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This is unbelievable. There have been now two watershed crimes for this city over the past year: The unsettling Mission Beach rapes and now the assault on billionaire Ernest Rady’s home.
Obviously, there are areas of this city that have to endure crime and violence all the time. But incidents like these have the power to mobilize people with the means and ability to demand accountability.
Rady is one of them.
And then there’s Officer Jeff Jordon, who has written extensively on this site recently. Obviously Jordon and his colleagues on the police force are angling for a raise. But his facts about the pathetic police coverage around the city continue to amaze me. Nobody, not the mayor, not the City Council, challenges what he’s been saying. Look at what he wrote in Café San Diego not too long ago:
… the San Diego Police Department’s response time goal to Priority 1 calls (serious crimes in progress) is 12 minutes. The department has been unable to meet this goal in over six years, so it changed the types of calls that make up a Priority 1 dispatch.
Patrol officers are being overwhelmed by priority calls involving violence. Fewer patrol officers means you get dispatched to more calls and have less time to arrest criminals before they commit their crimes. This is not difficult to understand. When I first joined SDPD, we used to patrol North Park and University Heights with seven officers and a sergeant. Recently, we have patrolled Western Division, a 26 square mile area with 176,000 residents, with roughly the same number of officers that we used to patrol just two areas of it.
The incident at Rady’s house may very well be an outlier, a fluke, a horrible experience that doesn’t represent a threat overall.
But it won’t be taken that way. Just like the rapes in Mission Beach, the home invasion in La Jolla Tuesday will be a big deal for a long time.