Last year, in the midst of local and national uproar over police brutality and some news-grabbing racist incidents in Santee, San Diego County leaders promised that the county would do more to address issues of racial justice and equity.
In the span of two months last summer county supervisors revived the defunct Human Relations Commission, expanded the powers of the county’s independent Citizen’s Law Enforcement Review Board and voted to establish its first ever Office of Equity and Racial Justice, which will work across county departments to identify systemic bias within the organization.
Those actions were just the beginning of the task and, to be honest, I had some skepticism about whether all the talk about change would be followed by significant, tangible action. Look around San Diego County; there is no shortage of racial justice issues that still need to be addressed.
An encouraging sign, though, is that the new head of the county’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice seems realistic about the challenges ahead — even as he comes into the role as a sort of county insider.
Andrew Strong, who was most recently chief of staff to the county’s chief istrative officer, will head up the new office, which still has to add two more staffers. A Black Navy veteran, Strong brings more than a decade of experience working in county government and was tapped after a nationwide search that included input from at least a dozen community organizations.
We spoke by phone Wednesday afternoon. Strong certainly seemed realistic about where San Diego is and recognized the doubts some people in the community may have about whether the county will truly step up to racial justice efforts.
Personally, I still sitting in a Board of Supervisors meeting not two years ago where the supervisors, urged by the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of San Diego, went out of their way to oppose a state bill that ultimately put restrictions on police use of force and demanded greater law enforcement ability.
The composition of the Board of Supervisors has since changed, but that doesn’t mean the structural issues and attitudes that prevented the county from more aggressively addressing racial justice issues have disappeared.
When asked about how he would respond to residents who might have concerns about trusting him to change county practices, Strong said he would start by acknowledging that those are valid concerns and “100 percent understandable.”
He said that while working as chief of staff to the county istrative officer, he was able to make the position have more of an external role, building relationships with some community leaders and associations in ways that weren’t done previously. He said that made him feel more comfortable applying for the director position, but “there are connections we still need to build and build stronger.”
Strong, 40, also spoke with a sense of urgency when it comes to addressing inequities.
“The time for talking has ed and it’s finally time for the county to acknowledge that,” Strong said.
“We start taking actions by working with our community, partnering with our community, building trust with the community and having the community more involved in what we do.”
Originally from the Shreveport-Bossier City area in Louisiana, Strong ed the U.S. Navy at 18 and served for nine years as a hospital corpsman. He said his experience in the military taught him a lot about how to work with people from all walks of life.
As he was transitioning out and finishing his degree at Southern Illinois University, Strong ed the county as a unpaid student worker before taking a full-time position in the Human Resources Department, where one of his first projects involved freshening up the county’s diversity and inclusion training program.
Since then he has held several posts in the county, including in the Land Use Department and the county Finance Group. Now he hopes to blend his understanding of county operations with his ion for equity and racial justice issues.
“I have a ion for bringing people into the county, specifically black and brown individuals because there is simply a lack of them in leadership roles in the county and local government agencies,” said Strong, who was a 2017 fellow with the RISE Urban Leadership program.
As director of the Office of Equity and Racial Justice, Strong will be one of a handful of people of color in prominent leadership positions in the county.
“It’s hugely important to be visible, to bring people into the county and connect them, to be quite frank, in some ways that the community hasn’t been connected to the county for a long time,” Strong said.
When asked about where he plans to look first for inequities in the county, Strong pointed to immediate issues like healthcare access during the COVID-19 pandemic and the location of vaccine sites, as well as issues of social equity in the county’s new cannabis program.
In most places where marijuana has been legalized, Black and Brown people historically have been excluded from entering the business.
To address many of racial justice and equity issues though, Strong said the county has to start by taking a hard look at itself, in particular its hiring and selection process, its employee s, its everyday policies and procedures, and the county’s contracting practices.
“We need to look for issues of systemic racism, issues of institutional racism that maybe stem from policies and procedures and things that have been put in place 50 years ago and really haven’t been changed,” he said.
“We have to diversify our supplier pool to really give back to those communities that have been underserved for years. We need to tap into those resources and actually build those communities, and we can do that through contracting.”
Time will tell if Strong and the Office of Equity and Racial Justice are successful. I’m encouraged, though, by his emphasis on connecting with the community and turning talk into actual action.
Black and Brown people have tried to call attention to issues of racial justice and equity for decades, both locally and nationally. Sometimes that talk is met with opposition; other times it’s met with genuine ally-ship. Far more often than I’d like, it’s also met with people who talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk.
I guess what I’m saying is a lot of us are tired of having the same conversations over and over. We’re ready to move beyond talk, and it’s nice our new director of the Office of Equity and Racial Justice seems ready too. Lets hope the county is as well.
