Seasonal Duty No Picnic for Officers

The day’s first unit in the Bermuda Shorts Brigade, armed with automatic cameras and neon fanny packs, slowly filtered out of its hotel and into the sunshine along Harbor Boulevard.

“Bet they come from Indiana,” quipped veteran Anaheim Police Officer Richard Christensen, watching from his black and white cruiser parked near Disneyland. As the vacationing family in question became part of a contingent of tourists streaming into the Happiest Place on Earth, the officer mused: “They come from all over the world to this spot.”

Moments later, a dispatcher radioed for the officer to investigate a rift between a motel manager and two customers, and Christensen’s attention turned to the more bothersome side of summer.

While city officials from Anaheim to San Clemente welcome the money that flows from playing host to as many as a million out-of-towners a day, police officers greet the seasonal shift with trepidation.

As they patrol Orange County’s prime vacation spots, they see petty thieves preying on travelers, party-goers disturbing the peace, beach crowds growing unruly and freeways becoming even more jammed.

And with schools closed, juvenile crimes increase. Charlotte Rhea, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Criminal Justice, said juvenile arrests historically peak in July--last year, Orange County recorded 1,468, contrasted with a low of 1,093 in December.

“We certainly keep pretty busy,” said Buena Park Police Sgt. Stan Myrhen Jr., who heads a unit that monitors Knott’s Berry Farm and Beach Boulevard’s so-called entertainment row. “With no school, we’ve got children all over the streets.”

That workload, in addition to keeping up with more serious crime, sometimes forces officers to put off their own vacations or stretch themselves thin in order to deal with the hordes of fun-seekers, who hit the attractions and beach towns as thick as midsummer smog.

This year may be especially trying, police say, because recessionary budget constraints have all but exhausted many cities’ overtime accounts.

In Newport Beach, for instance, police are forced to juggle their schedules--often leaving other areas of the city undermanned--to oversee the weekend migration of as many as 200,000 out-of-towners, who pack onto the narrow Balboa Peninsula.

“Our resources are getting pretty taxed,” lamented Newport Beach Police Sgt. Andy Gonis one recent Friday night as he pointed out particularly troublesome spots on the peninsula.

Carloads of young adults and teen-agers, unaware of Gonis’ presence in an unmarked police car, hooted and howled past him on their way to Balboa Pavilion. Many of them were turned back by police, who set up a roadblock on 15th Street.

Some found their way to noisy gatherings in one of the hundreds of summer rentals that line Shore Line Drive.

On a typical summer Friday night, each of the area’s four to six weekend police units respond to more than 15 calls to shut down loud parties. Occasionally fights break out between vacationers, and the boisterous crowds spill onto the street.

“Sometimes they go a little too far,” Gonis said. As if to underscore his point, the dispatcher reported that an unidentified man pulled up to a large party on 45th Street in a yellow Chevrolet pickup, struck a party-goer and fled. The party was dispersed.

The trick, Gonis said, is to keep the tourists touring.

“We do our best to keep people moving” from one section of the peninsula to another, Gonis continued. “It’s when they congregate that trouble begins.”

For example, this year’s Fourth of July celebrations ended with 127 arrests, most of them alcohol-related. Police noted that 8 out of 10 of those taken into custody were from outside the city.

That illustrates a point raised by Huntington Beach Police Officer Mike Kelly: “We have few problems with the per se tourists,” Kelly said. “We have the problems with the out-of-county boys.”

Kelly is part of a small band of police officers who are taken off regular patrol for the summer months and assigned beach duty, Huntington Beach Police Sgt. J.B. Case said.

From mid-June to Labor Day, the officers swap their traditional woolen blue uniforms for breezy, white shirts and short pants. They climb aboard red all-terrain vehicles and cruise the narrow stretches of beach, inching and meandering around the carpet of oiled bodies sprawled atop blankets on the sand.

The officers look for beach-goers who are illegally drinking alcohol and keep the peace at the often-clogged area around the Huntington Beach Pier.

The Green Burrito, a popular restaurant, is the only casual eatery where barefoot beach-goers can hang out and grab a pitcher of ice-cold beer.

Once a day on the weekends, Kelly said, police are called to clear the place out.

“They pile up next to the window and scream at the women,” Kelly said during a recent tour of his temporary beat. A little while later, the restaurant manager called police in.

In three minutes, six officers had extricated a drunk, handcuffed him and hauled him off to city jail as a public nuisance.

But as they wrestled the tall, beefy man to the ground, the crowd around the restaurant grew from a few dozen to a few hundred people. Some of them started shouting and cursing the officers.

The tense moment eased when the suspect was taken away.

“It can get pretty hairy out here,” said Sgt. Case, who stood nearby.

Laguna Beach also has its share of beach-related problems. But its two summer-long events--the Festival of the Arts and the Sawdust Festival--complicate police staffing. The solution: Hire a few temporary summer community beach officers to patrol the crowd out on the sands and put a couple of sworn officers on bicycles to patrol the congested downtown.

“All we want is to provide a safe and comfortable environment for the thousands of people who visit our beaches,” Laguna Beach Deputy Police Chief James Spreiny said.

In Anaheim, the manpower problem is not so easily solved.

The four officers assigned to Sector 3, the “entertainment area” near Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center, juggle their routine calls with tourist control and Disneyland duty.

Disneyland duty not only includes investigating reports of criminals preying on unsuspecting tourists, but also hauling away errant teen-agers accused of shoplifting or other illegal activities inside the park.

One case can take an officer off the street for more than two hours, said Officer Christensen, who has patroled the park since it opened in 1955.

“It can really tie our guys up,” Anaheim Police Lt. Ray Welch said. “But we do what we gotta do.”

Up to No Good

With school out, summertime typically sees a rise in Orange County juvenile arrests, statistics show: July 1990: 1,468 December 1990: 1,093 Source: California Department of Justice