Santa Monica has always possessed a talent for self-presentation. The city markets itself as a peculiar kind of coastal utopia—a place where palm trees grow in neat rows, bicycle paths unfurl like moral imperatives, and progressive politics coexist harmoniously with multimillion-dollar real estate. It is a community that has convinced itself, and many others, that its version of governance transcends the ordinary failures of municipal administration. This self-regard, as it happens, became both the city’s defining characteristic and its most dangerous blind spot.
The Police Activities League represented everything Santa Monica wanted to believe about itself. Here was a program that seemed to crystallize the city’s highest aspirations: police officers and city employees volunteering their time to mentor children, fostering the kind of trust between law enforcement and young people that other communities could only dream of achieving. The image was irresistible—kids shooting baskets with cops, community building through sports, the very embodiment of enlightened civic engagement. It was also, as subsequent events would reveal, a façade concealing one of California’s most devastating child-abuse scandals.
Eric Uller occupied a curious position within this ecosystem. He was neither a police officer nor a coach, but rather a city information-technology specialist, the sort of quiet, reliable presence that large organizations depend upon but rarely notice. For decades, he inserted himself into the lives of vulnerable children, many of them boys from Latino families in the Pico neighborhood. He organized recreational activities, supervised community events, and routinely transported children to and from P.A.L. functions in official vehicles. His access was extraordinary, his authority unquestioned.
In October 2018, someone finally made the call that should have been made years earlier. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arrested Uller on multiple counts of child molestation. Within weeks, facing the prospect of trial and public exposure, Uller took his own life. The criminal case ended there, but the reckoning had only begun.
What emerged in the aftermath was a story of institutional negligence so profound that it bordered on the surreal. In 1991, twenty-seven years before Uller’s arrest, a routine background check had uncovered a troubling piece of information: as a teenager, Uller had been arrested for molesting a toddler while babysitting. It was the kind of discovery that should have immediately and permanently disqualified him from any involvement with children. Instead, the information was filed away, forgotten, or perhaps willfully ignored. Uller became not merely a participant in P.A.L. activities but a fixture—the volunteer who arrived early and stayed late, who seemed genuinely invested in the welfare of the children under his care.
The scope of Uller’s crimes, when finally tallied, defied comprehension. More than two hundred children had been victimized over the course of his tenure with the program. The number is so large that it initially strikes the reader as a typographical error, until one encounters it repeated in court documents, news reports, and the growing pile of civil lawsuits that would eventually consume the city’s attention and resources.
Santa Monica’s response followed a recognizable pattern. The city retained Praesidium, a consulting firm specializing in child safety, which delivered the recommendations that any reasonably attentive observer might have offered: implement proper training protocols, standardize policies across departments, create mechanisms for reporting and investigating concerns. A law firm was hired to conduct an internal review, parsing the question of who knew what and when (the review remains secret to this day). The Sheriff’s Department pursued its criminal investigation until Uller’s suicide rendered the effort moot. These measures provided the appearance of accountability without publicly addressing the fundamental question of how such a catastrophic failure had been allowed to persist for so long.
The financial reckoning, when it came, was staggering in its dimensions. An initial group of a hundred and five victims agreed to a settlement of a hundred and seven million dollars. A second group of a hundred and twenty-four victims received an additional hundred and twenty-two and a half million. The combined total, roughly two hundred and twenty-nine million dollars, represented an almost incomprehensible sum for a municipality of fewer than a hundred thousand residents. Calculated on a per-capita basis, every man, woman, and child in Santa Monica had effectively contributed nearly $2,500 toward the cost of the city’s failure to heed a warning it had received three decades earlier.
The settlements provided a form of justice for the victims and substantial fees for the attorneys who represented them. For the city, the payments represented something more complex—a crude attempt to purchase closure for a scandal that had exposed the hollowness of its carefully cultivated image. But the true cost extended far beyond the immediate financial impact. The money for the settlements came from the same municipal coffers that funded police patrols, infrastructure maintenance, and public services. In budget workshops held in March 2025, city officials spoke with the kind of grim urgency typically associated with corporate restructuring or municipal bankruptcy. They discussed depleting reserve funds, eliminating subsidies, and selling public assets. Basic services—streetlight repairs, garbage collection, playground maintenance—faced delays and cutbacks. The city government, once flush with resources and confident in its mission, began to resemble a struggling startup, but without the prospect of eventual profitability, and this week the city declared a fiscal emergency blamed, in great part, on the child-abuse scandal (added to other factors, discussed in an upcoming article).
The irony was almost too perfect to be coincidental. The Police Activities League had been created with the explicit goal of keeping children safe, of providing them with positive adult role models and constructive outlets for their energy. In the end, the program became the vehicle for the city’s most grievous failure, precisely because it had welcomed the one person who should never have been allowed near children. The 1991 background check represented a moment of clarity that might have prevented decades of abuse. Everything that followed, the years of unchecked access, the mounting number of victims, the eventual reckoning, flowed from that initial failure to act on available information.
The survivors of Uller’s abuse succeeded in forcing Santa Monica to confront its own negligence, but the monetary settlements, however substantial, represent a limited form of justice. It is possible to assign a dollar figure to legal damages; it is far more difficult to quantify the destruction of trust between a community and its institutions and, most importantly, its victims. The more pressing question concerns the durability of the reforms that have been put in place. Will the new protocols be rigorously implemented, or merely adopted as bureaucratic window dressing? Will the next Eric Uller be identified and removed before he can cause harm, or will he simply become more adept at concealment?
Santa Monica’s reputation for enlightened governance has been grievously damaged, and whether the city has learned from the scandal—or merely learned to look as if it has—remains unclear. Rebuilding trust requires more than public relations; it demands lasting reform. The true test will come once the scandal fades, when old habits threaten to return. Future P.A.L. children deserve more than good intentions, however sincere; they deserve competent execution of those reforms.
Daniel Jansenson, Architect, for SMa.r.t., Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow
Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA; Thane Roberts, Architect; Mario Fonda-Bonardi, Architect AIA (former Planning Commissioner); Sam Tolkin, Architect (former Planning Commissioner); Michael Jolly AIRCRE; Jack Hillbrand, Architect AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; Daniel Jansenson, Architect (former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner); Phil Brock, Santa Monica Mayor (ret).; Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB
