Sheriff Makes Changes at Station in Ojai : Law enforcement: Decision to transfer five deputies and their superior for overzealous policing came after a car belonging to Gillespie’s son was towed.

Ventura County Sheriff John V. Gillespie has shaken up his Ojai station by transferring five deputies and their superior and ordering a new car-towing policy shortly after he angrily bailed his son’s towed vehicle out of an impound lot in May.

The timing of the changes, Gillespie admitted Friday, was poor.

“If it looks bad, I’m sorry,” he said. The sheriff said he took immediate steps to prohibit what he called unjustified towing and later transferred officers to stop generally overzealous policing in Ojai.

Gillespie said the moves were being considered long before May 9, when Deputy Ward Eckstein ticketed Shawn V. Gillespie, 23, for driving with an expired license and turning without a signal and ordered his car towed.

However, employees of two Ojai towing companies said that when Gillespie paid $101 and picked up his son’s 1986 Ford Mustang in May, he vowed to take action against the deputy responsible.

“He said, ‘This officer . . . is gonna be sitting behind another desk in another county,” recalled Tim Deason, a tow truck driver for Adamson Towing. The sheriff seemed irritated, “like something had crawled underneath his skin and was buried under there pretty good,” Deason said.

A few moments later, impound yard owner Sonny Walden told the sheriff, “ ‘I’d sure hate to be in that deputy’s shoes.’ And that’s what prompted him to say, ‘I know of one deputy that will make a fine desk officer,’ ” Walden said.

Gillespie said he “might have said something. Probably, ‘I need to get them out of this situation, perhaps on a desk.’ ”

The next day, Gillespie ordered deputies to obtain the approval of their supervisors before calling tow trucks for the cars of unlicensed drivers. He said he told them that while such tows were legal, they were unnecessarily punitive, especially when a car is legally parked and a licensed driver available to take it home, as was the case with his son.

“I called my staff together and said, ‘If this sort of thing is happening in our jurisdiction, I want it stopped,’ ” he said Friday.

This month, the sheriff approved the transfers of Eckstein, four more deputies and the lieutenant in charge of the Ojai station.

The sheriff, whose department acts as the police force for Ojai, said the moves were in response to numerous citizens’ complaints since January that Ojai deputies often are too strict in enforcing traffic laws.

Some deputies thought issuing many citations was a way to “prove they were really doing their job,” Gillespie said. One woman brought him a dozen complaints from residents, he said.

A spokesman for the deputies’ labor union could not be reached for comment Friday. Nor could the deputies who are being transferred to other stations Aug. 4.

But Lt. Larry Weimer, who also faced transfer before he decided to take early retirement, defended the deputies who Gillespie characterized as strict and inflexible.

“They’ve been working really hard to keep crime out of the Ojai Valley,” said Weimer, the officer in charge of the 26-person Ojai station. “I guess it depends on your definitions of strict.”

The lieutenant said he did not question Gillespie’s changes. “That’s his job.”

Weimer, a 23-year department veteran, said his August retirement, four months early, is not related to the sheriff’s house-cleaning.

“I’m not concerned because I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “I’m outta here.”

The sheriff’s actions drew mixed reaction among Ojai residents and officials in other police departments.

Oxnard police Chief Robert Owens said he is confident of the sheriff’s integrity. “I don’t think there’s an evil bone in John Gillespie’s body. It just looks bad,” Owens said.

In Ojai, music store owner Hal Lucido described the transferred officers as “the best batch of deputies we’ve had in some time. . . . I’m sorry to see them go. They are more courteous and more serious than other guys in the past.”

City Manager Andrew Belknap said he knows of only a few complaints about deputies.

But Mayor James Loebl said he has heard of “a number of nitpicking tickets” issued by Ojai deputies. And Councilwoman Nina Shelley said that several elderly residents have complained that deputies cited them for offenses as minor as driving two miles per hour over the speed limit and failing to make a left turn quickly enough.

Hans Jensen, 21, a fisherman and Ojai resident for seven years, said he is convinced that deputies have a quota of tickets to issue each month.

“The cops here give a lot of tickets,” Jensen said. “. . . They have several intersections where they fill their quotas. The eager guys go out at the first of the month, and the lazier ones go at the end of the month. That’s when it’s a bad time to drive in Ojai.”

The Sheriff’s Department began monitoring complaints early this year, months before Shawn Gillespie’s car was towed, Assistant Sheriff Oscar Fuller said.

In June, the department sent Cmdr. Merwyn Dowd, who oversees the Ojai area, into the community to see if residents were satisfied with deputies’ conduct.

Fuller said Dowd found that “there wasn’t anything really wrong, no really serious accusations of excessive force, or perjury or anything like that. Just an appearance of an inability to communicate, a real insensitive and inflexible approach.”

Complaints were about arrogant officers, unwarranted towing, tickets for very minor offenses and officers who refused to consider good reasons for citizens’ bad driving, Undersheriff Larry Carpenter said.

“If you enforce the absolute letter of the law, people could not move,” Gillespie said. “If you spit on the sidewalk, you’re going to get a ticket. . . . And you have just taken away a free society.

“It’s an overzealousness and an ‘us and them’ attitude,” Gillespie said. “We’re talking about the kind of thing (Los Angeles Police Chief) Daryl Gates has been criticized for not doing--worrying about the community.”

The Sheriff’s Department, which provides police protection for five cities in the county, received $1.1 million last year from Ojai for its services.

“Our job is to put the appropriate personality with the appropriate skills in the right slot,” Fuller said. “Sometimes that happens and sometimes that doesn’t.”

The idea “that the sheriff places his son above his concern for the public safety is absurd,” Carpenter said.

Shawn Gillespie said it’s ridiculous to think his father would change department policy solely because he was angry about the towing ordered by Eckstein, who is being transferred to the El Rio-Saticoy area.

Gillespie’s son said that when he was arrested for drunk driving in 1988, officers called his father from the scene for direction.

“He said, ‘Do what you would do with anyone. This is nothing special,’ ” Shawn Gillespie said.

However, in another case involving one of Shawn’s older brothers, 28-year-old Anthony, the sheriff did call county prosecutors to see if he could avoid testifying, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Vincent J. O’Neill Jr. said.

In that 1989 drunk-driving case, Gillespie was the only witness who could confirm that his son admitted that he had been drinking heavily before police arrested him as he pushed his wrecked motorcycle to a hospital, O’Neill said.

“He was asking, ‘Why am I needed?’ and was there any way the information could be presented without him having to appear against his own son,” O’Neill said. “But he was not trying to affect the course of the case.”

Times staff writer Hugo Martin and correspondent Thia Bell contributed to this story.