HUMBOLDT TODAY: The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office releases stats chronicling last year’s exploits; a Humboldt County Supervisor tours a fish farm in Denmark; plus, Cal Poly Humboldt has a new Dean of Students. Those stories and more in today’s online newscast with John Kennedy O’Connor.

FURTHER READING: 

• Sheriff’s Office By the Numbers: County’s Law Enforcement Arm Releases its 2022 Annual Report, With Scads of Charts and Graphs About Every Aspect of its Operations
• Supervisor Arroyo Will Take Us on a Photographic Tour of Nordic Aquafarms’ Denmark Fish Farm During Tomorrow’s Humboldt County Board of Supervisors Meeting
• California Lawmakers Want to Know Why Billions in Spending Isn’t Reducing Homelessness

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On April 15, 2023, at about 11:27 p.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the Samoa area for the report of an armed robbery.  

Deputies contacted a 45-male-victim and learned that the robbery reportedly occurred near the intersection of New Navy Base Road and Cookhouse Road. The victim told deputies that he was walking along the roadway when he was approached by an unknown dark-colored truck with two male occupants. The men reportedly brandished firearms at the victim, demanded he drop his belongings and threatened to kill him. The men then took the victim’s belongings and fled. The victim did not sustain physical injuries during this incident.

The suspects remain outstanding at this time. They are described as follows:

• Suspect One: White male adult, approximately 30-years-old, medium build and short hair. He was last seen wearing a blue-colored jacket and dark pants.
• Suspect Two: White male adult, thin build, with facial hair and possibly long, “slicked back” hair. He was last seen wearing a green jacket.   

This case is still under investigation. Anyone with information about this case, the suspects or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539, reference case number 202301773.

PBS has a new digital series called “Untold Earth,” which explores weird and awe-inspiring corners of the planet in and easily digestible format. It’s produced in cooperation with Nature magazine and the great Atlas Obscura website.

The first episode — which you can watch in its entirety above — is a very handsomely shot look at the old-growth forests of Redwoods State and National Parks. Redwood experts guide us through the unusual ecology of old-growth redwood trees, current management practices and the cultural importance of the trees to the Yurok Tribe.

In other words: This might cover old ground for most of you, but again: Beautiful cinematography. It’s worth eight minutes of your time.

Find below: The trailer for the entire series.

Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On April 13 and 14, 2023, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office investigators and representatives from the Arcata and Fortuna Police Departments conducted a sex offender registration compliance sweep throughout the County of Humboldt.

During this sweep, law enforcement attempted to contact registered sex offenders to ensure each offender was in compliance with state requirements and living at the locations which they provided during registration. Pursuant to California Penal Code 290, sex offender registrants are required to register in person with the law enforcement agency that has jurisdiction where they reside. The registrants must also comply with several registration requirements, such as updating their registration annually and informing law enforcement when any changes have been made to their address or registration information. Failure by a sex registrant to keep law enforcement notified of an address change or registration information is a crime and can be punished as a felony or misdemeanor.

During this two-day compliance sweep, 154 registrants were found to be in compliance and 16 registrants were found to be out of compliance. Detectives are completing follow-up investigations into the individuals found to be out of compliance and anticipate cases to be submitted to the District Attorney’s Office for review and prosecution.

There are a total of 433 sex registrants in Humboldt County. This month’s operation is part of an ongoing effort to do smaller, more frequent 290 sweeps to reduce violent sexual offenses in the county through proactive surveillance and arrest of habitual sexual offenders, and strict enforcement of state registration requirements. The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is a participant in the Region II Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Team, and these enforcement efforts are funded through the SAFE grant.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office would like to thank participating agencies for their assistance in this operation.

Additional Resources:

• https://meganslaw.ca.gov/faq.aspx
• https://humboldtgov.org/DocumentCenter/View/69388/Sex-Offender-Registration-Requirements

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Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office is pleased to share with the community our 2022 Annual Report. The new report, and previous years’ reports, can be viewed online or downloaded at this link..

In this report you will find information on every division of the Sheriff’s Office. This publication is only a snapshot of what the Sheriff’s Office accomplishes daily throughout the county. There are things our personnel do every day that make a difference and go unnoticed. We pride ourselves in that. The Sheriff’s Office is blessed to have the community’s trust and support.

As public servants, we value all lives above our own and we are always ready go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure our community and citizens are protected. We can’t do this job alone. We value our tribal public safety partnerships with Hoopa, Yurok and Blue Lake Tribal Police. We also want to recognize it takes a team of volunteers to assist us with carrying out our goals. We want to thank those volunteers that assist us with Neighborhood Watch, Search and Rescue, Coroner duties, Animal Shelter Care and Maintenance, Sheriff’s Citizens on Patrol, Community Emergency Response Teams, and our beloved Chaplains.

We look forward to continuing our pursuit to build trust and relationship with our community, to solve problems together and make Humboldt County a safe place to live, work and play. If you are interested in learning more about the Sheriff’s Office or our mission, vision and values, please visit our website at humboldtsheriff.org, like us on Facebook HumboldtSheriff, or follow us on lnstagram @HumboldtSheriff or Twitter @HumCoSO.

The state has spent billions of dollars on homelessness in recent years. So why is the crisis getting worse instead of better?

That’s what a bipartisan group of California legislators is trying to get to the bottom of by calling for a first-of-its kind, large-scale audit of the state’s homelessness spending.

The state has stepped up its involvement and investment in the crisis under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s leadership, allocating $20.6 billion toward housing and homelessness since 2018-19, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. But despite the influx of cash, during that time, the number of unhoused people in the state has increased by nearly a third — to more than 170,000 as of last year.

That discrepancy between what’s being spent in Sacramento and what voters see — tent cities in their neighborhoods — has many legislators clamoring for an accounting. They have instructed the state auditor to embark on a sweeping project that will analyze multiple state homelessness programs — as well as focus on homelessness spending in two cities — in an attempt to improve California’s response.

“What we’re doing is not working,” said Assemblymember Josh Hoover, a Republican from Folsom who co-authored the audit request with Democratic Sen. Dave Cortese of Santa Clara County. “And I think it’s important to get to the bottom of that and figure out where are we investing that is not getting a return on investment. And we need to stop spending money on the programs that are not working.”

The $743,400 audit, approved unanimously in the state’s legislative audit committee last month, will take about 5,000 hours of staff time and is likely to be complete by October, State Auditor Grant Parks said during the hearing. It will scrutinize the cost-effectiveness of as many as five state homelessness programs. The auditor has yet to reveal which ones, but Project Homekey — one of Newsom’s signature efforts to create homeless housing — likely will be one. And the audit will analyze spending in two California cities — San Jose and one other yet to be determined.

The analysis will focus on questions such as: How many people received services between 2020 and 2023? How much funding have San Jose and the other city received, and how has it been spent? How much of that money went toward administrative costs instead of services?

Newsom’s office wouldn’t weigh in on the pending audit, except to issue a statement: “This process is still in its early stages, and we will continue to closely monitor any future developments.”

Myles White, assistant secretary of legislation for the California Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency, defended the state’s track record during the legislative hearing. “A lot of the progress we’ve made provides a really solid foundation for us to continue in the days ahead,” he said.

San Jose officials said they have used state funds effectively and efficiently, and have been transparent in their work. Local officials rallied at the state Capitol last week, demanding that the state give them an ongoing $3 billion a year to address homelessness.

Cortese began pushing for the audit after touring a massive homeless encampment on vacant land near San Jose’s airport. One of the largest in California, the camp was home to more than 400 people during the pandemic. What he saw shocked and appalled him: “Rodents running around your feet. Massive piles of trash. Tons of broken RVs and abandoned cars. Cars turned upside down with people living inside.”

When Cortese brought up the idea of a state audit, he says local officials told him while they had spent local money, they hadn’t used state funding to improve conditions or offer services at that encampment.

“Which to me just really begged the question: ‘What’s going on?’” Cortese said.

That camp has since been cleared; the Federal Aviation Administration had threatened to withhold airport funds from the city because the camp extended into flight paths. But the city couldn’t move everyone into housing or shelter, and some people have moved to another lot just across the street.

Past attempts at accountability

Cortese’s audit isn’t the first time California’s homelessness response has come under scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Interagency Council on Homelessness found the state spent nearly $10 billion on homelessness between 2018 and 2021 and served more than 571,000 people. But despite that effort, most of those people still didn’t get a roof over their heads.

And in 2021, a state audit of five local governments found that they did not always comply with federal regulations or follow best practices when responding to homelessness.

The new audit will be an “entirely different animal,” Cortese said, as it will go deeper into the state’s spending. Legislators hope it also will make specific recommendations as to how ineffective programs could be improved or even cut — something the Interagency Council’s report didn’t do.

San Luis Obispo Mayor Erica Stewart speaks during a press conference on a request for $3 billion a year more for local homelessness programs at the state Capitol in Sacramento on April 12, 2023. Photo by Rahul Lal, CalMatters

The heightened scrutiny comes as Newsom has both ramped up spending and rolled out a series of new homelessness programs since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Those include Project Roomkey, which temporarily put elderly and medically compromised unhoused people up in hotels; Homekey, which gives cities and counties money to turn some of those hotels (and other buildings) into longer-term homeless housing; and the Encampment Resolution Grant program, which gives cities and counties money to clear homeless encampments and move occupants into housing and shelters.

It’s no surprise that Republicans would continue their critique of the liberal governor’s spending. But the recent involvement of Cortese and other Democrats signals the politics have shifted.

For example, Assemblymember Luz Rivas, a Democrat from the San Fernando Valley, is pushing her own accountability bill. Assembly Bill 799 would force the state to set specific goals for reducing homelessness, while also allowing funding to be reallocated away from local agencies that fail to meet their goals.

“We get asked by our constituents,” she said. “They ask ‘Where is this funding going to? Is it really being used effectively?’”

Even Newsom himself has advocated for more accountability. He recently began requiring that cities and counties submit “homeless action plans” before receiving state funding, and he briefly held $1 billion hostage after determining the plans they drafted weren’t ambitious enough.

During last month’s hearing, several legislators advocated for the auditor to choose cities in their own districts. Some made pitches for Los Angeles and Sacramento, while others pushed for smaller cities.

Gail Osmer, a San Jose advocate who led Cortese on the encampment tour that inspired the audit, spoke alongside the senator at the hearing. In an interview, she said she hopes the audit’s findings will be a wake-up call for her city.

Osmer has been critical of how the city cleared the airport encampment. Camp residents were promised services, such as free repairs for their cars and RVs, that many people never received, she said.

“People are not held accountable,” Osmer said. “Where’s the money going?”

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

You read that right. I didn’t mistype New Hampshire’s state motto, adopted in 1945 and which probably had its origins in French Revolutionaries’ Vivre Libre ou Mourir. Fact is, our yearning for personal independence and autonomy is probably responsible for a shocking factoid: post-Covid life expectancy, which had decreased in most countries in 2020, bounced back everywhere except in the US. According to the CDC, while U.S. life expectancy at birth dropped nearly three years from 2019 to 2021 (78.8 to 76.1), comparable countries barely registered Covid between the same years (82.6 to 82.4). Here’s a summary of the CDC’s findings, and how it came up with them.

Even without Covid, we’re still doing terribly: We’re far outspending other large, wealthy countries in healthcare, yet we have the lowest life expectancy—also by far. Outspending by how much? “In 2021, the U.S. spent 17.8 percent of gross domestic product on health care, nearly twice as much as the average OECD country,” according to the Commonwealth Fund.

Got that? We spend double what comparable countries spend on healthcare, and live six years less than they do. Not just rich OECD countries, either. “They” in this case includes citizens of Cuba, Lebanon and Czechia (previously Czech Republic), none of which are usually considered part of the “first world.”

What’s going on?

Ten years ago, a panel of experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences published a report titled “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” which accurately predicted our current situation. According to the report, “A big part of the difference between life and death in the U.S. and peer countries is people dying or being killed before age 50.” It specifically points to “factors like teen pregnancy, drug overdoses, HIV, fatal car crashes, injuries, and violence.” Interviewed more recently by NPR, one panel member, Eileen Crimmins, professor of gerontology at USC, has a harsh word for lovers of assault weapons (see last week’s guest column on the Nashville shooting): “Two years difference in life expectancy probably comes from the fact that firearms are so available in the United States.” In addition, “There’s the opioid epidemic, which is clearly ours – that was our drug companies and other countries didn’t have that because those drugs were more controlled.”

One unexpected finding of the NAS panel is that our worse health and shorter lifespan isn’t just confined to poor and minority cohorts, but extends through all sections of society, including the one-percent. Money isn’t always the answer. In fact, economics is a critical part of the equation: Extra health care costs the country “as much as $100 billion annually.”

What’s the answer? A willingness to learn from other countries, instead of going it alone — that is, a dose of humility! — would sure help. And specifically, according to Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University (in an interview on NPR) “…universal, better coordinated health care, strong health and safety protections, broad access to education, and more investments to help kids get off to a healthy start. These policies are paying off for [other countries], and could for Americans, too.”