PLATFORM

By James Louis "Jim" Cronin

As your Sheriff, these are some of the things that I think are most important to your Sheriff's Office and your county

As your Sheriff I will reorganize the department so it can better serve the needs of the communities that it polices. At the present time too many of the decisions that affect the communities of South County or the Monterey Peninsula are made from the Salinas Office. I will reorganize the department to put the decision making power for these areas into the stations. All three stations, Salinas, Monterey, and King City, should have sufficient deputies, investigators, special enforcement teams, assigned to the stations, and under the station command, to be able to better deal with local problems as they come up.

Crime is a very local issue, and it needs to be addressed at the local level. The people dealing drugs on the next block, the theft of your TV or your child's car stereo, drunks or prostitutes bothering your children coming from school, junk cars or the illegal repair shop across the street are the type of crimes that have a negative impact on the lives of you and your children. These are also the types of crime that a decentralized sheriff's department will be best situated to deal with.

As your Sheriff I will see that we continue the youth-based crime prevention programs that we have started. DARE, the Sheriff's Explorer Program, the Natividad Ranch Project, the Restorative Justice Project, and the School Resource Officer Programs will all continue, and expand.

As your Sheriff I will see that the programs and the equipment that we have in place are properly managed. At the present time the program to put computer terminals in the patrol cars is terribly mismanaged. This administration has spent hundreds of thousands of your dollars on a system that works only part of the time. In 1999 the department obtained surplus military rifles for all the patrol cars. Today, over three years later, these weapons are just being issued to the deputies. This type of mismanagement of can no longer be tolerated.

As your Sheriff I will see that your deputies have the proper training to do the job they need to do. At the present time there is no language training to teach the deputies Spanish to communicate with a large portion of the public we deal with. There are no training programs in place to train the up coming generation of department leaders to replace those who will be retiring in the next few years. It is imperative that your department began training new leaders. With the new retirement formula in place, almost ALL members of the department above the rank of sergeant will be retiring in the next 4 to 5 years. The preparation of the next generation of leaders is a must.

The single most expensive asset that the Sheriff's Department acquires with your tax dollars, are the deputies who serve you. By the time we recruit, tests, educate, and train a deputy through the academy, the jail, and then the patrol-training program we have spent over $150,000 of your tax dollars for each deputy. Over 4 million dollars of your tax dollars have been spent in the last three years recruiting and training deputies who have quit the department. As your Sheriff I will see that your department does a better job of retaining and better utilizing these assets.