Tide Turns for Patrol : Police: Budget crunch forces Oceanside to disband high-profile beach squad. Some worry about return of crime to popular tourist spot.

Just when ugly memories of rowdy drunks and blatant prostitutes on Oceanside’s beaches were starting to fade, the city’s reinvented image as a mellow coastal mecca with virgin white sands may be at risk.

Quite simply, lack of money is forcing an unusual band of shorts-clad police officers to retreat from the city’s tourist-crammed, 4-mile stretch of beach.

Police Chief Bruce Dunne is sadly bowing to a city budget deficit and manpower shortage by ordering his six-man beach patrol into regular uniforms and black-and-white patrol cars for duty elsewhere.

That would make Oceanside’s the only unpatrolled beach in North County, just as the mid-summer deluge of visitors with sun-screened white noses is expected to assault the city’s sands.

By July 1, when the patrol is scheduled to vanish, an estimated 2.7 million people will have mashed their toes into the city’s beach this fiscal year. About 3 million are expected next year.

Yet the patrol isn’t going down without a fight. People who have staked their fortunes and personal safety on a patch of beachfront property aren’t willing to deed the shore back to troublemakers and miscreants.

And business leaders who have labored to put a luster on the community--where the tacky motto used to be “Tan Your Hide In Oceanside”--won’t see years of promoting tourism turn into a lost cause.

“For the city to consider this is economic suicide,” said Bill Wilson, who, with some trepidation, moved his wife and two children into a new beachfront condominium 3 1/2 years ago.

The Wilsons had lived in neighboring Carlsbad, where erosion tends to turn the scenic beaches into stretches of foot-clobbering rock. “I heard some negative things about Oceanside, but the beach is so gorgeous,” Wilson said.

It took a while to feel comfortable after they sank roots in Oceanside, but they noticed that, as time passed, the hookers, transients and drug users on the beach slowly diminished.

Finally, the Wilsons felt secure, and the children, aged 10 and 13, freely played Frisbee on the beach, as though their home was neatly tucked in a womblike cul-de-sac in the sleepy outback of town.

Now, Wilson isn’t so sure about his family’s security.

“If the city dissolves this team, there’s no way I’d let my kids go back on the beach like that,” he said. “I think we would feel less secure.”

Oceanside’s beach cops sympathize.

Officer Jim Gularte figures it won’t take long for word to spread that the patrol has been scattered and that the beach is virtually free for the taking.

“Probably in three months, they could undo what it’s taken the Police Department and the community three years to do,” Gularte said. “Gangs aren’t stupid. They read that the police are leaving the beach. They’re already starting to stake out territory.”

Most other beaches in San Diego County are patrolled, and law enforcement agencies believe it’s folly to pull back.

San Diego Police Department spokesman Bill Robinson said, “If we were to back off, one week or one weekend, we would lose control.”

His department assigns six officers and a sergeant to patrol the sands from Ocean Beach to Torrey Pines State Park. Farther north, the Sheriff’s Department handles the beach between Del Mar and Carlsbad from its substation in Encinitas.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Sean Gerrity said beach patrols don’t aim to make a lot of arrests but to be highly visible and discourage drinking, drug use and fighting.

“It definitely does have an effect on keeping peace on the beach, no two ways about it,” Gerrity said.

Oceanside Police Chief Dunn knows all this but faces a bleak budget and demands that other areas of the community also receive adequate protection. The city will end the fiscal year with a $1-million deficit, and Dunn has 28 officer positions he can’t fill.

“Something had to give within the organization,” said Dunn, whose department has also grounded its two helicopters to save money.

So the beach patrol, unless the City Council says otherwise, will shed its summer shorts, don regular dark uniforms and leave its bicycles, Jeeps and all-terrain vehicles for regulation patrol cars and dry land.

“Our primary need is to have enough officers in uniform and black-and-white (vehicles) being able to respond” to calls elsewhere in the city, Dunn said. “If there was any way of meeting our commitment and still keep the beach team, we would do it.”

For the beach patrol’s supervisor, Sgt. Tom Bussey, who has surfed at these beaches for nearly 30 years, being disbanded raises fears that the coast will return to the way it was before the special patrol was created in the mid-1980s.

“It was all here--rapes, robbery, prostitution,” he recalled. “We used to have to fight our way down to the beach and fight our way out of the beach because of all the intoxication.”

The patrol covers the beach seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to midnight, usually trying to gently correct misbehavior with verbal warnings. Officers wrote 4,371 tickets during fiscal year 1989-90, including 1,478 during the 10-week peak period between June 24 and Sept. 3.

There were also more serious crimes that year.

The beach patrol made 191 arrests: 152 for narcotics, intoxication or vandalism, and the rest for crimes such as robbery, rape, burglary and auto theft.

Without the patrol, Bussey believes, many offenses may go unchecked, as police units will have to be summoned from greater distances than the patrol’s tiny substation right by the beach.

“I grew up on the beach here, I would hate to see it go backward,” Bussey said.

The business community, which has nurtured Oceanside’s image away from that of a sleazy Marine town by Camp Pendleton, is worried that dissolving the beach patrol will send visitors the wrong signal.

“We have come a long way in tourism, and we need to protect our beaches so the tourists who have come here in the past come back,” said Stebbins Dean, chief administrative officer of the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce.

“We have growing numbers of people from Orange County and the Los Angeles areas coming down to use our beaches,” he said. “A visible police force creates a feeling of comfort.”

Another troubling part of the city’s budget problem is cuts in the lifeguard program. Aquatics Superintendent Ray Duncan said the city’s force of 33 lifeguards will be cut by five.

He worries that ending the beach patrol will burden his lifeguards with helping to keep order on the beach. “With the anticipated increase in attendance, we’ll have our hands full with people in the water,” Duncan said.

It’s always possible that the City Council will save the beach patrol, but that means taking money from another strapped city department or making do with fewer patrol officers in other parts of the city.

Mayor Larry Bagley said, “We fought too hard to get the beach and the pier back from the no-goodniks.”

However, the council is bitterly divided on nearly every issue, from spending to growth, and Bagley says with understatement that he sees “a little budget fight” over the beach patrol.