On July 22, the Peace Officers Research Association of California (PORAC) published a research brief shedding new light on the problem of rural police staffing in California. So acute is the problem that two years ago, the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office made national news when it announced that staffing shortages caused the office to end daytime patrol operations. Tehama County is just one of 58 in California and many are struggling to provide public safety services.
Today, law enforcement staffing in California is at its lowest level since 1991 and perhaps nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in San Benito County.
Long a bastion of California’s farming and ranching lifestyle, San Benito County is little known to most Californians. Traveling along Hwy 101 from San Jose to Salinas, it is possible to pass through San Benito’s 7.5 miles of highway frontage without knowing you have done so as it is almost devoid of any commercial activity.
Despite its low profile, one group that has discovered San Benito, and its two cities, Hollister (pop 44,218) and San Juan Bautista (pop 2,111) are nearby Santa Clara Valley residents seeking affordable housing. In June 2024, the median price of homes sold in Santa Clara County was $1.9 million, while in San Benito County the median price was a much more affordable $854,000.
From 2020-2023, San Benito County was California’s fastest growing county.
What hasn’t grown is the San Benito County Sheriff’s Office, where today just 17 deputies are available for work to staff the county jail. This has forced the transfer of San Benito’s AB 109 funded rehabilitation facility inmates to the main jail. After a recent visit, the California Board of State and Community Corrections recommended that to properly staff its correctional and rehabilitation programs, San Benito should have 40 correctional deputies, although the BSCC does not mandate minimum staffing in any of California’s jails.
On the patrol side, things are no better. A similar number of deputies are available for patrol and while there are no plans to reduce daily patrol coverage, currently just three deputies per shift patrol San Benito’s 1,388 square miles.
One reason for the low staff numbers is the fact that San Benito County deputy sheriffs earn 30 percent less than their counterparts in Santa Clara County. For the same reasons that Silicon Valley workers are commuting to San Benito County for affordable housing – San Benito deputies are leaving to join departments in nearby Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, or Monterey Counties, or any agency in the entire Bay Area – all of whom offer better compensation packages.
Another issue is the now defunct relationship with nearby Gavilan Community College, which at one time counted almost half the San Benito County correctional staff as its alumni. Today that pipeline has been turned off.
Due to declining enrollment, Gavilan has gutted its pre-service Administration of Justice (AJ) Program from eleven courses to just six and all but two are now only offered online. Online education might appear to broaden educational access, but Gavilan is a Hispanic Serving Institution and nationally only 60 percent of the Hispanic population has broadband access. In addition, online course success rates run significantly below those same courses when taught in-person, which is a double whammy for Gavilan’s mostly Hispanic students and San Benito’s potential deputies.
Fewer deputies and a now closed recruiting pipeline have helped make San Benito County a relative refuge for another group – criminals. According to FBI statistics, from 2018 to 2022 violent crimes in San Benito increased 118 percent while the better staffed and paid police department in Hollister was able to hold the increase to 39 percent.
Yet in far better staffed and paid Santa Clara County, violent crime actually declined 14 percent. This is no surprise. Better staffed police agencies both solve and deter more crime.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office reports on criminal justice staffing annually and 2023’s Crime In California Report states that public safety staffing in California has increased from 2022-2023 by a scant .6 percent or about 900 peace officers statewide. The .6 percent increase would be lower were it not for the over 6 percent increase in one category of criminal justice employees — public defenders.
The 2022 FBI/UCR report revealed another statistic. Overall crime in California is increasing while in the rest of the country it is decreasing. Our retail stores and restaurants may be closing but for criminals California is open for business and the residents and their deputy sheriffs on the edge in San Benito County know that better than most.
Steve Smith is a senior fellow in urban studies at the Pacific Research Institute, focusing on California’s growing crime problem.
