Santa Paula police in crisis mode as Ventura County Sheriff's Office hires away 10 officers

The Santa Paula Police Department is on the verge of a staffing crisis as half of its sworn officers plan to leave for other police agencies, most of them to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office.

Santa Paula now has 22 police officers, including the chief and other supervisors; eight open positions due to recent retirements and departures; and two employees on injury leave. Eleven of the 22 active officers are undergoing background checks to be hired at other police agencies and will leave Santa Paula if they pass those checks, according to a report on the matter from City Manager Dan Singer to the Santa Paula City Council.

Ten of the 11 are leaving for the sheriff’s office, Singer told the City Council at a special meeting held Wednesday to discuss the situation. Singer said the county law enforcement agency is likely to hire all 10, and they will probably be in their new jobs before the end of the year.

That will leave the Santa Paula Police Department with as few as 13 officers, including top managers. That's far fewer than the city has had at any time in at least the last 40 years, and it's a staffing level that Singer called "unsustainable" in his report to the council.

“This is going to be a significant challenge for us,” interim Police Chief Don Aguilar told the City Council at Wednesday’s meeting. More than 75 people attended and some of them had to stand in the back of the room or the hallway.

The Santa Paula Police Department is in the process of recruiting and hiring additional officers, Aguilar said, but it will take months to train them before they can go out on patrol on their own. For at least the next four-to-six months, the city will have to significantly reduce its police services.

Aguilar’s short-term plan is structured around moving every available officer to patrol duty, so two officers and one supervisor can be on patrol for every shift. That's down from the current standard of three patrol officers and one supervisor per shift, a staffing level that many current officers say is already dangerously low.

After the 11 officers with pending job offers are out the door, the entire detective bureau will be eliminated and all five detectives will be transferred to patrol duty, Aguilar said. The two school resource officers will be pulled from the high school and middle school and put on patrol. The homeless liaison unit will be eliminated, as will an administrative sergeant position.

The result will be reduced services and slower response times, Aguilar said.

For example, if the two officers on duty are at the scene of a domestic violence incident and a call comes in of a robbery in progress, there will be no one to respond to the robbery except the sergeant on duty, and his job is to manage the department and supervise the patrol officers. If the two patrol officers are at a crime scene and a call comes in regarding a possible drug overdose, the officers might not get there in time to administer life-saving naloxone.

If the department is ever left without enough officers for a given patrol shift, it can ask other police departments in Ventura County to send temporary reinforcements, Aguilar said. The sheriff’s office can also help, Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff told the City Council.

“I do not want your city to fail,” Fryhoff said. “I am your sheriff. I am the sheriff for the entire county, and we will do what we can to help.”

Councilman accuses sheriff of 'hostile takeover'

One option for the city is to disband its police department and contract with the sheriff’s office for police services. Five cities in Ventura County already contract with agency: Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, Fillmore, Camarillo and Ojai.

Ventura, Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Simi Valley and Santa Paula have their own police departments.

Fryhoff and his top deputies met with Singer over the summer and offered to take over the city's police department. Singer told The Star he consulted City Council members individually about Fryhoff's proposal, and when none of them supported it, they decided against bringing the idea before the council at a public meeting.

Undersheriff John Reilly then brought the plan to the Santa Paula Peace Officers' Association union, which voted by a two-thirds margin to support it. When that did not prompt the City Council to take up the matter, Santa Paula officers began to apply for jobs with the sheriff's office.

Top sheriff’s office officials say contracting with their department would save the city money and would involve hiring all of the current Santa Paula police officers, if they meet the county's standards.

The City Council did not make any decisions on Wednesday, except to unanimously approve a "vote of confidence in support of the Santa Paula Police Department and its contingency plan."

Some council members spoke against the idea of a merger with the sheriff’s office, and none came out in favor of it. Santa Paula residents who spoke at the meeting were also opposed to a merger.

Councilman Pedro Chavez said Fryhoff's offer to take over policing Santa Paula, combined with his hiring of numerous Santa Paula officers, amounts to an attempt at a "hostile takeover."

"We're being undercut by our own sheriff, and I have a real problem with that," Chavez said.

Councilman Carlos Juarez, a retired Santa Paula police lieutenant, said the sheriff's office is "decimating a small city's police department."

In response to the council members' comments, Fryhoff replied that he should have approached the city publicly from the start.

"This was not a way to undermine what you're doing," he said. "This could have happened a whole lot better and should have happened a whole lot sooner. We do not want to have a relationship based on animosity."

'A line in the sand'

One reason for the exodus out of the Santa Paula Police Department is money. Last year, the city paid its entry-level officers between $75,000 and $90,000 in base salary, according to data from Transparent California, which compiles information released by all government agencies in California. Senior officers earned between $93,000 and $113,000. A new labor contract will bump those salaries by 5% this year and another 4% next year.

At the sheriff’s office, deputies earned around $110,000 to $130,000 in base salary. Salaries for senior deputies were as high as $145,000.

The actual pay difference is even bigger, Reilly told The Star. Sheriff’s deputes typically work three 12-hour shifts a week and have other opportunities for guaranteed overtime, which comes on top of the base salary, he said.

As more officers leave, the morale and working conditions for those remaining gets worse, said Dan McCarthy, a senior officer in Santa Paula and the president of the Santa Paula Peace Officers' Association union.

Some of the officers who aren’t leaving have told McCarthy they have “a line in the sand” and will look for work elsewhere if staffing levels get so low that they don’t feel safe on patrol or don’t feel they can keep the city safe.

"There's a lot of forced overtime, a lot of sick calls. People are burned out and tired," McCarthy said. "Our staffing levels haven't increased in 20 years."

McCarthy said Santa Paula's current police staffing levels are about the same as the sheriff's office provides in Ojai, which has one-fourth the population of Santa Paula, and Fillmore, which is about half the size of Santa Paula.

McCarthy himself is one of the officers in the process of being hired by the sheriff’s office. He said the undersheriff did not attempt to recruit officers when he met with the union.

"All the officers came to the decision on their own," McCarthy said. "The officers heard the presentation, and everyone was looking at a significant pay increase."

Sheriff estimates $1M per year savings

Reilly, Fryhoff's second in command, told The Star the idea of taking over policing in Santa Paula came last year, during Fryhoff's election campaign. Reilly said he and other Fryhoff supporters campaigned door-to-door in Santa Paula, where "several" business owners and other residents asked if Fryhoff would be interested in merging the sheriff's office with the city police department.

The city made a similar move in 2018 when its fire department merged with the county's. And there had been serious talk before of contracting with the sheriff for police services. In 2004, the City Council commissioned a study on the matter but decided against it after the public and the city police officers came out in opposition.

"It's always been a delicate topic," Santa Paula Mayor Andy Sobel told The Star. "People care deeply about their police department here."

Two decades ago, the city decided contracting with the sheriff would cost more than keeping its own police department. That might not be true this time around.

Santa Paula will spend a little less than $10 million this year on its police department. Reilly said contracting with the Sheriff's Office could be at least $1 million cheaper.

The sheriff's office has not prepared a formal estimate; the $1 million savings is based on the cost of police services in Moorpark, which is similar in size to Santa Paula.

Reilly said the agency can provide the same or greater service levels for less money, even while paying its employees more than the city, because there are efficiencies in running a large, countywide department. For example, Santa Paula now has its own dispatch center and its own records department. If it were part of the sheriff's office, it would share those resources with the rest of the county.

The sheriff's office also picks up some of the costs for the cities it polices. The sheriff's captains who act as chief of police for a contract city have half of their salaries paid by the county and half by the city. The county also sometimes picks up half of the salary for other positions, such as a detective in Fillmore who investigates crimes in both city and county jurisdictions.

"You can look at any sheriff contract in the county, from Thousand Oaks to Fillmore, and for the most part it's cheaper" than a city police department would be, Reilly said.

Interim chief for a year

The Santa Paula Police Department turned 100 earlier this year, and the current City Council members all indicated that they'd like to have more birthdays. When the council meets again next week, Singer said it will consider adopting "incentives to attract and retain employees."

Some council members said the best thing the city can do is hire a permanent police chief to give the department stability at the top. Aguilar has been the interim chief for a little over a year. He took over for Travis Walker, who was chief for eight months and resigned facing accusations that he sexually harassed two female city employees.

The city has a $25,000 contract with an executive recruiting firm to help find a permanent police chief. Aguilar has the support of many in the community and in law enforcement, and at Wednesday's meeting Chavez suggested dispensing with the recruiter and hiring Aguilar on the spot.

Hiring a police chief is one of the city manager's duties, and Santa Paula's city attorney, Monica Castillo, advised the council not to tell Singer who to hire. She said the council could make "a suggestion" for a permanent chief at a future meeting.

"We have an urgent situation in front of us," Chavez said. "Not having a permanent police chief is a major contributing factor to this situation."

Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Santa Paula police in crisis as sheriff hires 10 officers