Santa Barbara Supervisors Get Annual Report on Sheriff’s Use of ‘Military’ Equipment

Lieutenant Joe Schmidt took pains to state that it was law enforcement equipment the Board of Supervisors was addressing on Tuesday, even though the name on the ordinance was “military” equipment. “The helicopters and the MRAP high-water vehicle are military,” he said, “but the rest are law enforcement.”

Those two items have been used extensively by the Sheriff’s Office in Santa Barbara County’s many natural disasters of recent years, but since 2022 and the passage of Assembly Bill 481, law enforcement agencies are required to disclose their “military” arms and their supervisors to approve them, which the board unanimously did on Tuesday.

What falls under the heading of military equipment under AB 481 runs from drones and bomb robots to firearms and ammunition of .50 caliber or more. The rules require the Sheriff’s Office to not only list them, but to indicate if they were deployed and if there were any complaints. With the exception of a couple of large trucks used by the bomb squads, most of the equipment was purchased by federal grants, were donated, or are listed as “no initial cost.” The annual report stated that drones were used to search for missing persons or photograph crime scenes over 10 hours in 2023, twice used in a special response like a hostage or barricade situation, while the Sheriff’s Office’s multiple bomb response vehicles were deployed five times in 2023. The majority of the 261 rifles listed were not used in 2023, except for less-lethal pepperball and polymer-round launchers.

Lt. Schmidt gave the example of a successful de-escalation using a plastic round after a DUI suspect pulled a knife and advanced on a deputy: “One deputy retrieved the 12-gauge launcher that deploys a polymer round. They were able to subdue the suspect. A knife is a potentially lethal threat,” Schmidt said. Use of a plastic round was one step short of lethal force and resulted in minimal injuries.

Public speaker Denise El Amin was not convinced. “This legislation was for a reason,” she said, “for civil rights violations.” She was concerned that the stereotyping of people of color would prevent de-escalation, as these devices were reputed to be used for. 

Speaker Gail Osherenko observed that the de-escalation described by Schmidt was not the crisis de-escalation she has advocated for in the past — in which the main tools are empathy and conversation. Osherenko asked to be notified when the Sheriff’s Office held its next public meeting on military equipment, which Schmidt said was held on April 25. 

Lawanda Lyons-Pruitt of the Santa Maria–Lompoc branch of the NAACP said no notification had come to her office either, saying “continual evaluation” was necessary for transparency in the use of this equipment. “We’re not opposed to the use of military equipment, because we do recognize there are certain situations when it is helpful to the public, for a person in mental-health crisis, for instance, and it might save lives,” Lyons-Pruitt said.