The police chief recently presented the Chamber of Commerce with good news about crime stats and challenging news about budget cuts. Overall crime was down from 2023 to 2024 (though retail crime has increased). Meanwhile, inflation and budget cuts have effected the Seal Beach Police Department.
Chief Michael Henderson spoke at the Thursday, July 11, Seal Beach Chamber of Commerce Networking Breakfast. It is common for a city official to speak at a Chamber breakfast.
Space makes it impossible to transcribe everything he said. The following are some of the highlights.
Crime
“The good news overall as compared to 2022 for 2023 crime is down 4% overall for the city of Seal Beach. So of course as chief, I love hearing that,” Henderson said.
(The SBPD reported that in a press release issued earlier this year. See “Seal Beach Police Overall crime down 4% in 2023,” at sunnews.org.)
“While response is a big part of what we do, prevention of crime is also a big part of what we do. And so the best way to fight crime is to do those things and engage in those activities where crime just doesn’t occur at all. So an overall reduction is absolutely something that we’re always striving for. Sometimes we hit it, sometimes we don’t,” Henderson said.
However, he said retail theft was up.
“It’s significant. It’s affecting cities and all over the state,” Henderson said.
“I know that our folks in Old Town, on Main Street, have experienced it and especially our retailers in the north, in the big the bigger stores—Target, Kohl’s—we’re going there on a daily basis to deal with organized retail theft,” Henderson said.
“Last fall when we were really seeing a significant spike in retail theft. We had our challdetective bureau do a number of surveillance operations in our North End to address some of this retail theft in over the course of three months and this was the run up to our holiday season which is our busiest season not just for retail but for retail theft. Over the course of three months, we arrested over 25 individuals recovered two stolen vehicles and recovered over $30,000 worth of stolen goods. So we do those types of directed operations regularly,” Henderson said.
Budget
“Through our last budget process, we really experienced some challenges. We’re seeing increasing costs from a number of different sectors,” Henderson said.
He said inflation was having an effect on city operations.
“I’ll give you a quick example of that. In the police department. We buy cases of rubber gloves that our police officers put on every day. We’ll go through many, many different pairs of rubber gloves, a case used to be 45 to $50. It’s now $75. That’s those are just one example,” Henderson said.
“We’re seeing increases due to inflation just like you are another issue. For the city, it is unfunded state mandates. What that means is the legislature in Sacramento will pass laws. That’s their job,” Henderson said.
“What they rarely do is provide funding for the implementation of those laws and in the police department. We’re seeing this acutely because there’s been a lot of police reform, a lot of changes, a lot more oversight, and no money to help pay for these types of things,” Henderson said.
“These are challenges that governments are experiencing all over the place, and it’s driving up costs. So in this past budget cycle we’ve identified that there is likely going to be an ongoing budget deficit for the city,” Henderson said.
He said the good news was, the city had balanced the budget.
“We always have a balanced budget. We will work hard to do that. We’ll work closely with all departments in the city and the city council to identify priorities and to arrive at a balanced budget. The tough part is we had to make some tough decisions and some of the decisions that come with that include reduction of services. And so some of the things that became apparent this year was that we had to reduce some of our personnel costs,” Henderson said.
“And what that means is we’re just not hiring people to the tune of about a million dollars in salaries. And while that’s a fiscally responsible thing to do in order to balance the budget, what that means as a practical matter is that we’re simply not hiring people to do the work and provide the programs that helped the city run the Police Department,” Henderson said.
“I took two positions and I won’t be filling them in this coming year ,” Henderson said.
“It’s fewer hours that someone is out on the street performing a service and that’s across all departments. And that was about a million dollars of police overtime that was reduced,” Henderson said.
“And then there were cutbacks in street and landscape maintenance, and we’re postponing some repairs and maintenance for almost all city buildings,” Henderson said.
“So obviously one of the priorities is maintaining our emergency services,” Henderson said.
“We want to work hard to identify what’s important for the city and see if we can identify some opportunities including revenue opportunities and solicit your input if you have ideas for things that the city can do next. I talked about some good news and bad news, the good news is revenues are going up. The bad news is expenses are also going up,” Henderson said.
Henderson encouraged the audience to visit the survey on the city website.
“I think there’s a lot of great people, very smart people here, who can help us come up with ideas how we can run the city in much more efficiently and financially respectful manner. And we want to hear from you. There is a poll online on the city website,” Henderson said.
Other remarks
Speaking without a script and without referring to notes, Henderson began by giving the audience an overview of the SBPD. The department has 40 sworn officers and 20 to 30 non-sworn personnel.
“Those are the folks that write parking tickets, that do animal control, that work in our Records Bureau,” Henderson said.
He said the majority of Seal Beach officers came from other cities.
“There’s a several reasons for that. The first one is that those types of officers are generally tenured. They have a work history, and we can select from a wide variety of experienced police officers. Many police agencies are struggling to find police officers. There’s actually a lot of vacancies in the law enforcement profession right now. We don’t have that issue here in Seal Beach,” Henderson said.
Henderson said he came to Seal Beach 17 years ago from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.
As for Seal Beach officers, he said many times they have a family connection to Seal Beach.
“And that’s something I look for when in the interview process when I’m hiring new police officers. What I asked them to do is when they come I want to see that they will weave themselves into the fabric of the community that they’ll take ownership of this community and make themselves part of it. So that’s something that we really focus on here is making sure those police officers that we bring into this community filled with a very caring attitude,” Henderson said.
He said the SBPD was split into the Operations Bureau and the Support Bureau.
“The easiest way to remember that is everyone in the Operations Bureau carries a gun,” Henderson said.
“We have a serious traffic accident response team. With PCH, with Westminister, with some of these major thoroughfares, we get our fair share of traffic accidents, serious traffic accidents in India. That’s a highly specialized investigative skill set. They go to special schools for that. There’s actually a lot of math involved in those types. of investigations,” Henderson said.
Addressing the department’s animal control program, which marked its first anniversary this July 1, Henderson said they’ve been busy this year.
He encouraged the audience to check out the SPBD’s Instagram page.
He said there was a video of pelicans being released after being rehabilitated by the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach.
He said recently animal control dealt with an influx of pelicans that had an unknown ailment. (Seal Beach was not the only coastal community to deal with the pelican crisis.) He said after the pelicans were rehabilitated, the Wildlife Center invited Seal Beach animal control officers to attend the release of the rehabilitated birds. “My understanding is that there’s been over 100 of these pelicans that have that throughout up and down the coast that they’ve had to capture rehabilitate,” Henderson said.
90,000 or more calls for service
“So in 2023, we had 90,000 or 90,500 calls for service,” Henderson said.
“Our philosophy is no call is too small. Often when we find out about things that have happened, a common refrain will be ‘it wasn’t a big deal,’ ‘I didn’t want to bother you,’” Henderson said.
Henderson encouraged the audience to call the police. “If we don’t know something’s happening because we didn’t didn’t get called, then we can’t help you with it,” Henderson said.
