Public Safety
The California Constitution provides the city with the authority to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its residents. Cupertino is regarded as a safe, clean, and attractive city which we are proud of, and we want to maintain this and thoughtfully remedy any areas where there needs improvement. The city responded quickly to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic, and cautiously relaxed restrictions to maintain public health, as an example of our thoughtful planning. Our Sheriffs are greatly appreciated in our City, and they have worked diligently and successfully to stop crime rings, help individuals with mental health issues, provide traffic safety around schools, educate the community on personal safety, and much more behind the scenes. I support reforming Prop 47 through Prop 36, which helps our sheriffs to be able to do something about the synthetic opioid crisis and repeat thefts much of the state and we have been experiencing. Sacramento has taken too long to do something about the problems Prop 47 created where nearly everyone knows of someone or has seen someone devastatingly impacted by synthetic opioids or has been a victim of theft enabled by Prop 47 unintended consequences.
Our taxpayer dollars fund the Santa Clara County Fire Department which responds to health and fire emergencies throughout our city. They are hard at work every day and they have an interactive map available to see who they are helping right now: https://www.sccfd.org/ Many thanks to our SCCFD!
In the event of an emergency, our city will need an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) which would be a Tier 4 Structure. As a City Hall Subcommittee member along with former Councilmember Jon Willey, we worked with staff to plan the relocation of the EOC to the Torre Annex and remodel/seismic retrofit the City Hall Building. The projects were approved by the Council in 2022 and the new council chose to abandon those plans and entertain plans to build an 80,000 sf new City Hall with a 500 seat theater, or tear down City Hall for housing, or buy a different building offsite for City Hall with no plans for the current City Hall and no plans for the EOC. Two years have passed with no plan for the EOC being implemented when the Torre remodel would have already been complete and the EOC relocated and ready. We need rational planning to support our community when we need it.
Cupertino is fortunate to have a team of award-winning volunteers who provide behind-the-scenes support for our residents at events and have a communications network which helps in community crises. You may sign up for a CERT class here.
Our Block Leader and Neighborhood Watch programs have been an ongoing Work Program enhancement area to get our community more connected, safer, and having fun together. Our policies will continue to be made in such a way to balance our personal freedoms with the need for the protection of health, safety, and welfare of our community!
Please plan to attend the 2024 Public Safety Forum in October, you may watch last year’s forum which includes a section on crime trend here.
