Santa Cruz, CA: Keepin' It Real? "Big Joe" Netro and Steve Schlicht Partner Up for Hate

Netro, whose full name is Joseph H. Netro, is a homeowner in Santa Cruz who volunteers with the Santa Cruz Police Department. He served as a member of the 2016-17 Santa Cruz County Grand Jury, which issued a controversial, and some say biased, report critical of the county's Syringe Services Program.

Netro's court "reporting" is one-sided and extremely biased. He rarely (or never) reports on the legal arguments put forward by defendants and/or their attorneys. Many of his court reports begin with the same introduction:

"In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories."

When describing defendants generally, Netro has written that "no one is innocent", and he often chastises defendants for exercising their legal rights. "This shitbird fired his court appointed attorney today. Only in America", Netro wrote about one defendant.

When quoting court records and police reports, Netro often adds the mantra, "These are the facts. And they are undisputed."

When reporting about some individuals appearing in court, Netro titles the post, "Taking out the Garbage: In Court this Week".

Netro also advocates for long prison sentences. He believes defendants should receive the maximum allowable sentences in all cases. Netro believes that mass incarceration achieved through systemic maximum sentencing will solve what he perceives to be many of society's problems.

Netro has been accused of inaccurate reporting and outright defamation multiple times by readers of his blog.

Netro's blog is also a place were hate is fomented; Netro routinely creates bigoted posts that are overtly anti-homeless. He has created a number of racist posts, and the vigilante and/or violent comments made by his readers are left to remain on his sites. Netro openly refuses to remove hate comments.

Readers have left the following comments on photos Netro posted to his blog:

- "Someone should clean this place up. Brooms, shovels, baseball bats" (Comment made about the Heroes Camp)
- "Let the people take [care] of these two fucks. Long boat ride no more problem" (Comment left on a photo of a person accused of a crime)
- "I hope this guy meets an armed citizen that puts him where he belongs....in the ground" (Comment left on a photo of a person accused of a crime)

On Joe Netro's personal Facebook page, one of his friends asked a question about why "transients" couldn't be forcibly "transferred" back to their "place of origin".

Netro responded by posting a picture of a prison work camp, adding "this would work better".

In January, members of the San Lorenzo Valley/Scotts Valley Coalition Against Racism called out Netro for a racist post that has since been removed from the Santa Cruz, CA: Keepin' It Real blog.

In a post titled "Same Guy?", Netro posted photos of two individuals side by side and asked readers if they thought they were the "same guy". One photo was a booking photo of a person currently under probation for an ID theft conviction, and the other photo was of an unknown person being sought by Santa Cruz Police for allegedly placing a skimming device on a local ATM machine.

Readers took issue with the fact that the two individuals looked nothing like each other, and additionally the person in the booking photo was a person of color. Many accused Netro of racism.

One reader called Netro's post, "racial profiling at its best".

Another individual left a poor rating in the reviews section of Netro's blog, adding:

"We don’t need a hateful vigilante targeting people of color and falsely accusing people based solely off their past criminal record and his ignorant hunch of them committing future crimes. Bringing up Public Safety Committee Member criminal past (Drew Glover) as an attempt to slander his name and character is a all time low, coincidentally a person of color too. This coward and racist hides behind the alias name Big Joe 77."

Netro eventually removed the post, replacing it with a thank you note to those who played along with his comparison game by taking guesses.

Netro has been accused of racism on social media for other questionable blog posts.

When Netro posted a photo of Santa Cruz City Council Members Chris Krohn and Drew Glover titled "Dumb and Dumber", one individual commented, "Wow, what a non helpful and rather racist post I would say. Hating people who have different experiences than you is not really a point." Council Member Glover, who is one of the first African Americans ever elected to the Santa Cruz City Council, has faced repeated vicious attacks on his character by Joe Netro and Steve Schlicht, and conversely their followers.

Since 2016, Netro has been personally promoting social media posts from the "Santa Mierda" page, which is an anti-homeless/crime blog that is penned anonymously by Steve Schlicht of Take Back Santa Cruz, using the name "Ben Dover". Mierda is Spanish for "shit" and the blog takes the view that daily life is shitty in Santa Cruz in large part due to homeless people. More recently, Netro has appeared on the Santa Mierda podcast, "Unfiltered", as well as other productions of the "Santa Mierda Podcast Network".

The Santa Mierda blog has been called a "rabid anti-homeless website" by one homeless advocate in Santa Cruz, and a hate blog by others. Besides being a member of Take Back Santa Cruz, Steve Schlicht is also one of the group's web designers. Schlicht and Take Back Santa Cruz have been associated with two other hate websites that were created anonymously to wage defamatory personal attacks against local homeless advocates.

Schlicht served for a short period of time on the Santa Cruz Public Safety Task Force, which was a public commission in the City of Santa Cruz. Schlicht is probably best known locally for the statement he made during his time on the task force that he was "fine with junkies dying", which became a public scandal reported on by Indybay and the Santa Cruz Weekly.

Netro's partnership with Steve Schlicht appears to be an effort by the two of them to amplify their voices, which often times relies on for support only a small group of friends within the Take Back Santa Cruz circle. Time will tell what the partnership between Netro and Schlicht will fully entail; both individuals create highly discriminatory and sometimes racist posts to support their extreme political agendas.

Another partnership visible on the "Santa Cruz, CA: Keepin' It Real" blog is between Netro and other individuals who have worked in California's prison system.

Netro created a podcast on the Santa Mierda Podcast Network with Melissa Freebairn, a nurse currently employed at Soledad state prison who is also a resident of Santa Cruz. Freebairn shares some of Netro's discriminatory views in relation to the politics of crime and homelessness in Santa Cruz. Their podcast together was critical of the Syringe Services Program, a commonly addressed topic for both of them.

Other prison employees can be seen commenting on Netro's blog, including Frank Wong, who describes himself as a Correctional Lieutenant at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

On Facebook, Joe Netro is connected to a number of Take Back Santa Cruz members, as well as two conservative former city council candidates Ashley Scontriano and Paige Concannon (both Republicans). Concannon is a regular commenter on Netro's blog, sometimes using both of her screen names on Facebook to praise him.

Netro publicly rejected the politics of Rochelle Noroyan during the 2018 election.

As far as partisan politics goes, Netro calls himself a "lifelong Democrat". He endorsed and voted for a Republican for a seat in the state assembly in 2018, however.