Police Increasingly Wedded to Jobs and One Another

They not only love the law. They marry it.

A growing number of police officers in Ventura County are choosing mates within the ranks, saying it is easier to live with someone who understands the demands of the job.

“I’ve seen an increase in this type of union,” Oxnard Police Chief Robert Owens said. “I think it’s very, very definitely a trend.”

Sixty-four of 1,109 county law enforcement officers are married to officers within their departments or other departments. But those statistics don’t touch upon the couples who are living together, dating each other, or engaged.

Indeed, insiders say that some police agencies are veritable love nests.

“We have everything here,” said one sergeant, who asked that he and his agency remain anonymous. “We have men with men, women with women and men with women. They’re dating. They’re engaged. And they’re married.”

Law enforcement officials said they have experienced no problems as a result of married couples on the force and would not mind if even more officers got together. “I guess when we say law enforcement is a family, we’re serious,” Ventura County Sheriff John Gillespie said.

Officials credit the increase in law enforcement marriages partly to a rise in the number of female police officers, who may have special reasons for hooking up with their peers.

“If you meet someone in a civilian job, right away they say you’re a big tough lady,” said Simi Valley Sgt. Pat Hopkins, who is married to a homicide detective in the department. “You find you’re more comfortable when you’re with one of your own.”

Cop couples give a variety of additional reasons for seeking romance behind badges.

Some say it is easiest to meet people on the job. Others enjoy sharing similar interests with their spouses. And the majority stress that fellow officers best understand the unique demands of a job that can expose them each day to hardened criminals and life-threatening dangers.

Santa Paula Police Officer David Kemp, for example, offers a compliment that few men could give their wives.

“I’d have no problems in going into a bar fight with her,” Kemp said of his wife Kathy, a Ventura County sheriff’s lieutenant in charge of two jails. “I know she can hold her own.”

David and Kathy Kemp met 3 1/2 years ago during a seminar on traffic enforcement. Within a year, they were married.

For Kathy Kemp, dating a man in the business was a nice change of pace from other beaus, whose expressions often changed when they discovered what she did for a living.

“It’s a certain threat to their masculinity,” said Kathy Kemp, a 43-year-old blonde with a friendly smile and quick laugh. “I had one guy tell me he felt safer when he was with me.”

The Kemps said they understand each other’s jobs. They talk over investigations and commiserate with each other about troublesome inmates.

They even speak in radio codes sometimes, complaining about how the day was so busy they didn’t get a 10-10 (coffee break) or won’t be home in time for a Code-7 (dinner).

But married officers say there are also downsides to working in the same field. David Kemp, who patrols the street, said he was razzed over the difference in ranks when he married Kathy.

“I’ve even had people say, ‘Does she wear lieutenant’s bars on her nightgown?’ ” David Kemp, 43, said.

It is the peculiar hours of police work, however, that seem to present the biggest problems for law enforcement couples.

Kathy Kemp works a normal week Monday through Friday. But her husband works from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., enjoying his weekend in the middle of the week. Once every four months or so, the Kemps get a couple days off together.

Tim and Renee Cowgill, both deputies in the Sheriff’s Department, suffer the same woes.

Renee Cowgill, 24, works in the Ventura County Jail from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. About the time she is looking toward slumber, her 33-year-old husband is gearing up to work his 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift at the Rose Valley Work Camp, north of Ojai.

The couple, who live in Camarillo, spend about one day a week together. But most of those hours pass by with one or the other in sweet repose.

“This morning I got off at 6 a.m. and I slept most of the day,” Renee Cowgill said. “At midnight, I’m starting to wake up and he’ll be long dead by then.”

Renee Cowgill met her husband before she joined the force. Debating whether to pursue a law enforcement career, she rode with him as he patrolled county streets one clear March night four years ago.

Not only did she say yes to the job, she eventually said yes to him.

An 11-year veteran with the department, Tim Cowgill said he was delighted to marry someone interested in police work.

Indeed, Renee Cowgill said that if it were not for her husband she never would have made it through the grueling 21-week Ventura County Criminal Justice Training. She graduated in February.

Her husband taught her how to shoot a gun and scale a 6-foot fence before she entered. And he bolstered her confidence through the emotionally and physically demanding experience.

“He cleaned and he cooked,” she said. “Sometimes, he’d spit-shine my shoes or clean the brass on my hat or just listen to me scream and yell and cry.”

The two say they could not be happier now that Renee Cowgill has a job with the Sheriff’s Department. They said it helps to understand each other’s work--particularly certain parts of the work.

“She goes to work all night with a bunch of guys,” Tim Cowgill said of his wife’s assignment. “It doesn’t bother me. I understand what’s going on.”

Officers Tami and Brian McAllister, who both work at the Ventura County office of the California Highway Patrol, said they also are able to share a special understanding of the other’s career.

Tami McAllister, 28, said she called upon such understanding when she went into labor with their first child last June.

Brian McAllister, 29, did not arrive until a couple of hours before the birth because he was on duty trying to keep people away from a fire that was raging through Santa Barbara County.

“I understood he was working overtime,” Tami McAllister said.

But sometimes working together can bring couples a little too close. Seven months after their wedding, the McAllisters, who met and married while training to become officers, were assigned to ride in the same patrol car for 10 or 12 hours each night.

“Everybody told us, ‘You don’t want to work together,”’ Tami McAllister said. “I said, ‘Oh, no, we’re in love, we can do that.’ ”

“Now I understand.”

She said that during the patrols together she and her husband sometimes disagreed on whether to issue citations or give verbal warnings to motorists.

Those disagreements came up again later at home, she said.

But home life became easier when the two-month assignment came to an end.

Chuck and Maureen Hookstra, both in law enforcement, said they steer clear of work when they are home.

“You hear enough about it 10 hours a day,” Chuck Hookstra said. “We talk about our trees and kids.”

Chuck Hookstra, 42, is a sergeant who spends nights patrolling city streets for the Oxnard Police Department. Maureen Hookstra, 33, works narcotics for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. They have been married 12 years.

Despite their attempts to keep shoptalk to a minimum, the two say their eldest son has already decided that he wants to venture into law enforcement.

The child, yet to grow his first whisker, has selected the Oxnard Police Department over the Sheriff’s Department. “He said, ‘I’m not going to be a sheriff,’ ” Maureen Hookstra said. “ ‘Girls are sheriffs. I want to be an Oxnard police officer.’ ”