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There is a massive elephant in the room when it comes to the so called “Safe Parking Lot.” The City claims that participants are vetted, run through the Megan’s Law checks, and no alcohol and drugs are allowed.
What the City is not telling you is that 99% of the homeless who show up do not qualify for the parking lot. They end up going into our communities and setting up camps, doing drugs, and commiting crimes.
The Safe Parking Lot shareholders began marketing the lot on 11/15/2019 to outsiders from all over America. If we had a problem for people sleeping in cars they could be steered to the lot by our Sheriffs. Encinitas didn’t have a homeless problem when this was proposed. There were only 47 cars in the Encinitas district that covered Solana Beach, Del Mar, Carmel Valley, Rancho Santa Fe, and of course Encinitas.
Encinitas decided to create it’s own homeless problem. Our mayor declared a “shelter emergency crisis” in 2018 to qualify for some HEAP State grants. We didn’t have a shelter crisis and many didn’t think she had ulterior motives. After the Safe Parking Lot was sprung on our town we figured out that the nonprofits qualified for millions of dollars and the mayor looked better to run for State Senator.
The residents were very concerned about motivation for this lot. The Regional Task Force on Homeless showed 3 consecutive years of declines. You can read their reports here: https://www.rtfhsd.org/reports-data/
Almost immediately after the announcement of the Safe Parking Lot residents began noticing a spike in homeless numbers as well as a spike in crime. According to Crimemapping.com there was a rise in overall crime by 27% in just one month.
Here is a fact statement that is deeply concerning for the residents of Encinitas. On May 20, 2020, Captain Taft spoke at our City Council meeting and stated that the Safe Parking Program had absolutely no impact on crime. Of course the residents were completely shocked because we knew crime was skyrocketing and that the mayor had packed many of Encinitas hotels with other town’s transients. Below is a transcript of Captain Taft’s comments about the Safe Parking Program.
Captain Taft, the head of North County Sheriffs.
Many residents had been monitoring crime and expected Captain Taft to support what we saw and monitored with our own eyes. The last thing the community of Encinitas expected was to be mislead by our own Sheriff’s Department. We expected the Sheriffs to be neutral and not pick sides, so it caught us off guard until we made this discovery shortly afterwards.
We found out the the FBI provides a midyear Uniforme Crime Report for all cities across America. When we got a copy of the report we realized 2 major things. First, our Sheriff misled or lied to the community about crimes numbers in Encinitas. The second thing is Encinitas went from the #1 safest city in San Diego January 2020, to the #1 fastest growing crime town in only 6 quick months, by June 2020. You can see the FBI report on SANDAG which, coincidentally Catherine Blakespear is the head of as well.
FBI Violent Crimes by jurisdiction.
FBI Property Crimes by jurisdiction.
The Encinitas City Council voted 3 to 2 to relocate the Safe Parking Lot based upon false crime information while stacking nearly 100% nonprofit people as opposition. The residents find this a massive problem because crime continues to climb each year, and the Captain is not being truthful, and we don’t like nonprofits controlling our City Council. To make matters worse, the mayor is unilaterally making decisions without public input. We believe this photo shows our mayor’s true motivation.
Our opinion is that this parking lot needs to be put on hold until we are told the truth. The idea of pushing this parking lot to an area that has the highest concentration of children is a recipe for disaster. We are being lied to about the truth on crime and there seems to be no way we can hold anybody accountable. Hopefully this article will reach the right people and we can have this Safe Parking Lot program investigated before any of our children inevitably get hurt.
