This has become especially important over the past year as the state has been re-assigning non-violent prisoners back to the counties. Many of these prisoners were arrested for burglaries, but are now being released early because the county does not have enough money to handle this influx of prisoners. This is a major cause of the recent increase in home burglaries in Sunnyvale, which was recently experiencing over one home burglary per week.

 

Sunnyvale's Department of Public Safety is under-staffed. Over the past 12 years the city's population has grown 8%, while the number of Public Safety officers has declined 14%. This means we have 38 fewer officers then we did before this recent uptick in crime.

Our Public Safety officers are caring and intelligent people that, I believe, want to assure that we have a sustainable compensation system that does not continue reducing their ranks. Now we can't afford to hire enough new officers to replace all the officers as they retire. We need to get our pension costs under control, and we need to revise the PSOA salary survey to make room in the budget to begin hiring more officers.

Paid for by Andy Frazer for Council 2013

FPPC #1354898