Park Rangers Ask for More Authority to Fight Crime

On a recent springlike day, park ranger Neil Underhill sniffed the fragrant air and marveled at how few places are quite as wonderful this time of year as Orange County’s Featherly Regional Park.

As he leisurely patrolled, children played on the grass and retirees sat outside their recreational vehicles, absorbing the peace and quiet of this wooded park in Yorba Linda along the Riverside Freeway.

Come summer, however, Featherly Park becomes an entirely different place, Underhill said. The serenity is shattered nightly by revelers. Fights break out among drunk campers, and park rangers often are assaulted when they try to intervene.

“I wish you could come back here at night (then),” said Underhill, supervising ranger at the park. “It gets real dark, and you don’t want to walk into some of these campgrounds. It’s almost scary.”

The public has good reason to be afraid in county parks like Featherly, according to the Orange County Employees Assn., the union for the county’s 67 park rangers.

The union recently issued a report claiming that the county’s parks have become increasingly dangerous since 1986, when county officials stripped the rangers of their status as peace officers with authority to issue citations and make arrests.

As a result of the escalating violence, park visitors face an increased risk of being “robbed, raped and maimed,” said John H. Sawyer, the union’s general manager.

“Enter Orange County parks at your own risk--your life and property may be in danger!” Sawyer said in the report Feb. 25.

County officials vehemently deny that the 13 county parks are unsafe.

Deputy County Counsel Robert Austin said 2.1 million people visited the county’s parks last year but only 133 reported incidents that were categorized as serious.

Most of those incidents were concentrated at Featherly, O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon and Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park in San Juan Hot Springs, where camping is allowed. All but a few of the incidents, Austin said, involved relatively minor offenses such as theft and domestic fights.

Among the more serious crimes reported were a child molestation at Featherly and an attempted rape at O’Neill Park.

But Austin and other county officials said the rangers’ union is trying to intimidate the Board of Supervisors into restoring their status as peace officers. That, Austin said, would give the rangers bargaining leverage to seek better retirement benefits in the next round of negotiations. Union officials deny that, saying safety--theirs and the public’s--is their primary concern.

However, Board of Supervisors Chairman Harriett M. Wieder told Sawyer last week that the county does not intend to give in on the issue.

County park rangers were made peace officers in 1984 after county studies detailed a steady upswing in reported park crimes. Although the rangers weren’t granted full peace officer status, entitling them to wear guns, they were given powers to arrest and issue citations and law enforcement training through the Sheriff’s Department.

In 1986, county parks officials changed their minds and rescinded the peace officer status. Austin said the county took a second look at the issue and decided that the rangers’ primary purpose is to inform and help the public--not enforce the law. That, county officials said, should be left to police agencies.

The rangers complained to their union, which in turn filed a grievance with the county and a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court seeking restoration of peace officer status. A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled April 7.

As the battle goes to court, some rangers say they have to wait as long as an hour for police to respond to park incidents. For instance, a ranger was attacked in Featherly Park last summer when he tried to stop a man from beating a woman, Underhill said. The ranger was not seriously hurt.

Also at Featherly, it took Brea police 50 minutes one morning last September to respond to a call from a ranger about a man “out of control” who was beating his girlfriend and throwing things around their campsite, according to a report of the incident filed with the county.

Response Time Issue

In O’Neill Regional Park, according to another park incident report, rangers waited from midnight until after 1 a.m. last May for a sheriff’s unit to help break up a party where beer bottles and cans were being thrown. By the time sheriff’s deputies arrived, the party-goers had abandoned their campsite.

Officials at the Brea Police Department, which serves Yorba Linda, said they try to answer every call as promptly as possible but that they respond to the most urgent calls first. On a busy night, Brea Police Lt. Jim Winder said, there may be several urgent calls.

Orange County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Lt. Richard Olson declined to comment on the response time issue, saying he did not want to interject himself into the park rangers’ dispute.

The response time complaint is not new. As early as 1976, a county parks and recreation study cited slow response time as a reason why park rangers needed law enforcement status. The study found that the average response time of sheriff’s deputies to the regional parks was 33 minutes. It also found that police agencies were reluctant to respond to infractions involving dogs off leashes, illegal fires and illegal camping.

Called as Last Resort

“This has resulted in many violators being let off without paying the consequences for their deliberate infractions,” the study concluded.

Today, county parks officials say they are satisfied with police performance.

“It’s been my experience that when we call them, they roll,” said Tony Gimbrone, county parks district supervisor. “They get here as quickly as they possibly can. We’ve always had complete support.”

Gimbrone added that police are called only as a last resort. Rangers first ask the visitors to cooperate or leave.

But according to Brett Petroff, a former park ranger assigned to recruit rangers, “People realize the ranger doesn’t really have any authority. We can tell people what to do, but if they don’t obey we have to call the police.”

Citizen’s Arrest

The rangers do have power--the same as anyone else--to make a citizen’s arrest. Petroff pointed out, however, that in making a citizen’s arrest the ranger exposes himself to civil liability. Under the cloak of peace officer status, he said, the ranger is immune from personal liability.

Consequently, Petroff said, most rangers are not making citizen’s arrests.

“We don’t know how far we can or cannot go,” Petroff said. “As a result, we are not providing an adequate level of service.”

While the county is unyielding on the subject of restoring peace officer status to rangers, officials have acknowledged that a crime problem exists, primarily in Featherly and O’Neill parks, where scores of homeless people have set up camp in recent years.

Featherly, with its easy access from the Riverside Freeway, accounts for more than half of the incidents in county parks, according to a December report by R. J. Novello, a director of the county Environmental Management Agency, which administers the park system. Most of those incidents involve theft, intoxication or domestic fights, the report said.

Refunds Given

A big problem at the park, Novello said, is that it is unstaffed between midnight and 7 a.m. Campers must go down to the park entrance and use the pay telephone to call police.

During this unstaffed period, rangers told Novello, they have received a regular stream of complaints from campers. The rangers estimated that about a third of the refunds given to campers during the past two years--for about 700 to 800 days of camping--were due to complaints of inadequate security and safety.

To fill the gap, Novello recommended--and rangers said county supervisors recently approved--the hiring of an armed security guard. The guard is to start work in July.

Novello also found that the majority of the park problems were caused by a small contingent of troublemakers who take advantage of the county’s lenient 60-day eviction policy. Novello recommended that the eviction stay be increased to a year to keep troublemakers from returning every two months. County officials are mulling over that proposal.

With the busy summer months approaching, Underhill said he and other Featherly rangers are tensing for what promises to be a lot of action. If past experience is any indication, he said with a sigh, rangers will be verbally assaulted, maybe even attacked.

For now, though, he said there is peace in the campground.