Sheriff’s Deputies in Antelope Valley Work a Tough, Lonely Beat

They patrol the deserts and mountains of Los Angeles County’s last frontier in Chevy Blazers, carrying semiautomatic rifles along with the Sheriff Department’s standard-issue shotguns and pistols.

They take on wandering bears, paramilitary groups, escaped horses, desert nomads, poachers and drug-dealing urban gang members who have set up shop in the Antelope Valley desert.

And they like it.

“I’m like my own station,” said Deputy Richard Ingalls, who is the deputy in the unincorporated desert areas of Lake Los Angeles, Littlerock, Sun Village and Pearblossom. “I’m my own detective. I do my own follow-up work.”

Unlike police officers who commute to their beats from distant suburban refuges, Ingalls works out of his home in the far rural reaches of the Antelope Valley station’s 1,500-square-mile patrol area. Like frontier sheriffs of old, the community deputies are well-known and often the only law around.

“Let’s face it, they’re out there by themselves,” said Sgt. Ron Shreves, spokesman for the Antelope Valley station. “There are situations where bravado alone is not going to prevail. Maturity is a big factor. You need someone experienced, someone able to talk to people.”

The Antelope Valley community deputy program was created five years ago to respond to complaints in Acton and Agua Dulce about slow response times and minimal contact with the Sheriff’s Department. Increasing population and crime subsequently led to creation of a community deputy in the eastern valley and one in the western mountain communities of Leona Valley. The only similar patrols in the county are resident deputies in Gorman and on Catalina Island.

“It’s a necessity out here,” said Greg Gerard, principal of Challenger Middle School in Lake Los Angeles, where 15,000 residents live amid desert buttes. “It’s the only link we have. Prior to that, we would call the department and get a car in a half an hour or maybe four or five hours.”

Jim Gary, former president of the Agua Dulce Civic Assn., said the patrol has improved police protection and community relations during the day, when a deputy is on patrol.

But at night, Agua Dulce residents believe they do not get enough service when other, rotating deputies are less familiar with the winding roads and stark canyons south of Acton, Gary said.

“Ninety percent of the people still want quicker response times,” he said. “Under the best conditions, it takes 20 minutes.”

Some residents have said the Sheriff’s Department should consider shifting Agua Dulce into the Santa Clarita station’s jurisdiction. Sheriff’s officials at the Lancaster station said they are working to improve coverage and expect a new Palmdale station to improve matters, because deputies will be based closer to Acton and Agua Dulce and will be able to spend more time there.

But deputies also said the potential for slower response times comes with the territory.

A new problem for deputies is gangs, particularly in Lake Los Angeles and Sun Village. Local youths, some of whose parents moved from the city to escape urban threats, are claiming allegiance to Los Angeles-area gangs and causing problems in schools and neighborhoods.

“It’s a very big shock to the parents,” Ingalls said. “They say, ‘We moved here to get away from that.’ And you tell them: ‘You have to make a stand.’ ”

Ingalls, 32, oversees a vast and diverse territory, about 400 square miles. Two other deputies help police the area bounded by the Kern County line on the north, the city limits of Lancaster and Palmdale on the west, the San Bernardino Mountains on the south and the San Bernardino County line on the east.

On a crisp, sunny morning recently, Ingalls cruised from the peach fields of Pearblossom into Littlerock and Sun Village. Ranch-style houses with horse corrals alternated with tumbledown shacks and squalid trailer parks. Ingalls pointed out several of the local “rock houses” and surveyed a known drug location where two vacant-eyed women slumped on the front steps. He has put six houses out of the rock cocaine business in the past year.

In addition to the cocaine trade--run primarily by gang members who sell in the Sun Village area and in Palmdale and Lancaster--Ingalls’ turf has been home to heavily armed, well-disciplined members of outlaw motorcycle gangs who use remote spots for the production and sale of methamphetamine.

And even among non-criminal residents, including many deputies and officers from other departments who live in the Antelope Valley, guns and ferocious dogs are common household items.