The Isla Vista Foot Patrol
By Andrew Shulman
This story appeared in the May 17, 1988 Isla Vista Free Press.
When you walk into the Foot Patrol office at 6547 Pardall Road,
you realize immediately that it isn't the ordinary kind of police
station.
First
of all, the person who greets you smiles and the atmosphere
is definitely laid back. Secondly, there is a poster on the
wall of the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America in flames--a
reminder of the event that lead to the establishment of the
Foot Patrol.
A foot-and-bike patrol created in the fall of 1970, the Foot
Patrol is the main policing force in a town that has 10% of
the population of the county's unincorporated areas but 25%
of its reported crimes. The Foot Patrol was designed as a solution
to the specific problems Isla Vista was experiencing in the
wake of the 1970 civil disturbances--problems, some said, that
were directly associated with the lack of community relations
between police and students.
But there were problems in the beginning bridging that gap--some
of which have not entirely gone away.
Early Days
In the early 1970s, military policemen near the end of their
tours of duty in Vietnam were offered early discharges if they
agreed to join law enforcement agencies upon their return to
the United States. Several former MPs found themselves on the
Isla Vista Foot Patrol and the result was an intensification
of the sense of alienation between the police and the community
that existed during the riots.
One resident recalled Foot Patrol officers referring to Isla
Vista residents in that period as "gooks." In return,
mistrust of the newly formed Foot Patrol felt by the community
was echoed in the nicknames residents had for them: "authoritarian
pigs," "Nazi punks," and "the army of the
establishment."
In the early years, the Foot Patrol program was made possible
by a grant from the California Council on Criminal Justice,
the state agency in charge of disbursing funds from the federal
Anti-Crime and Safe Streets Act of 1968.
Then as now, the UCSB Police Department assigns six officers
to the patrol on an 18-month rotational basis and the Santa
Barbara County Sheriffs Department provides six of its deputies.
In this way, the financing has become split between the County
and UCSB.
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