Why Does Santa Barbara’s Sheriff Stay Silent?

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CHANGING TIMES: At a certain point, people stop being who you thought they were. But maybe they never actually were. But then again, maybe you weren’t either.

And for the record, people do change.

Right now, as we await the next tsunami of mass deportations, I find myself haunted by such after-the-fact reckonings about Sheriff Bill Brown and who he was back when he first ran for that office in 2006.

Then, as now, immigration was the hot-button issue; Congress had just passed a law to build a 750-mile-long border wall and to make the act of crossing the border without proper papers a felony. Most explosively, it would have empowered local law enforcement officers to detain and arrest immigrants for the mere crime of crossing the border.

The incumbent in that race, Jim Anderson, was a decent enough guy, but with an unfortunate penchant for putting his foot in his mouth while wearing spiked golf shoes. Just three days before a major “A Day Without Immigrants” rally, he opined how and why he supported that bill. Anderson said he worried about Iraqi and Iranian terrorists sneaking across the border into the United States. “It’s not like I am proposing that we do massive sweeps and send people back across the border,” he added with uncanny prescience about what, in fact, is happening now. Later, Anderson would sort of backtrack: “It’s just a concept I threw out for discussion.”

One of the three challengers in that race was Bill Brown, then the Lompoc police chief whose candidacy was the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass thrown into a hurricane. He pounced on Anderson’s statement the hardest. 

Brown — a moderate, thoughtful, and almost progressive law-and-order Republican — was then aggressively courting liberal and Democratic voters. “Our job is to protect and serve the whole community,” Brown thundered as only he can thunder when in front of a microphone. “We can’t do that if people are afraid that if they report a crime, we might put them in jail.” 

To highlight his thinking, Brown would later recount how serial killer Richard Ramirez — the dreaded Night Stalker of Los Angeles — had been stopped, beaten, and detained by a handful of alert barrio residents who, it turned out, were in the country without legal papers.

Brown would add, “When I was with the California police chiefs, we wrote a letter to the attorney general saying we thought it was a terrible idea.”

The incumbent Anderson would accuse Brown of telling Latino voters in Guadalupe and Santa Maria during Mexican Independence Day parades that he, Anderson, was going to initiate mass arrests and wholesale deportation. Brown denied saying any such things. 

What I do know is the Independent endorsed Bill Brown. There were lots of reasons. But this issue was a big one. I won’t say our endorsement got Brown elected. But I will say it moved the needle significantly on his behalf.

So, where’s that Bill Brown now? 

He’s still the sheriff, the longest-serving one in county history. And right now, he’s the President of the Major County Sheriffs of America. That’s a very big hat to wear. As such, he’s met personally with Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s tough talking border czar. He’s also met with Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and the vocal architect of the administration’s take-no-prisoners, round-up-3,000-immigrants-a-day policy.

Is Brown — president of an organization representing sheriffs across this country — sending letters to Homan or Miller saying the military-style maneuvers that we all experienced in Carpinteria was a terrible idea? Or that the roving contact teams participating in “Operation Trojan Horse” — part of what federal officials have described as the largest mass deportation program in history — might drastically damage the trust Latinos, who make up 47 percent of the population in Southern California’s seven counties, have in law enforcement?

If he has sent those letters, Brown’s not saying. But spokespeople for Major County Sheriffs did testify in favor of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which will send $10 billion in funding to various law enforcement programs that are of consequence to Brown and the major sheriffs of America.

If Brown were to advocate de-escalation, perhaps he would risk Trump’s wrath. It’s been known to happen. But with leadership comes risk. 

But what about the community trust Brown spoke of so eloquently in 2006? 

Or about serving the entire community?

What about that “terrible idea”?

I bring this up because two weeks ago, 29 local elected officials — from Congressmember Salud Carbajal down to the proverbial dogcatcher — mailed a letter to Brown demanding that he use the bully pulpit afforded him by the Major County Sheriffs of America to call on Trump, Holman, and Miller (the reincarnation of Joseph Goebbels — look him up) to call for restraint.

“You are in a unique position to call for the de-escalation of the attack on our immigrant communities,” the 29 signatories wrote. “Hardworking people have been taken into custody at gunpoint by masked agents…. Young children have been left to survive without their parents.”

Brown declined to respond to this letter. Admittedly, he might have felt sandbagged. There had been no prior meetings where they might have hashed things out with Brown, none of the usual spade work required for success in the legislative universe. 

But do we really need a military occupation for a search warrant to be executed, as was purportedly the case with the Carpinteria cannabis greenhouse raid a month ago? 

Brown’s lack of anything approximating empathy or even professional concern when asked about the impact of these hyper-aggressive federal raids on the targeted population — Latinos, people who speak Spanish, people who work in car washes, and people in the parking lots of Home Depot — has been striking.

It’s especially so when compared with remarks made by District Attorney John Savrnoch and Santa Barbara Police Chief Kelly Gordon — high-ranking Santa Barbara law enforcement officials — neither of whom, it should be noted, gave away the store to the rioters whom Brown was so quick to focus on in his statements to the public. 

But this lack of human concern was most striking when contrasted with the clear and obvious sensitivity to the county’s Latino population Brown exhibited in 2006.

The reality also is that law enforcement agencies can vigorously enforce strict immigration laws without resorting to the goon-squad tactics we have just witnessed. How else are we to describe the cadres of armed, masked men with no name tags, wearing outfits with no insignias identifying which branch of the government they represent, smashing car windows, and taking parents out of their cars in front of children?

I like to think that if Brown were still only one good cop representing the voters who put him in office, he’d be showing the world a different face. But now he’s the president of a national law enforcement agency — the pinnacle, perhaps, of his long and accomplished professional career. 

I think Brown sold out to the people who put the star on his chest so he could better represent the people at the national level who put that big hat on his head. Worse, he sold out the 47.6 percent of Santa Barbara County’s population over whom “reasonable suspicion” exists solely because they’re Latino. And the 40 percent who speak a language other than English in their homes. And the estimated 10 percent who are in the country without legal papers.

Worse still, I think Bill Brown sold himself out on this one. I think the real Bill Brown would have spoken out against so egregious a display of force. Or at least he would have acknowledged that it was egregious.

I say that because the real Bill Brown already did. 

And that’s a real tragedy.

But then people do change. They’re not who we think they used to be. Maybe they never were. And maybe we’re not, either.