LAPD Veteran Trades Mean Streets for a Slower Beat

Glamorous crime fighters and elusive drug dealers are about as common in Whitefish, Mont., as lumberjacks are in Los Angeles.

But 25-year Los Angeles Police Department veteran Dave Dolson, a former San Fernando Valley captain who lived in Valencia, has left his big-city job to be police chief in not-so-wild Whitefish, a timber and resort town of about 4,000.

Whitefish, five miles from one end to the other, was never the scene of a glitzy television cop show. It is a town whose police statistician cannot remember the last homicide (Los Angeles had almost 800 last year) but is sure there hasn’t been one for at least eight years.

“I’ve asked that question before,” Dolson said, “and nobody could remember.”

Dolson retired from his $72,000-a-year job with the Los Angeles police in early August. But, he said, his new $27,000-a-year salary plus LAPD retirement benefits make the move “only a slight pay cut.” The country life style makes the trade-off a plus, he said.

Community-Oriented Work

And he is getting an education in community-oriented police work.

Dolson had worked for six years in the Foothill Division, in the northeast Valley, before being moved to West Los Angeles for his last 18 months as a Los Angeles police officer. He was patrol commander in Foothill, an area with considerable drug and gang problems, for four years.

In Los Angeles, “just a routine traffic stop can be a cocaine bust,” Dolson said, and officers are so busy that they have little time for citizens’ requests for help in non-criminal matters.

In Whitefish, police often deliver messages or help people locked out of their cars, he said.

Dolson supervised more than 150 full-time uniformed officers in Los Angeles. Now, he has eight full-time officers and some support staff, including an animal warden who also writes parking tickets.

All his officers live in town and carry portable two-way radios while off duty. The entire police force can respond to an emergency within minutes, Dolson said.

“In Los Angeles,” Dolson said, “it was my experience that most of the officers lived outside the city, or at least in a relatively safe suburban area. For the most part, they weren’t part of the community they were policing, and there are both pros and cons to that approach.

“Here, all of the officers live in the city. . . . They are part of the community. When they’re not on duty, they’re shopping in town or they’re recreating in town. I think it does heighten their concern for the community.”

Dolson’s home in Whitefish is on the ninth hole of a golf course, where the worst disturbance in recent memory occurred when a black bear interrupted a round by trudging across a green.

‘Timing Was Just Right’

According to Dolson, crime in Whitefish from January to September of this year meant: 2 rapes, 1 robbery, 14 stolen cars, 3 aggravated assaults, 27 burglaries and 134 thefts.

Dolson first went to Whitefish on vacation; some of his wife’s relatives live in a town nearby. This summer, his 25th Los Angeles police anniversary--which means a pension of more than half an officer’s salary--coincided with the opening for the chief’s job in Whitefish, and “the timing was just right,” he said.

“We get a lot of people who come here on a visit and fall in love with the place,” Whitefish businessman Pat Sullivan said. “That’s the way it is with our chief.”

Dolson said he misses late-night eateries and morning newspapers, but has found it possible in Whitefish to pursue his passion for Louis Armstrong-style Dixieland jazz.

In his Valley days, Dolson and the Jazzin’ Babies band could be heard Wednesday nights at the Red Vest Pizza Parlor in Sylmar. Now he keeps his soprano saxophone and clarinet in tune with the Good Tyme Jass Band, playing an occasional gig for a new audience--the fish-fry circuit.