Occasional Officers : Police, Sheriff’s Reserves Help Fill Law Enforcement Gaps as Volunteers in the War on Crime

Patty Williams spends most nights serving cocktails at a restaurant in Acton. But at least four nights a month, she straps on a gun and cruises the streets of Pacoima.

Williams is not hanging out with a gang or dealing drugs. The gun is a police service revolver, and she rides in a Los Angeles Police Department black-and-white.

Williams is one of the 740 reserve officers in the Los Angeles Police Department and 1,000 reserve deputies in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who donate part of their time each month to chase criminals down alleys, patrol crime-ridden streets on horseback, scour canyons for lost hikers and perform most of the other duties of their full-time counterparts.

For Los Angeles police reservists, the only monetary compensation is a $15 monthly stipend to cover dry-cleaning of uniforms. Sheriff’s reservists are paid $1 a year to qualify for the department’s liability insurance, which covers only paid employees.

Officials say reserves are an increasingly essential part of the war against crime in the San Fernando and neighboring valleys as law enforcement agencies struggle to keep up with growth in those areas.

“The reserves fill in the gaps,” said Sgt. Bob Kellar, who is in charge of reserve officer training at the Los Angeles Police Academy in Elysian Park. “It adds up to a tremendous contribution to our police needs in the city of Los Angeles, not to mention tax savings.”

The reserves saved the city at least $1.5 million last year, Kellar said. The figure is four times that amount by the reckoning of James C. Lombardi, a Police Department reservist who is president of the California Reserve Peace Officers Assn., which represents the more than 10,000 reservists at law enforcement agencies statewide. Counting the benefits for the equivalent number of full-time officers and other savings, the reserves saved the city about $6 million, Lombardi said.

Sheriff’s Department reserves saved county taxpayers more than $11.8 million in the 1988-89 fiscal year, according to Sheriff’s Department statistics.

Reservists come from all walks of life but share a love for police work, Kellar said.

“We have everything from zookeepers to bus drivers, plumbers, electricians, bankers, lawyers--you name it, we’ve got it,” he said.

Some reservists intended to become full-time police officers when they were younger but wound up in other careers. As reservists, they say, they can satisfy their interest in police work while continuing to make a living in other professions.

Many of them want to fight crime in their communities, while some have special skills--such as search-and-rescue training, ham radio proficiency or foreign language skills--that police departments need on a part-time basis but cannot afford full time.

“I always wanted to be a police officer,” said Stan Brittsan, a Thousand Oaks resident who supervises telephone repair technicians for Pacific Bell and is a reserve observer in a Los Angeles police helicopter every other weekend. “But I became interested in another career, so I put aside police work. Later, I thought, ‘I’m pushing 30 years old. Maybe it’s too late for a career change, but I can become involved in law enforcement by becoming a reserve officer.’ ”

Along with having the same responsibilities as regular officers, many reservists face the same risks.

John Cresto, a La Crescenta computer consultant and reservist who was assigned to the Rampart Division about three years ago, said he was helping other officers make an arrest when shots rang out.

“I was standing in the middle of the street and somebody decided to do a drive-by shooting at the black-and-whites,” Cresto said. No one was hit, and other officers later arrested the gunman, said Cresto, who is now assigned to the Police Department’s Foothill Division.

In the last 30 years, at least 11 sheriff’s reservists have been killed in the line of duty, said Sheriff’s Capt. Stanley Backman, commander of the department’s Reserve Forces Bureau. Among Los Angeles police reservists, one has been killed on duty over the past 21 years, Lombardi said.

Years ago, Los Angeles police reservists were mostly assigned routine patrol and desk assignments, Kellar said. But today reservists often are assigned special duties such as operating the Immediate Booking and Release System, or IBARS, in which arrested suspects are booked in the field during gang or prostitution sweeps, and they take part in foot patrols in crime-plagued neighborhoods, he said.

“We are increasingly relying on our reserves,” Kellar said. “We are utilizing them more and more and in a more varied manner.”

Using reserves for special assignments gives the Police Department’s 7,900 full-time officers more time to respond to the overwhelming number of emergency calls that take up almost all of an officer’s shift, Kellar said.

Unlike often overworked full-time officers, reserves have the time to do the kind of nuts and bolts, old-fashioned police work that has become a luxury in Los Angeles, officials said. That includes patrolling city parks to keep away drug dealers or even taking so-called “community enhancement” reports from residents complaining of potholes or other non-criminal neighborhood nuisances. Police send those reports to whatever agency has jurisdiction over the particular problem.

“I like the idea of an officer being able to help rather than saying, ‘Hey, there’s nothing I can do,’ ” said Sgt. Gary Merrifield, the reserve coordinator for the Police Department’s Foothill Division, which serves the northeast Valley.

“If I use these reserves to the maximum to relieve a patrol officer, then what I’ve done is give the patrol the little extra time to handle extra calls,” he said.

Of the 740 police reservists, 225 are classified as “line reserves”--meaning they carry a gun and are authorized to perform the same duties as full-time officers. About an equal number are “technical reserves” who do not carry a gun and are typically assigned desk duty or other administrative tasks. The remaining 300 are “reserve specialists”--people who have expertise in computers, for example, or clergymen who volunteer as department chaplains.

The Sheriff Department’s 1,000 reservists include 698 uniformed deputies, with the rest divided among the department’s Mountain Search and Rescue Team and Mounted Posse. About 450 of the uniformed reservists perform the same functions as full-time deputies. The other 248 are specialists assigned to a variety of details, such as the Media Specialists Company, which helps produce training films for deputies.

The 38 reservists and 45 civilian volunteers in the Media Specialists Company produce, among other films, a series based on shootings involving deputies, said Sgt. Mark Aguirre, supervisor of the Sheriff’s Media Resources Section, which oversees the company. The 35-millimeter films, aimed at demonstrating the right and wrong procedures, are videotaped and sold or loaned to law enforcement agencies nationwide, he said.

Many of the company’s volunteers are successful Hollywood directors, writers and directors of photography, Aguirre said. “They are motivated by a basic civic pride and a willingness to become involved and a real dedication toward law enforcement,” he said.

In both departments, only reservists who undergo the same training as full-time officers are authorized to carry a gun on and off duty.

Line reserve recruits in the Police Department train for almost 10 months at night and on weekends to receive the same amount of training as full-time officer recruits do in six months. Technical reservists graduate after 17 weeks, Kellar said. In the Sheriff’s Department, reservists go through an 18-week academy, also at night and on weekends, and those who want to join the mountain rescue team receive additional training.

Both reserve programs have fewer participants than when they were begun during World War II to replace officers who had joined the military, officials said.

The Police Department’s contingent of 740 is “at about as high a figure as we’ve ever been in recent years,” Kellar said, although the number is far short of the record 2,000 men and women who signed up in the mid-1940s. Still, the figure represents a large increase over the all-time low of about 150 in the early 1950s, Kellar said.

Lombardi said minimum training requirements for reservists--in effect since passage of a state law in 1981--have led to a decline in interest in such work.

“The requirements are heavy,” he said. “That discourages a lot of people, but that’s fine because we’re after the finished product. We’re not out to just give a gun to somebody.”

Reservists stay with the department for an average of nine years, about as long as the average full-time officer serves, Lombardi said.

Backman of the Sheriff’s Reserve Forces Bureau blames attrition and a general loss of interest in volunteer work for the decline in his ranks from 1,200 in 1982 to today’s 1,000.

“It’s more difficult to recruit volunteers for anything,” Backman said. “I think it’s because so many people work at least one job and sometimes two jobs apiece. They just aren’t as volunteer-minded as the previous generation.”

Nevertheless, hundreds of young professionals in typically high-paying jobs--the average California reservist is 32, with an annual income of $40,000--donate an average of 32 hours each month to help fight crime.

On a recent Friday night in the Foothill Division, for example, Williams the cocktail waitress teamed up with Cresto the computer consultant and a Lockheed engineer to arrest a suspected drug dealer sitting in a car next to a Tujunga park known for drug dealing.

The officers were patrolling the park because neighbors regularly complain of drug dealers there, Sgt. Merrifield said. Though they found no large amounts of drugs in the car and ended up arresting the man on three outstanding traffic warrants, the officers achieved their main objective: visibility.

“The reserves augment our manpower,” Merrifield said. “The guy’s away from the park. People have seen the arrest made. The park will be dead for the rest of the night, and we’ve put a lid on it.”

While many in the reserve unit usually patrol the streets in cars, others ride horseback, fly in helicopters or hike through rugged terrain, looking for missing people. The mounted reservists supply their own horses and pay for their upkeep.

Ben Pedrick, for example, searches for downed planes or lost hikers in the hills behind Santa Clarita when he isn’t working as an agent for Great-West Life Assurance Co. in downtown Los Angeles.

A member of the all-reserve Sheriff’s Mountain Search and Rescue Team in the Santa Clarita Valley since 1966, the 61-year-old Granada Hills resident has witnessed the kinds of emergencies that he insures clients against in his other career.

Two years ago, a lengthy search for a lost motorcyclist ended when Pedrick and other team members found the woman’s body in an open field. She apparently had died of heat exhaustion after abandoning her disabled motorcycle to seek help on foot, Pedrick said.

Pedrick assisted in removing the body of a man killed Aug. 15 when a private plane crashed into a steep ravine off Templin Highway, north of Castaic. While county Fire Department paramedics prepared the injured pilot to be hoisted into a rescue helicopter, Pedrick and other rescue team members were flown to the scene in a sheriff’s helicopter to search for victims who might have been thrown from the plane.

Pedrick said participation in the search-and-rescue team allows him to pursue an interest in mountaineering and hiking. He said he enjoys the camaraderie of the other 14 reservists on the Santa Clarita team.

“When I was in college, I was a rock climber,” Pedrick said. “When I got into my 30s, I had a family, so I couldn’t go rock climbing anymore. This is local. And it’s a fun group of guys to be with--everyone there is interested in helping people.”

Indeed, many reservists say the most rewarding part of the work is helping others while taking a break from making a living.

“A lot of us got into it because we wanted to do something for our communities,” Williams said. “You can maintain your enthusiasm. It’s not like a regular job where you have to go in every day.”