Rancho Bernardo Wants to Lend Eyes, Ears to Police Patrol

This is one of those places where crime is not rampant in the streets. This is one of the safest communities in the city, statistics show; in fact, the crime rate here has gone down, not up, over the past four years.

This is also a place of immense community pride, where thousands of folks are living the good, idyllic life of retirement. They’ve got time on their hands; hundreds are attending college extension classes and others generously volunteer for charity and community service work.

And now some of those people with community spirit and time to kill want to reduce the crime rate--such as it is--even more. They are proposing that volunteers drive around the streets of Rancho Bernardo in two-way radio-equipped cars, to contact police if they spot vandals and burglars, or maybe deter criminals from ever showing up here in the first place.

The proposal is called a Volunteer Community-Alert Patrol. It’s sort of a Neighborhood Watch on wheels. Don’t call it a posse, they say; don’t call them vigilantes. They are not lawmen nor do they want to take law into their own hands.

They would not be armed, and they would not chase criminals. Their idea is to be additional ears and eyes for the San Diego Police Department, which protects this master-planned community of 20,000 with a single patrol car, around-the-clock.

“We wouldn’t be a bunch of old and senile people driving around with guns,” said Craig Chambers, who proposed the idea several months ago. “The volunteers would be carefully screened and carefully trained. It would be a first-class operation.

“And it is a psychological fact that when people retire, they have the need to be needed. This would serve that purpose.”

According to San Diego Police Department statistics, there were 16.24 serious crimes per 1,000 residents committed in Rancho Bernardo in 1984--one-fourth the citywide crime rate of 66.89 serious crimes per 1,000 residents.

The only neighborhoods in San Diego with a lower crime rate than Rancho Bernardo are neighboring Los Penasquitos, a bedroom community, and the San Pasqual Valley, an agricultural preserve.

In raw numbers, 333 serious crimes occurred in Rancho Bernardo in 1984, according to the police department. There were no murders, two rapes, eight robberies, five aggravated assaults, 100 burglaries (79 inside of homes, 21 inside of commercial or industrial buildings), 53 grand thefts of over $400, 140 petty thefts and 25 motor vehicle thefts.

Why would a community with relatively little crime take to the streets to fight crime?

“Any crime is bad,” said Don Clark, who heads a committee assigned by the Rancho Bernardo Community Council to study the proposal. “We want to head off crime at the pass. We don’t want any crime here at all, if we can help it.”

Clark and others say they would have little trouble enlisting volunteers to drive around the community to fight crime.

“I’ve had any number of people tell me, ‘Don, count me in!’ When I ask, ‘To what extent?’ they say, ‘Any way you need.’ One guy told me he had four loaded revolvers in his home, and he wasn’t afraid to use them. But I told him that he’s not the kind of guy we want.”

The San Diego Police Department has not yet thrown its support behind the proposal, which will go before the Rancho Bernardo Community Council on May 23.

Police Capt. Joe Schwalbach, commanding officer of the department’s northeastern station, which serves Rancho Bernardo, said he is sympathetic to the concerns of Rancho Bernardo’s residents.

“My concern is that they will overreact and start talking about making arrests and getting actively involved (in police work),” Schwalbach said. “We say, leave that to the professionals.

“But I have no problem with them being additional eyes and ears for the department. If they want to drive around, keep an eye out and report crime when they see it, that’s great. But let us be the policemen.

“And realistically, they’re not going to see that much. We (police) very seldom come across a crime in progress. They’re going to find out that riding around in a car will be very boring.”

Local proponents of the idea say crime-fighting would not be their only purpose. They could help with traffic control, be trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation for medical emergencies and help track down lost children.

The concept of volunteers keeping eye on their community from behind a steering wheel is not new. Perhaps the most sophisticated program in the United States is at Sun City, Ariz., where about 225 senior citizens--with the formal support and backing of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Dept., patrol that retirement community of 47,000 located 20 miles west of Phoenix.

The sheriff’s office there relies on the posse system, a throw back to the days of the Old West when the sheriff would call men to the town square, deputize them and give them the power to arrest the subject of their search.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department has the posse volunteer network down to a fine, modern-day science in which the sheriff, rather than giving the posse members a specific charge, allows them to operate under letter of his authority to patrol the streets, in uniform and driving marked patrol cars.

While they do not have the authority to make police arrest or to hand out traffic citations, they serve effectively as quasi-lawmen in deterring crime by their visibility and appearance of authority.

The posse members are specially trained by the sheriff’s department on criminal and traffic law and communications and how to make citizens’ arrests. And some have attended an extensive training course--similar to what sheriff’s deputies go through--that allows them to carry firearms.

Of the 225 Sun City Posse members between the ages of 50 and the mid-80s, about 50 are qualified to carry guns, said their volunteer commander, Eldon Page.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department blanket liability insurance coverage is extended to all of the 40 posse groups in the county, but the Sun City Posse is otherwise self-sufficient. Through successful, community-backed fund-raisers, the posse has purchased its own communications equipment, allowing members on patrol to eavesdrop on sheriff’s communications, and vice versa. And the posse has purchased its own fleet of 10 patrol cars, equipped with two-way radios, flashing light bars, spotlights and even the official sheriff’s department seal.

“Deterrence is our mission,” Page said. “We don’t figure on catching a guy in the act, because we have very little crime here. We like to say we’ve got the lowest crime rate in the United States.”

The Sun City Posse puts as many as four patrol cars on the streets in morning and evening hours, but coverage is only sporadic after midnight, Page said.

In 1984, the posse drove more than 184,000 miles on patrol and put in more than 70,000 man hours, Page figured.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Lt. Ray Blanchette, who oversees the department’s posses, said the Sun City group “is a definite benefit to our department.”

Has the group helped reduce crime?

“That’s difficult to measure,” Blanchette said. “We can sit here all day and argue that if the posse wasn’t out there, there would be 10 more burglaries. But we can’t say that. We do know, however, that by comparing that community to others of that same size around the country, the crime rate is much lower. The fact that there are those patrol cars in the area, and they are quite visible, might cause a burglar to think twice about going in there.”

Page said a similar volunteer patrol force for Rancho Bernardo could be successful if support is given by the San Diego Police Department.

“No police department ever has enough ears and eyes in the community. That should be their function,” Page said. “But they shouldn’t try to set up their own law enforcement agency.”

The Rancho Bernardo supporters of a civilian patrol force recently visited Sun City to evaluate the posse system and generally were impressed by what they saw.

In fact, the only active opponent to a volunteer patrol force here is Ralph Bing, who is chairman of the Rancho Bernardo Community Alert, the area’s network of 290 neighborhood block watch captains.

Bing argues that rather than encouraging volunteers to take to mobile patrol, civic leaders should lobby for more police on the Rancho Bernardo beat and work for more support for the home-based community alert program.

“We need more police up here. Anything else would be a Band-Aid remedy. I don’t believe this (community patrol) could even be a fake substitute for trained security personnel.

Clark, who is heading the study into the community alert patrol, does not deny the value of the established neighborhood watch program, but argues that the patrol could supplement it by watching commercial areas of Rancho Bernardo, as well as paying especially close attention to homes of people on vacation.

San Diego City Councilman Bill Mitchell, whose district includes Rancho Bernardo, said the proposal for a citizens patrol force shows that “the people of Rancho Bernardo are crying out for a higher level of police services--even to the point where they’re willing to go out and do it themselves.”

He said he did not want to encourage citizens to take to the streets to do deterrence and surveillance work because “that’s a function of the police department. But if we don’t get more cops, what else can we do? When people are willing to get in cars and use sophisticated radios and undergo training to work with the police, that shows they’re pretty serious about it.”

“Just because Rancho Bernardo has a low crime rate doesn’t mean they’re satisfied. They don’t want any crime,” Mitchell said. “And Rancho Bernardo is a unique community. When they don’t like something, by God, they get on the stick and do something about it.”