A NIGHT IN THE DRUNK TANK

Every few seconds, the scream coming from Safety Cell 9 rises to a horrible rasping shriek. The young woman inside is disheveled, disoriented, terrified, outraged. She pounds on the walls and the thick metal door, wailing for an unseen friend to help her, consumed by uncomprehending alcoholic delirium, rage and fright.

In the adjacent booking area room, she appears every few seconds on one of several small video monitors, then disappears again as the automatic surveillance system switches to another camera in another cell. But she keeps screaming and screaming.

On the other side of the booking area and down a short corridor, a thin 37-year-old man with tangled blond hair sits cross-legged on the bare floor in a corner of the male detoxification cell and hugs himself as he sways back and forth. His face is bloated, flushed and lined beyond his years and when he was brought in nearly two hours before, shaky but conscious, his eyes were blazing red, swimming and unfocused. Sealed in the cell behind unbreakable glass, he cannot hear the woman’s screams.

“That guy’s probably a really good candidate for a detox center,” says Anaheim Police Lt. Ted LaBahn, the officer in charge of what is known officially as the city’s holding facility--the jail. “This is a classic alcoholic. He’s a drunk drunk. He’s obviously been through the system. We’d have no problem if they were all like him.”

He nods toward Safety Cell 9. “But her . . . .”

The California Penal Code section is 647f. It explains when public drunkenness becomes a crime. It describes a person who is under the influence of alcohol or drugs “in such a condition that he or she is unable to exercise care for his or her own safety or the safety of others, or . . . interferes with or obstructs or prevents the free use of any street, sidewalk or other public way.”

LaBahn is more succinct.

“We only enforce it,” he said, “if there’s a problem or there’s going to be one.”

That means that drunks who are lying in a driveway and are too intoxicated to move, or who are staggering insensibly into the street, or shouting incoherently outside an apartment building, or passed out in the bushes behind a bar are candidates for a night in the drunk tank.

They are brought in every night, but the weekends are the busiest. Every Friday or Saturday night, between 15 and 20 people will arrive in handcuffs at the Anaheim holding facility in violation of section 647f. They will be booked and will remain in jail until they sober up, rarely longer than six hours, LaBahn said.

Anaheim is lucky. It has a jail where public drunks can sober up by themselves, in a detoxification or safety cell, and the jail staff can check their progress on the video monitors and during a routine walk around the jail every 30 minutes.

Ten other Orange County cities, however, have no jail, and officers or watch commanders on duty must supervise drunks until they sober up or are released. In other cities where facilities are minimal, arrests for public drunkenness have been discouraged. And because of overcrowding, no public drunks at all are accepted at Orange County Jail.

Police would love to be rid of the responsibility for taking care of the benign, non-combative drunk, the person whose immediate problem will disappear when his body metabolizes away the alcohol.

“If we had a place to put these people,” LaBahn said, “it would be a godsend.”

A task force of city, county and law enforcement officials convened by county Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder would like to see the drunks taken to a series of four or five “sobering up centers” that the group has proposed for the county. The centers would be staffed by civilian health care professionals, freeing police to return to duty immediately after bringing the drunks in.

They brought in 7,352 of them in 1988, according to the task force report. The actual figure, however, probably is considerably higher because Anaheim was not included (the Anaheim Police Department, said the report, was unable to provide a figure because of lack of time to do a “hand search” of its records). Though Barbara Foster, one of Wieder’s executive assistants, said public drunkenness was “an ongoing problem” in Orange County, she added that the city police chiefs sitting on Wieder’s task force have said they believe that the problem is increasing.

A sobering-up center, depending on availability and funding, could be part of a hospital alcohol ward, a section of an existing alcohol treatment center or be created as a new, free-standing facility, according to the task force report.

Garden Grove Police Chief John Robertson, a member of the task force, said he would like to see the centers work in concert with existing facilities that now provide long-term counseling and care for alcoholics.

“What we end up doing now is basically baby-sitting them,” said Robertson. “They go into a holding cell, they sober up and then they go out the door. Some of them we see night after night.”

The sobering-up centers would “give police agencies a place to take people where they’ll be at least better handled, by health-care professionals who can guide them in the right directions. We’re not in the business to counsel them. Also, if they’re in need of acute care right away, the professionals will recognize it far sooner than a police officer would.”

Funding for the project, Foster said, “is going to be tricky” because of tight government budgetary constraints.

“It looks as though we’re going to approach the alcohol industry directly,” she said. Letters have been sent to alcohol distributors in the area describing the project and soliciting money to fund the centers, she said. The cost of starting up and maintaining a center for a year, Foster said, has been estimated at $500,000.

Still, LaBahn said, some drunks must be handled by police.

She had been lying in the dirt behind a bar and was picked up, cuffed and taken to Anaheim Jail shortly after 2 a.m. And she conforms perfectly to an observation LaBahn had made early in the evening.

“Words cannot express trying to handle a lady who’s drunk,” he said. “They don’t realize their situation. All their lives, it’s usually been that if the lady doesn’t want to do something, the lady doesn’t have to do it. But not when you’re in custody.”

Outside the booking cell, the young woman begins to sob heavily and strains and thrashes against the cuffs behind her back, ignoring three officers’ exhortations to calm down. They decide to leave the cuffs on for the time being. All three are wearing rubber surgical gloves.

“I think you would be insane to handle the people we have to handle without wearing gloves,” LaBahn said.

The officers quickly empty the young woman’s pockets, removing identification and any objects that she could injure herself with in her delirium. She begins to scream, over and over.

“Vicki! Please help me! I’m not a criminal! Vicki, please!

She is pulled along the corridor to the padded safety cell, thrashing, incoherent, wild-eyed. The cell is about the size of three phone booths, with a video camera high in the corner of the ceiling and a small grate in the floor that serves as a toilet. The door is solid metal, padded on the inside, with a thin observation window that can be closed off and a small port through which food can be pushed. Like the rest of the jail, the cell is painted a neutral light brown and smells heavily of disinfectant.

It begins to dawn on the woman that she is going to be put in the cell, and she begins to kick and scream louder. The officers wrestle her to the floor on her stomach and, as two female officers try to calm her before removing the handcuffs, a third male officer places a foot across her ankles to stop the kicking.

“No!” she shrieks, her voice brutal and gravelly, retching. “No!”

At last the officers are able to remove the cuffs and quickly back away. They shut the door behind them. The woman screams louder and louder for Vicki.

“She’s thinking how dare you hold her down. How dare you stand on her legs,” said LaBahn, a 19-year veteran of the Anaheim Police Department. “But it’s difficult to control people who are out of control. Sometimes it’s like turning a wild animal loose. Most people never see the sights we do here. Here, you’ll hear how loud a human can scream when they want to scream.”

Meanwhile, LaBahn’s “classic alcoholic”--the blond man who might otherwise end up in one of the proposed sobering-up centers, tries to sleep in the male detoxification cell. It is a long rectangular room with a stainless steel toilet at one end, and the man continues to huddle in one corner. LaBahn peers through the large window.

“He’s cold, poor guy,” he says. “But keeping it cooler in here seems to calm them down. This is home for your standard drunk.”

This particular drunk, however, needed no calming. Found lying in the bushes near an apartment complex about 11 p.m., he had smiled wanly as he stood in the tiny booking cell and extended his hand through a small slit to have an identifying plastic band clipped to his wrist. Standard questions are asked by officers who have done this hundreds of times before. The questions are quick and sharp, the answers slow and slurred.

“You a street person?”

“Yeah, for the last couple of months.”

“Where’s your gear?”

“Lost.”

“Forget where you put it?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the case.”

“Any problems with the DTs?”

“No.”

“Ever been here before?”

“I don’t know. Where is here?”

As it happens, he has been there before. A quick computer check reveals that he was arrested for violating section 647f in Anaheim twice in 1988. He has several convictions for driving under the influence and has had his license revoked with the provision he complete an alcohol rehabilitation program.

He is 37, “but his street life age is much older than that,” LaBahn said. “That’s alcohol abuse.”

The man’s original booking number--the number assigned for his first offense in Anaheim--shows up during the computer check.

“It’s these guys with old, old booking numbers for drunk in public, these guys I would envision a detox center would be ideal for,” LaBahn said. “It would give us someplace to put the true alcoholic.”

But chronic alcoholics are not the jail’s exclusive customers. Sometimes, LaBahn said, a rare bender will land a business-suited man in the drunk tank alongside a handful of transients.

Sometimes, LaBahn said, such prisoners “want us to treat them differently, but we won’t. Most of them pace when you put them in the drunk tank. They’re out of their element. It’s very uncomfortable for them. Street people will just say OK, but for the professional person it can be traumatizing. In a free society, when you take away somebody’s freedom, it can be dehumanizing. But alcohol knows no race, no sex, no social order.”

They arrive sporadically throughout the night: The man with the wind-beaten face who looks 60 but is probably 40, who stands in the middle of the drunk tank while others lie snoring around him and stares malevolently out the window into the empty corridor; the young man in camouflage pants with amphetamines in his pocket and alcohol on his breath who punched a box boy at a grocery store; the man sleeping on his stomach, arms tucked beneath him, across the floor from the blond man who continues to rock back and forth in the corner.

A man who could be 55 is picked up lying on the sidewalk at a busy intersection. He shuffles down the corridor toward the booking cell, eyes liquid, mumbling. Once in the cell, he immediately moves to one corner and stands with his face against the wall. The booking officers clean out his pockets and steer him toward the drunk tank a few feet away. His legs buckle under him, and they must drag him into the cell and roll him onto his stomach.

“Night-night,” says one of the officers. The man looks up and smiles comically.

“Thank you,” he lisps.

He does not hear the woman only steps away in Safety Cell 9 as her howling reaches another chilling crescendo. She has screamed, almost continually, for 90 minutes.

How long will it go on? LaBahn answers wearily.

“Until she tires herself out.”