‘Most Wanted’ List : Sheriff’s Deputies Are in Strong Demand, and Dept. Is Even Recruiting Out of State

The helicopters whirring in the background in the radio ad are Duke I and Duke II, named after John Wayne by Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates. The voice is that of Patrick Wayne, the actor’s son.

“I know my dad would have been proud to have had his nickname connected with the outstanding men and women flying as deputy sheriffs for the County of Orange,” Wayne says. “Choose an exciting career you can be proud of. . . .”

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department has been growing faster than any major police agency in the United States, and for the last six months Sheriff’s Department personnel have been engaged in the most active law enforcement recruiting drive in the country, a Times survey has found.

The effort is tough because law enforcement recruiters have found that they have to recruit far more people than they have jobs. Rigorous training and admissions tend to weed out more than 90% of the candidates, recruiters say.

“It takes 100 applicants to come up with six people who finally put on a uniform,” said Capt. Andy Romero, personnel and training director for the Sheriff’s Department.

Combine this process with the kind of rapid population growth that has taken place in Orange County and the result is a major recruiting demand.

“When I was a deputy (in the early 1960s), the cities were growing so much that some people predicted that the Sheriff’s Department would be about out of business in 10 years,” Gates said in a recent interview. “Well, look at us now.”

When Gates joined the department in 1961, it had 220 sworn officers and 61 civilian personnel. Today it has 1,121 sworn officers and 738 civilians.

The biggest jump came after 1984, when U.S. District Judge William P. Gray of Los Angeles began ordering a reduction in overcrowding at the main jail in Santa Ana. That has meant new jail facilities and pressure to staff them. Since then, Gates’ number of sworn personnel has jumped 45%, to 1,121 from 772.

At the same time Gates has been in court trying to persuade Gray to give him a reasonable amount of time to do something about the problem of overcrowding, he has been flooding the market with color brochures showing sheriff’s deputies in helicopters, on Harbor Patrol boats and riding through the desert on motorcycles.

“Exceed your expectations,” began the summer theme. “Be an Orange County deputy sheriff.”

The task of finding qualified deputies fell to Romero, who heads a team that includes three full-time recruiters, five county personnel workers, a paid advertising firm and volunteer help from Patrick Wayne and actor Chuck Connors, a close friend of Gates.

Gone are the days when the sheriff could hold one or two training classes a year, each with about 25 recruits.

Last year, for the first time, the Sheriff’s Department had to conduct overlapping training classes, with 50 or more recruits in each. This year it has three classes going at once. While the classes include recruits for other police agencies, most are being readied to be sheriff’s deputies. The training period is 18 weeks.

Salary Levels

Deputy trainees earn $1,737 a month, while those fresh out of the academy make $1,936. Salaries for sheriff’s deputies can go as high as $2,591 a month.

To keep up with the demand, recruiters have taken their brochures and test papers to Northern California, Iowa, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Nebraska. Romero’s staff also wrote to every college in the United States asking it to post a job notice.

“We had literally tapped out the market in our area,” Romero said. “We had to go outside the state to come up with the numbers we needed.”

About 25% of this year’s recruits are from outside Southern California, he added.

Part of the reason for success was knowing where to look, said Sgt. Rex Hatch, who is in charge of recruitment and background investigations.

“We went to targeted areas, where we knew the employment situation was not very good and people would be looking for work,” he said. “We found people receptive to coming to Southern California to live.”

Applicant a Police Chief

One applicant, he said, was a police chief and vice president of a family company, yet he was eager to sign up with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Police departments in many areas helped out by providing the Sheriff’s Department with space to conduct its written tests. In Utah, Hatch said, the state employment office was delighted to cooperate because it could use the recruitment drive as an example of what it was doing to try to help Utah residents find employment.

James De Kruif of Sheldon, Iowa, was one of the first applicants recruited by the Sheriff’s Department in its first experimental search out of state. De Kruif went on to be named chaplain class, primarily an honorary title bestowed on someone who shows leadership.

De Kruif, married and the father of a boy, worked in a family business in Iowa. He said he had never thought about living in Orange County until he saw the recruiters’ ads in a local newspaper. Once he made an initial visit to Orange County for further testing, he was convinced that it was the perfect opportunity for him. He wanted a law enforcement career, but there were no such jobs available near his home. He is delighted with the way it worked out.

“There is a mystique about Southern California back where I come from,” De Kruif said.

Despite initial success, the recruitment drive is not over yet. A new group of sheriff’s deputies must be trained in time to help staff the 380-bed intake/release center, which is scheduled to open in the spring of 1987. A 5,000-bed facility will have to be built by the year 2000 to meet the county’s population growth needs. And because of pressure from Gray, the U.S. District Court judge, county supervisors are trying to build a 1,500-bed facility in Anaheim as soon as possible.

Other Suits Predicted

Elsewhere, Gates predicts that lawsuits brought about from jail overcrowding will force other municipalities across the country to expand their jail facilities, creating a need to recruit more officers to staff them.

“As I see it, we just got in ahead of the rush,” Gates said.

County officials, in reports prepared for state corrections officials, attribute the jail population growth rate since the 1970s to a combination of the county’s population growth and changes in court sentences. The county population was at 1.4 million in 1970 and jumped to 1.9 million in 1980. Today, it is estimated at 2.1 million and just this week the Southern California Assn. of Governments predicted that Orange County would grow by 50%, to 3.1 million, by the year 2010.

Legislative changes, such as mandatory jail time for drunk-driving convictions, plus “enhanced sentences reflecting the public’s hard stand on crime,” increased the average length of stay in jail from 8.5 days to 11.7, county officials said.

In response to Gray’s orders to ease jail overcrowding, the county earlier this year set up a temporary tent village at the James A. Musick branch jail that could house 320 inmates, and more permanent modular units that hold 412 beds. While awaiting new deputies to be hired and trained, Gates had his deputies work overtime. But the sheriff worried that so much extra work hours were putting a strain on his people.

“We simply had to have more deputies,” Gates said, and the recruiting effort was born.