Jail hunger strike, divestment calls hang over talks
Activists demand further divesting from county law enforcement
As Santa Clara County leaders weighed heavy budget cuts to the county’s public safety agencies to help close a massive deficit, hundreds of jail inmates were in the throes of a five-day hunger strike and were joined by their families and advocates to demand divestment away from county law enforcement and toward safety net services, which were also on the chopping block.
Emotional testimony and debate, from both county supervisors and residents, were in ample supply Tuesday as part of a week of lengthy hearings to revise the county’s fiscal 2021 budget, with the aim of slicing over $100 million off projected yearly general fund shortfalls of $300 million to $600 million through 2025.
In the current fiscal year, there is a roughly $362 million deficit between general fund revenues and its $3.8 billion expenditure estimate. A final vote on the budget reductions is scheduled for Friday.
All told, staffers in the office led by County Executive Jeff Smith presented a revised budget that would eliminate 344 mostly vacant full-time-equivalent positions spanning more than a dozen county agencies. On the law enforcement side, those proposed contractions include 169 such jobs from the Sheriff’s Office, 84 from corrections, 17 from the District Attorney’s Office and 28 from adult and juvenile probation.
The vast majority of the two dozen public speakers who kicked off the hearing spoke in support of shrinking those agencies and of a plan by the civil rights group Silicon Valley DeBug, dubbed its Protect Your People budget, to steer funding toward community-based rehabilitation, pretrial and postrelease services and indigent legal defense.
The group’s proposal is a series of progressive guideposts to decrease mass incarceration with reforms like curtailing current methods of gang enforcement and prosecution they contend sustain racial inequities in the criminal justice system, as well as improving rights and conditions for those who are still in jail.
“There is a hunger strike happening right now in our jails. That strike is absolutely about the budget,” De-Bug co-founder Raj Jayadev said. “Budgets are expressions of what a county values and what principles guide them … De-carceration is a vehicle of how we get through this deficit and how we build a more equitable world once we get to the other side.”
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That plan has drawn vocal support from county leaders, including Supervisor Susan Ellenberg. Smith called it a “wise proposal” but said such a fundamental shift would have to be a phased process.
“If we’re going to get there, we’re going to have to get there in steps,” Smith said.
But other than some limited consensus about broad criminal justice reform, the span of county public safety cuts discussed Tuesday drew myriad concerns about the impact of reduced personnel and services. District Attorney Jeff Rosen, for instance, argued with county budget Director Gregory Iturria over needing more control over how his office meets the budget reductions and balked at Iturria’s suggestion to shift the reduced positions onto grant-funded work.
Rosen had presented his own plan to reach $3.3 million in reductions and asked the board to find a remaining $844,000 elsewhere in the budget. Supervisor Joseph Simitian served as referee in that instance, asking the two sides to work toward an agreement by
Friday.
Sheriff Laurie Smith, whose agency would absorb the largest reductions in terms of sheer volume, called the cuts “premature.” She warned the board that essential services currently filled through overtime because of staffing shortages would be imperiled by the loss of the vacant positions, which she said cover that overtime. Functions that could suffer, she said, include everything from staffing rural patrols to fulfilling court-mandated jail reforms.
“I ask the board to consider the long-lasting impacts of these budget reductions,” she said, adding that she would like to see an impact analysis of the proposed cuts.
That drew a swift rebuke from Jeff Smith, who long has voiced concerns about the reliance on overtime by the Sheriff’s Office, calling it a “troubling” response.
“If we’re using salary savings on a large number of vacant positions to guarantee overtime, that’s not a very good use of general fund dollars,” Jeff Smith said.
Board members found themselves especially troubled by how custody health services — working amid elevated COVID-19 risks and outbreaks in the county jails
— and behavioral health services were sharing in the cuts given that the daily jail census has dropped from about 3,200 to 2,100 since March. That has meant a lot more vulnerable people on the streets with physical and mental health issues who would be in need of precisely those services.
Ellenberg said those programs have to be expanded
in conjunction with cuts to law enforcement capacity.
“We can’t engage in the true reimagining of the justice system without comparable increases in mental health services and pro- so- cial services ,” she said.
Supervisor Dave Cortese echoed the sentiment.
“We’re releasing folks onto the streets … We don’t want them dealt with
badges and guns; we want them dealt with mental health services,” he said. “It’s less about do you want to fund police or not, or do you want to fund the DA or not. It’s about who are we going to have on the streets as a part of our growing safety net population.”
Chavez shared similar reluctance to proposed cuts to the probation department, particularly of a dozen positions in the juvenile division.
“The parts of our system that need to stay strong are ones that keep people out of custody and keep them from moving deeper into our system ,” she said.
The vast majority of public speakers calling for reforms Tuesday sought to bring attention back to the jailed population undergoing the hunger strike. Mothers of inmates spoke of their sons losing upward of 10 pounds since Friday to fight for improved conditions. The county jails have recorded 170 COVID-19 cases since March, with more than two-thirds of them surfacing in the past month, capped by multiple double-digit outbreaks.
It’s why Jayadev says reducing the breadth of lawenforcement has to go well beyond eliminating vacancies for fiscal expediency. It’s also why Juanita Martinez says her husband is nearly a week into a hunger strike.
“It’s horrible to see them in the conditions they’re in, but they’re trying to have high spirits,” she said. “They want change and they deserve it. We all deserve it.”