The Los Altos Hills City Council voted at a special meeting last week to take immediate action to address the recent increase in residential burglaries.
The town is set to hire private security for a pilot period of two to three months, add another full-time deputy to its contract with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office and add 600 investigative hours to that contract. Town leaders also plan to launch a community outreach campaign to educate residents on local crime trends and ways they can protect themselves from being targeted by burglars.
Burglaries in Los Altos Hills shot up from 22 in 2021 to 51 in 2022, and the trend does not appear to be slowing. The Feb. 28 meeting was called in part because there were four more burglaries since the last city council meeting Feb. 16, for a total of 14 this year so far. If the trend continues, it would put the town on track to hit 86 burglaries in 2023.
At the Feb. 16 meeting, the council approved another year of its automated license plate reader program, despite disappointing results in the first year, and also discussed exploring other options to combat the rise in crime.
“I’m not feeling particularly safe at this point in time – I feel afraid,” Vice Mayor Stanley Q. Mok said at last week’s meeting. “I think that my house will probably be the next one to get burglarized.”
Following Atherton’s lead
Many options were discussed at last week’s 2 1/2-hour special meeting, but not all of them were universally supported. Most of the proposed actions were based on the “Atherton model,” which crime consultant Brian Uhler explained in a presentation to the council. Atherton, a city similar in size and wealth to Los Altos Hills, successfully reduced burglary rates in the past few years.
Atherton built its approach on sustained community engagement, including outreach in the form of meetings, mailings and social media, as well as encouraging citizen initiatives such as a resident volunteer patrol team and collaboration between residents and law enforcement partners.
“We’re trying not to respond to the criminal activity and take the reports, but deter it in the first place,” said Peter Pirnejad, Los Altos Hills city manager. “And the way to do that is really by having eyes on the street and making sure that the criminals know that people are watching them.”
Town staff suggested that hiring private security on a short-term contract would provide preventive patrols as eyes and ears for law enforcement and send a message to town residents that its leaders are acting.
Several council members reacted well to the idea, but Councilmember Lisa Schmidt expressed concerns about a private firm’s training and ability to deter crime and instead advocated for hiring another officer from the county.
“I don’t have any sense of how high quality their training is – are we going to start stopping every Black or Brown man that we see driving through town?” Schmidt said. “We worried about racial profiling in the past, and I give the sheriff’s department credit for training against that. Also, we can hold them accountable.”
Other council members argued that hiring private security was the most immediate action they could take to protect residents.
The motion to allocate up to $150,000 from the general fund ultimately passed 3-2, with Schmidt and Councilmember George Tyson opposed. The motions to expand the Sheriff’s Office contract and to initiate a public education campaign passed unanimously.
