Stan Sniff did not plan to fail. He failed to plan and has been blaming everyone else but his mismanagement for the exacerbated problems in Riverside County. Sniff’s solution has been to threaten the apocalypse when he does not get his way.

The Riverside Press Enterprise recently posted a story about the improving budget in Riverside County.

Some departments, including the public defender and district attorney, will need cash infusions to make ends meet. But the public defender needs just $1.475 million instead of the $2.2 million projected earlier, and the DA’s current $3.76 million shortfall is less than half the projected gap of $9.3 million, according to the county executive office’s third-quarter budget report.

Note that the Press-Enterprise conveniently omitted the shortfall in the Sheriff’s Department preferring instead to repeat worn-out Sniff talking points:

The turnaround in the sheriff’s budget comes almost a year after Sheriff Stan Sniff asked for $50 million more than what was budgeted – otherwise, he warned, he might have to look at shuttering patrol stations.

Still, retirement buyouts in Sniff’s department are $10.1 million more than projected, and “although the department stated they have realized some savings, they continue to see higher overtime costs due to attrition of staff,” read the third-quarter report.

The department “is increasingly concerned about the continued reductions in staffing on the safety of its employees, and the ability to properly safeguard the public through patrol, jail, court and coroner operations,” the report added.

At the May 22 board meeting, Supervisor Kevin Jeffries said he’d seek to restore funding to deputy patrols in unincorporated communities in the upcoming budget.

“Our residents are just becoming unhinged over this, over the response times and the issues that we’re facing in the unincorporated areas with the homeless and the low-level offenders that are roaming the neighborhoods,” he said.

Yet Jeffries endorsed failure for re-election in 2018.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise lets the cat out of the bag while attempting to dance around the facts of failure. Staff Attrition proves the morale point. Reduced patrols in rural areas proves the mismanagement point. Retirement buyouts prove again the staffing and morale point. Finally, Jeffries own comment about residents coming unhinged shows that Sniff did not even attempt to try and make interim or partial solutions, rather he has deliberately pushed things over the edge in order to win an argument. (Classic Narcissism)

I received a couple other articles that emphasize this failure has been apparent for several years:

In 2015 KSEQ revealed that the Cochella Valley has a spiraling crime rate. Note that the Cochella Valley is Sniff’s strongest base of support.

Violent crime of homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault reported by city police departments: (Cathedral City and Palm Springs only two incorporated city police departments reporting a decrease)

• Banning up 56%

• Beaumont up 54%

• Hemet up 30%

• Murrieta up 29%

• Indio up 26%

• Corona up 25%

• Desert Hot Springs up 11%

• Cathedral City down 7%

• Palm Springs down 5%

Got it? Where the Sheriff has a contract to provide services, Crime is up. Where it is a City Department, crime is down.

Fueled by robberies and aggravated assaults, violent crime increased by 6 percent in the first 11 months of 2015 over the same period in 2014 in areas patrolled by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, officials said Monday, Jan. 11 in a news release.

The Sheriff’s Department’s jurisdiction includes the unincorporated areas of Riverside County and the 17 cities it contracts with. Eleven other cities have their own police departments; their crimes are not included in the numbers.

The increase in violent crime is in line with the 6.3 percent rise in violent crime that the department reported for the first six months of 2015, according to the release. Those crimes include homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

These increases in crime were despite Prop 47 and Prop 57 decriminalizing things like Drug Posession and making certain property crimes an infraction / misdemeanor.

The source article is linked here.

By no objective measure can you say that Stan Sniff has done his job effectively as Sheriff.