Surf and Tough Turf: Lifeguards on the Beat : Crime: Accustomed to fighting riptides, Southland lifeguards are now battling a rise in guns, brawls and booze.

The lifeguard with the pistol on his hip and the handcuffs on his belt slammed his Jeep to a shuddering stop and peered into the 9 p.m. darkness. He bolted out the door and crouched five feet from his prey.

“Get out of there now, you . . . “ lifeguard Rick Reisenhofer screamed at the man. “If you don’t crawl out of there in 10 seconds, I’m gonna kill you.” The man crawled out from the brush behind lifeguard headquarters.

How did Reisenhofer see his man in the dark? “His neon shorts gave him away,” the lifeguard said with a laugh. He handcuffed the man, sat him on the ground and went off to interview witnesses to a brawl.

Just another Friday night at Bolsa Chica State Beach.

As the sun sets and the families pack up to leave the beach, their places are taken by a different crowd, one drawn mainly by the fire rings that line the sand and offer the chance for nighttime barbecues, starlit evenings, good fellowship--and the occasional fight.

Fifty yards from the point where the man in the fluorescent pink swimsuit allegedly broke a bottle over a stranger’s head, two dozen young men and women from the Berendo Street Baptist Church in Koreatown discussed theology around a blazing fire.

Not far from them, a similar-sized congregation from the Open Bible Church in Pico Rivera sang hymns in Spanish.

Elsewhere on the beach, families gathered for reunions, friends barbecued hamburgers, men and women cuddled in sleeping bags and co-workers celebrated the end of another week, often by hoisting a beer or two while waiting for the hot dogs to cook.

Alcohol is allowed at two state beaches in Orange County that are open at night--Bolsa Chica and Huntington--and the lifeguards say that is a main cause of their problems.

A week ago , a lifeguard stopped Nicholas Joseph Caliri Jr. just past midnight at an exit from Huntington State Beach on suspicion of drunk driving. After the lifeguard returned to his car to check Caliri’s license and to see if there were any warrants for his arrest, Caliri fired two pistol shots at the lifeguard, police said. The lifeguard ducked and returned the fire, killing Caliri.

The fire rings, the booze and other attractions can draw almost 20,000 people to Huntington and Bolsa Chica beaches on a good Friday night, lifeguards say. At times, all 5,000 parking spaces at the two beaches are full and scores of cars wait outside on Pacific Coast Highway for a space to open.

Los Angeles County has only about 20 fire rings, all at Dockweiler Beach, just south of Los Angeles International Airport, and doesn’t allow alcohol, said County Lifeguard Capt. Tom Viren.

Alcohol has been prohibited on Los Angeles beaches, except for special permits issued for occasions like weddings, for at least 15 years, lifeguards said. That ban has worked to “reduce the number of drownings we’ve had” along the 31 miles of beach and to “reduce the tensions on the beach,” Viren said.

But even without the lure of booze, on a good Friday night in the summer, 25,000 to 30,000 people may show up on the beaches around Santa Monica and Venice.

Los Angeles County lifeguards don’t carry guns, although they are allowed to arrest people for violating beach rules, Viren said.

Lifeguards at beaches operated by Orange County cities don’t carry guns either, officials said, but the state beach permanent lifeguards do. With their blue uniforms, guns, nightsticks and handcuffs, they function more as cops who also happen to swim than as lifeguards.

Dan Sforza, 30, looks like a walking advertisement for a lifeguard--with his blond good looks, 6-foot, 175-pound frame and Wayfarer sunglasses--as he starts his evening shift.

But he looks more like a cop when he puts the navy blue trousers on over his red bathing suit, checks his .38-caliber revolver and makes sure the Remington shotgun in his car is ready for action.

At 6 p.m., the beach is peopled by the day-crowd stragglers. Men and women play football, volleyball and paddle ball; they toss Frisbees and softballs. Bicyclists, joggers and an occasional person in a wheelchair stake out their spots on the concrete walking path.

Before the sun sets, Sforza cites one man for having his dog on the beach and takes a 21-year-old from Glendale off to the Huntington Beach police station for a breath test. That occurs after Sforza watches the man toss a bottle of beer from the Volkswagen van he is driving. He had spotted Sforza’s Dodge Diplomat with flashing lights on top pulling up behind him.

The man passes the breath test at the police station; Sforza drives him back to the beach to get the van. When it doesn’t start, another lifeguard tells him he can leave it overnight this one time, but to get it out of there in the morning.

By the time the sun sets, fires are burning in most of the 550 concrete rings dotted at 10-yard intervals along the beach. The scene looks eerily Cro-Magnon, resembling a caveman’s luau.

While Sforza is seeing about Glendale man’s breath test, Reisenhofer and the other seven lifeguards on night duty patrol the sand, the parking lots and the jogger-bicycler-pedestrian strip.

The brawl involving the man in the neon-colored shorts, Gregory Hurst, 20, started as many do. Lifeguards said Hurst apparently had too much to drink, lurched over to a family of half a dozen or so gathered around the fire and started cursing them.

His friends from a U.S. Navy ship in Long Beach pulled him back. But he eventually found his way to the family again, investigators said. He allegedly insulted one woman. The family got irate. A fight began. Hurst allegedly hit one of the family men over the head with a bottle.

With fireworks from the Queen Mary visible across the water, Reisenhofer got to the fight scene in time to see the neon bathing trunks disappear in a flash around the lifeguard headquarters at the beach.

One lap in the Jeep, then another, and Reisenhofer spotted the man. Paramedics treated the injured, though no one was hospitalized. Lifeguards put Hurst in a lifeguard car and took him to Orange County Jail, where felony suspects are held. The charge: assault with a deadly weapon. Hurst’s friends were told to go back to their ship.

“This whole beach is known for fights, gangs, alcohol,” one lifeguard said. But another put a better face on things, contending that the majority of people on the beach at night cause no trouble. Still, even the optimist agreed that “It’s an urban beach with urban problems.”

The killing of Caliri was the first fatal shooting by a lifeguard in state beach history and the second one ever by an on-duty state Parks and Recreation Department officer. The previous incident occurred in November at Lake Perris Recreation Area in Riverside County. A state ranger shot an unarmed auto burglary suspect after a chase, and the Riverside County district attorney’s office determined that the shooting was justified.

Jack Roggenbuck, district superintendent for the Parks and Recreation Department, said that so far this year lifeguards have confiscated nearly a dozen firearms from visitors at Huntington, Bolsa Chica and Crystal Cove State Park beaches. Crystal Cove, in southern Orange County, isn’t open at night.

Last year, lifeguards at the beaches arrested 198 people and issued 1,000 citations, Roggenbuck said, with most of the action coming on the 4 1/2 miles of Huntington and Bolsa Chica beaches; 100 of the arrests were for driving under the influence.

Roggenbuck, who started his career as a lifeguard at Huntington state beach in 1967, said alcohol has been allowed as long as he can remember. The situation may change, he said.

About eight years ago, possession and consumption of booze was banned from the northern quarter of Bolsa Chica beach after numerous arrests for intoxication and fights, he said. Glass containers are banned too, after too many people cut their feet.

“Certainly we don’t condone consumption to the point of inebriation or intoxication, where you’re impaired to drive a car,” Roggenbuck said. And he added that at summer’s end, he and other district officials will “look into our problems” and decide whether alcohol should be banned completely.

Some beach-goers “want to have a nice cocktail on the beach with a barbecue,” Roggenbuck said. “Certainly I’ve done that with my family.” If there is a prohibition of booze, “I’d have to change my lifestyle.”

But Roggenbuck said problems arise when “one cocktail becomes 10, becomes 20,” and the drunks become a danger to themselves and people around them.

The increase in the number of guns confiscated worries him too, Roggenbuck said. State parks and recreation officers began carrying guns in the mid-1970s as violence spread from the cities to the beaches, according to George Cook, deputy regional director of state parks and recreation in San Diego.

Roggenbuck said the problems on the beach--drinking, fights, occasional attempted rapes--have been the same over the years, but now “it appears the numbers are increasing.”

“I think it just says something about today’s society in general,” Roggenbuck said. Certainly “more people are carrying guns because there are more weird things happening.”

Despite the problems, people still flock to the beach at night. At 10:30 p.m., 1 1/2 hours before closing time, drivers were still paying $4 to park. Sforza and other lifeguards questioned a 15-year-old girl who said she had run away from her home in Los Alamitos a day earlier.

The girl said a man in his 30s joined her in Huntington Beach and they began walking north to a fast-food restaurant at the northern exit of Bolsa Chica State Beach. But after the man tried several times to get her to accompany him into a dressing room, she broke away. She said she felt threatened.

Lifeguards phoned the girl’s home, then set out to search for the man. Sforza came across a man who fit the description the girl had given. He had a good story and would have been freed, but a check turned up one warrant for drunk driving and others for traffic violations.

Sforza told the man that because it was a bench warrant issued by a judge, he had to cart him off to jail. For the second time that night, the lifeguard made the pilgrimage to the Huntington Beach city jail.

But at 1 a.m., when he radioed back from the jail to the beach, all was quiet.

Lifeguards were getting the last stragglers off the beach, ticketing the cars that hadn’t cleared out, and getting ready to close up shop until 6 a.m., when the beach would reopen and a whole new crowd would appear.