Orange County’s ‘Small-Town’ Cops

It’s not what you’d expect to find in an Orange County police station. It’s what you’d expect in an up-to-date small town: just five desks, a computer terminal, a camera for taking mug shots, a small holding cell.

Except for a beat-up bicycle in one corner, everything looks new. The total force of one lieutenant, three sergeants and three patrol officers moved in about a year ago. Before that, they had a station only about a third this size.

As you’d expect in a small-town department, things were quiet. It was 11 in the morning--no calls yet. Both officers on this shift--Sgt. Bill Bechtel and Officer Frank Rudisill--were in the station taking care of odds and ends. If things remained quiet, they might walk the beat, dropping in to say hello to the shopkeepers they have come to know.

But unlike a small town, their beat was likely to swell to enormous proportions almost every day. On an average day, about 28,000 people in 23,000 cars putter about their 1/6th-square-mile jurisdiction, a population density considerably greater than Manhattan’s. On certain days, the population can be twice that.

“It’s a lot different here,” Bechtel said. “It’s like getting back to old, traditional beat-type policing, but in a very modern setting.”

The setting is the mammoth South Coast Plaza shopping mall. It has always had its own private security force, but in the mid-’70s, the Costa Mesa Police Department opened a station there, too. Officers were being called to the mall so often that a permanent station there would save time, the department reasoned.

The mall management was so delighted that it not only built but furnished the new station at the mall’s expense.

And it’s surprising--to me, at least--to discover that shopping-center duty pleases the officers, too.

“I like it here a lot better than on normal patrol,” Rudisill said. “Each officer here has a different reason. Personally, I like it because almost everyone I deal with is under arrest. On patrol, most are not. You get nuisance calls, barking dogs, family fights. Here I investigate. I build cases.”

“People call the cops for everything,” Bechtel said. “They want you to help them defrost their refrigerators, help them out of bed, or maybe their parakeet died. Really. And the policy of this police department is that if someone wants a cop, one is sent out.”

“The chances of an exciting pursuit here are about nil,” Rudisill said. “You get none of the kind of fun things on patrol. But you get some good foot pursuits.”

You get those, he explained, because while shoplifters and credit card frauds may simply argue with store security officers, sometimes they bolt when they see a police officer approaching. “We’ve had to run them down and tackle some of them,” Rudisill said.

And while violent crime is extremely rare--the last armed robbery was about four years ago--officers have occasionally unholstered their guns in the parking lot while apprehending car burglars.

“Vehicle burglars are our big concern right now,” Rudisill explained. “We consider them potentially dangerous.” He reached into his desk and brought out an evil-looking folding knife with “Tiger” stamped on its handle. “I took this off a 15-year-old kid who was on probation for murder,” Rudisill said. “He was burglarizing a car. The potential is there.”

“Vehicle burglaries kind of go in streaks,” Bechtel said. “When you catch them--and we do get quite a few--things simmer down for a long time.”

The station’s statistics for June are fairly typical, they said. There were five vehicles stolen and five cases of items stolen from vehicles. There were eight grand thefts (stealing anything worth $400 or more), one purse snatch and one case of malicious mischief.

There were eight cases of commercial burglary, which is the charge if someone goes into a store intending to shoplift. If intent can’t be proved, and items worth less than $400 are stolen, the charge is petty theft, which is this police station’s stock and trade. There were 51 petty theft cases in June.

They have a closet full of shoplifting paraphernalia at the station that has been impounded from suspects: women’s girdles with room to stuff hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise; a man’s sport coat with huge pockets sewn on the inside, a box in a shopping bag with a trap door cut in the bottom for stashing anything up to small appliances.

“We had one guy in here who had an entire man’s suit rolled up and stuck into one of his socks,” Rudisill said.

Some, such as the grab-and-run thieves, are not the slightest bit subtle. They park at the door, walk in, grab something and run. Several table saws--yes, table saws-- were stolen from a department store that way.

Last week, someone pulled the well-known switch at a jewelry store, Bechtel said. You ask to see the uncut diamonds, pick one up for a closer look, then put back a fake instead of the real one.

“We get some major crooks in here,” Rudisill said. “Any crook who does it for a living is going to wind up here. This is either the biggest or one of the biggest shopping centers in the world. Every one of them knows where South Coast Plaza is and what it is.”