violent crimes don't carry enough prestige to allow for the expense of calling out a detective. As evidenced in the De Anza case, and according to our sources, still a standard operating procedure, the deputies on the street handle these cases. Unfortunately, due to no fault of the deputies, they're often woefully undertrained to handle a complex case and risk missing evidence that can shut a case down and send a bad guy to jail. If the Violent Crimes/Homicide Detective has 2 homicide cases a year, let's even assume they both happened at night, what is the value-added aspect here if they are unable to respond to the bulk of their cases needing fast response? Perhaps the money for this car would be better spent on training the deputies in increasingly complex evidence collection. We ultimately gave this vehicle usage thumbs down as well. We look at this as another area that could be improved upon for the sake of Public Safety and better tax dollar usage. We were surprised to find that after the De Anza case, this policy had not been improved upon in some manner this many years later.