Facing calls to defund the police, the county sheriff calls on supporters.

Chris Lopez, chair of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, says when he’s out and about in the South County communities he represents, the first thing he hears from constituents is this: We need more deputies patrolling here, what are you doing to make that happen?

“The number-one ask I get is, we need a dedicated sheriff here, every single time,” Lopez says. “My district is the size of the state of Rhode Island, and I’m lucky if I get one patrol.” Once, he arrived home to find his front door kicked in, and it took six hours for someone to show up to take a report.

“It’s hard for me to say, ‘Let’s cut the sheriff’s budget. I can’t. Deputy sheriffs put their lives on the line. They do it for us, they show up for us,” Lopez adds.

Lopez’s comments came on Tuesday, June 23, after about 90 minutes of public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting where the supes were tasked with approving the county’s 2020-21 budget, a 635-page behemoth of a document that includes a $1.6 billion spending plan – an increase of $96.1 million over this year’s budget – and over $122 million for the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office.

The public comment was almost entirely devoted to the sheriff’s budget – both those who supported it and said Sheriff Steve Bernal needed every penny and more, and those who said the county should redirect more funds to community-based programming to help keep kids out of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Bernal had rallied his troops, sending an email to his “advisory council,” a group that includes, among others, former Superior Court Judge Jonathan Price, Salinas businessman Ricky Cabrera, public relations strategist David Armanasco and winemaker Jack Galante, asking them to ask the county supervisors to support the sheriff’s budget.

In the days and weeks since Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin killed Black citizen George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes while three other officers stood by and let it happen, there’s been a great deal of discussion, locally and nationally, about “defunding” police departments.

Defunding is the wrong term, but more elegant than “redirecting or reallocating money from police budgets to social services or other government programs in order to invest in communities and address societal problems including homelessness and mental illness,” as described in one New York magazine article.

Bernal has 20 deputy positions unfunded, although if he carves out funds from elsewhere in his budget, he’s free to hire.

“The simple message I am asking you to relay to the Board of Supervisors is, ‘keep the sheriff’s office funded as recommended during the budget hearings,’” Bernal wrote to his advisers. “Although more deputies are better, we can manage with what we have for now.”

And the emails flowed. Farm Bureau Executive Director Norm Groot seized on the defunding rhetoric, writing, “We cannot, as a community, allow a ‘defunding’ of our Sheriff’s Department or any other law enforcement agency, take over the discussion on how to move forward in the post-pandemic paradigm of finances and social justice.” From David Scaroni, of SMD Logistics: “This newfound level of society ‘wokeness’ and liberalism will wreak unprecedented levels of havoc, pain and suffering on the general law-abiding population, especially those in lower income areas who are the ones being touted to ‘benefit’ from these proposed defunding law enforcement initiatives.” In Carmel, Jon Levy suggests increasing taxes on ag companies to increase the sheriff’s budget, and the county budget overall.

In all, about a dozen letters came in from all corners of the county.

At the meeting, though, a number of community activists spoke. Former and current members of MILPA asked for funds to go elsewhere. Building Healthy Communities representative Cesar Lara told the supervisors, “We have this opportunity, in the new normal, post-Covid, post-racial unrest across the country, to do a new budget.

“I ask you, where are you going to stand, on the side of the community or on the side of incarceration?”

The supervisors voted 5-0 to approve the budget, including the sheriff’s funds.

MARY DUAN writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com