Communications System Gives Deputies a High-Tech Partner : Law enforcement: The Sheriff’s Department dedicates a long-awaited, $58.6-million network that includes portable radios and a bunker-like center.

During his years as a deputy, Sheriff Sherman Block recalled, he sometimes was caught in one of many “dead spots” not covered by his department’s radio system, such as the canyons of the San Gabriel Valley.

“You got on your radio and nobody could hear you,” Block said. “If it was an emergency or whatever, you had to look around for the nearest telephone.”

Such a predicament today is merely the subject of station house war stories. On Friday, Block dedicated his department’s long-awaited, new $58.6-million communications system.

Now, deputies in Long Beach and the Antelope Valley may talk directly over a hand-held radio. Or, when responding to a bank robbery in the Santa Clarita Valley, deputies may call up the floor plan of the bank on a mobile digital terminal in their patrol car. Soon, officers in the field also will be able to communicate by radio with other Los Angeles County law enforcement agencies.

Lt. Robert Elson, who directs day-to-day operations at the department’s radio center in East Los Angeles, called the new system “the showpiece of law enforcement communications nationwide.”

It allows supervisors to record all communications and trace the activities of a patrol car or a deputy for an entire week.

“Under a random audit program, once a week we’ll take a slice of life . . . of everything that’s happening out there,” Elson said. Supervisors will make sure that messages passed among deputies conform with department policy and law, he said, an apparent reference to the Rodney G. King incident in which Los Angeles police made allegedly racist comments over the digital terminals in their cars.

The system has 38 transmission towers to cover the sheriff’s vast 4,083-square-mile jurisdiction, including ones on Catalina Island and atop the 8,400-foot Frost Peak in the Antelope Valley. There are 3,600 portable radios at a cost of $3,000 apiece, 1,600 mobile radios and 1,000 mobile data terminals.

The hub of the system, where Block cut a ceremonial blue ribbon, is the windowless, bunker-like radio center, which is flanked by two 200-foot communications towers. The center, with vast rooms of computers and several backup power sources, is designed to withstand a large earthquake.

Planning for the system began in 1978. County officials lobbied for five years before the Federal Communications Commission in 1985 set aside the unused TV Channel 16 for law enforcement communications, freeing up 120 frequencies.

With the old system, Block said, deputies often had to wait to talk over crowded frequencies. The department is now using 65 of the new frequencies, including several for “scrambled” communications to allow narcotics detectives to speak during a raid without suspects monitoring on a police radio.

Capt. Bud Wenke said he learned the value of the new hand-held radios when they were first installed in the East Los Angeles substation. “A fight ensued and one of the deputy’s guns was taken. Typically, to get help, an officer would have to break away, leave his partner on the ground and run half a block to the car radio,” he said. In this case, “they were able to call for help right there.”

To many old-timers, Block acknowledged, “this kind of stuff (the new equipment) is scary.” One prominent department veteran is not yet “on line” with the new technology--the sheriff himself, who does not have a data terminal in his car.

“Someday I’ll learn how to operate one,” Block vowed.