Lending a Hand : Thin Blue Line of Police Is Reinforced by Volunteers Watching Everything From Computers to Patrol Cars

Cruising the streets of the northeast San Fernando Valley in an unmarked police car, Arthur Herkowitz, 56, who has undergone two heart bypass operations, said he almost feels like an undercover officer.

The retired mechanic, however, has been instructed by his police supervisor, Sgt. Gary Merrifield, not to leave his vehicle, engage in conversation or participate directly in any law enforcement activities.

Instead, Herkowitz makes his contribution to the Los Angeles Police Department by spotting abandoned cars and jotting down locations and license plate numbers of the eyesores that Merrifield has targeted in a cleanup campaign called “Operation Fix Window.”

Herkowitz’s efforts have eliminated costly hours of driving time for officers and allowed Merrifield to attend to other tasks in his job as community relations officer for the LAPD’s Foothill Division. Herkowitz is one of 130 civilian volunteers throughout the Valley who donate a combined total of more than 24,000 hours of work annually, saving police the equivalent of nearly $400,000 each year, according to police estimates.

However limited his role may seem, Herkowitz had a hand in the confiscation of about 85 abandoned vehicles from the streets of Pacoima and Sunland during the cleanup’s first month of operation, Merrifield said.

His efforts have not gone unnoticed. On Tuesday, Herkowitz will be among 100 of city government’s estimated 80,000 volunteers honored at an Outstanding Citizen Volunteer Awards ceremony at City Hall.

“The main thing is, Pacoima is improving, and that’s important. We’re getting rid of the burned-out junks,” he said.

The reasons that civilians volunteer their time and services to the LAPD vary from person to person, but many say they owe it to themselves and the community to join in the fight against crime and blight.

For Herkowitz, it is a desire to help clean up Pacoima and the nearby communities where his son, a police officer, began his LAPD career. For Collin Greer, 52, it is the belief that police alone cannot lower the crime rate. For Morton Kaciff, 77, it is a wish to offer the concern for strangers that officers once showed him.

All Kinds of Work

Many of the volunteers work inside police stations, doing everything from answering phones to filling out police reports to scanning crime sheets with an eye toward spotting trends. Their assistance frees officers who might otherwise get bogged down in paper work.

“It also puts more police cars on the street. That’s the important thing,” said Sgt. Bob Shallenberger of Van Nuys Division.

There are two types of volunteers, civilians such as Herkowitz and reserves. Reserves are made up of specialists who lend police their professional expertise, technical experts trained in fields such as computer work, and line reserves. Line reserves patrol the streets, armed and in uniform, with all the risks and responsibilities of regular officers.

The reserves receive varying amounts of training, from 500 hours for line reserves to a one-day orientation for specialists. Civilian volunteers can sign up for workshops and attend briefings but don’t undergo formal training.

Unlike the civilian volunteers, reserves get $15 a month to cover the cost of cleaning their uniforms and are required to work at least two shifts monthly.

Reserves clocked about 30,000 hours of work last year at Valley police stations, saving the department about $750,000, police reserve coordinator Robert Kellar said.

Joining the reserves offers a change of pace from a person’s regular job. Devonshire Division counts a computer programmer, a high school teacher, a bookkeeper and a writer for a television studio among its reserves.

Lay Groundwork

Volunteers such as Herkowitz are the purely civilian counterpart: men and women who lack training and authority to make arrests or enforce the law but, instead, help lay the groundwork for police.

Max Kerstein, for example, works eights hours every Saturday at Van Nuys Division, running computer checks on prisoners and coming up “with a fantastic number of warrants on individuals under different names,” Shallenberger said.

“We don’t have the time to go through this entire process,” Shallenberger said. “It’s very time-consuming. He would take 45 minutes checking one individual.”

Clinical psychologist Frank Zizzo, 40, also helps out at Van Nuys Division, counseling adults and adolescents. Zizzo has been a specialist reserve there since 1981, riding with patrol officers and offering advice on how to intervene in crises or resolve conflicts.

But, Zizzo says: “They probably get less from me than I get from them. . . . In dealing with a crisis situation, it’s one thing to read about it in a book and another to see it firsthand.”

Helped Catch Vandals

At Devonshire Division, 22 ham radio operators assist police surveillance efforts by staking out targeted areas and informing officers via radio when they observe criminal activity. Last March, several members of the group helped catch two Chatsworth teen-agers believed responsible for shooting out the windows of about 300 cars in Granada Hills and Chatsworth with a high-powered pellet gun, Sgt. Paul Haberman said.

Most of the civilian volunteers, many of whom are retirees looking for productive outlets, log anywhere from 8 to 40 hours each week with the police force.

“If I didn’t do it, somebody in the Police Department would have to,” said Kaciff, a six-year volunteer at North Hollywood Division who runs a program that locates merchants and managers at home in the event of burglaries at their businesses.

Kaciff described volunteering as his way of repaying police for concern they showed in checking on the health of his diabetic daughter several years ago. A friend of his daughter, unable to reach her by phone, had called police to investigate. Kaciff was home when police arrived, and they told him that had he not been there, they would have kicked down the door to see if anything was wrong. “I was so impressed, I decided I’d like to do some work in appreciation,” he said.

‘Horrified by Crime’

Greer said he signed up as a volunteer 10 years ago because he was shocked at the crime rate in Los Angeles after he arrived from Wessex, England in 1971. “I was horrified. I came from a rural, quiet area where the biggest excitement was someone stealing a bicycle. When I found out what the heck was going on, how we become victims ourselves in a way, I said that’s enough of that nonsense.”

For Gary Krystof, 39, of Northridge, who does office work at the aircraft division of Northrop Corp., his service as a reserve line officer at Devonshire Division provides a “break from the regular routine.”

“It’s a case of backing up a little in life and doing those things that had seemed interesting when I was a younger man,” Krystof said.

John Hess, 41, a 17-year veteran of the Los Angeles Fire Department, became a reserve line officer at Van Nuys Division 2 1/2 years ago. He said he works an average of five shifts a month.

“The police are just swamped. It’s just overloaded,” Hess said. “So anything that I can do just to help out, even though it’s kind of a small amount, is worth something.”

Herkowitz exhibits the same kind of pride while tracking down abandoned vehicles as a volunteer in the anti-blight effort Operation Fix Window. The campaign takes its name from the belief that repairing windows in an abandoned building will prevent further vandalism.

“I’m very proud of my contribution,” Herkowitz said. “I work very hard at it, and I put in many hours at this.”