Panel Calls for Arming City Rangers

An advisory board on Monday recommended that the City Council permit city park rangers to carry handguns on patrol.

“This is our first step in making sure our rangers are protected,” said Sean Mill, chairman of the city’s Recreation and Community Advisory board.

The board voted 5 to 0 to endorse arming the rangers and placing them under the supervision of the Police Department as well as the Recreation and Community Agency, which currently oversees the five permanent and eight part-time rangers.

Under the recommendation, only full-time rangers would be armed.

The rangers currently carry batons, mace and two-way radios when they patrol the city’s 38 parks, but Mill and others have argued that they must be armed to deal with a rising crime rate in city parks.

“They need the guns very badly,” Mill said. ‘If one of them gets wounded or killed, I don’t want to look back in hindsight and say we should have given them guns.”

No park ranger has ever been stabbed or shot while on duty, city officials said.

Six Orange County cities employ park rangers. If the City Council accepts the recommendation, Santa Ana would be the first to arm its rangers. All state and federal rangers in California are armed.

The advisory board proposed arming rangers last year, but a report by the city manager’s staff concluded in November that guns were not necessary.

Mill raised the issue at the March 19 City Council meeting and told the council that gangs were a growing problem in the parks. Several council members asked City Manager David N. Ream to re-examine the possibility of arming the rangers.

Ream has said that if the rangers are equipped with guns, they will have to be assigned to the Police Department to make sure they have adequate weapons supervision. Currently, rangers undergo 360 hours of reserve officer classes, which include training with firearms.

The park ranger program was launched in Santa Ana nine years ago to combat vandalism in the parks. Since the patrols began, vandalism has dropped from 9,000 incidents a month to about 1,000 a month, Park Director Allen Doby said. Besides patrolling, the rangers are also in charge of locking up restroom facilities and closing up parks at nights.