Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
After upsetting the entire community with the original “Lights Out at 11pm” proposal, Dixon has decided that it is better to execute her will through increased police force, and is now attempting to hire on additional police units to patrol the area which is already very well covered by police. This idea is purely illogical for the following reasons:
1) Balboa has one road in and one road out. Its only main road is in a straight line, and is 3 miles long. It is literally impossible to get lost. There is no need to police every square inch of the peninsula. A few police– which we already have– is fine. This is proven by the fact that crime stats clearly show that Balboa Peninsula has the fewest incidents of crime per-person than anywhere else in the city of Newport Beach.
2) Adding four new police to the peninsula will seemingly double the amount of police (Note: For security reasons, there are no stats about police coverage, so this is from personal estimations rather than actual numbers)
3) Conducting a council vote to mandate voluntary meetings is absurd. If meetings are voluntary, then no vote is needed. This is elementary-level logic and the fact that this is being proposed shows either a stunning lack of fundamental logic skills or an ulterior motive which has yet to be made public. Will the other council members be made into pawns for this game by allowing it to continue? We shall see.
4) The entire stated purpose of the “Lights Out At 11pm” (aka Balboa Overlay) proposal was supposedly that bars were causing all the crime. If bars are working with the city, then why are police needed? Conversely, if drinking establishments never caused the crime to begin with, then why are they being targeted by the city?
5) Newport Beach already has the highest number of police per-capita in Orange County. Yes: You read that right. Per 10,000 people, Newport Beach has a 24.1 law enforcement agents. Our closest “rival” has 28% fewer police per capita than Newport has, and our neighbor, the “Safest City in the USA”, Irvine, has a mere 12.9, according to 2012 federal law enforcement statistics (the most recent available at the time of publication).
To be perfectly clear: I am a huge supporter of our police department; in most cities, police are feared and hated, but people in Newport love our police. However, the last thing I want to do is to create a police state in Newport Beach. As Balboa residents know, as is often already the case many times per week– we cannot get home without passing multiple officers with radar guns.
Finally, these additional hires will be very expensive. At over $570,000 each year, every year, forever, for four new officers– not counting pensions and CalPERS indebtments– we simply can’t afford it.
The bottom line is this: With the safest that Newport Beach has been in history, and crime dropping last year on the peninsula at a rate of about 150% more than the city-wide drop, we simply don’t need more police. We don’t need them, and we can’t afford them.
The city council session for this will be TONIGHT, April 14th, at 7pm in the city council chambers, located at 100 Civic Center Dr, Newport Beach, CA 92660
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