Ojai Police Shake-Up Promises a New Era : Sheriff’s office: In the past, some zealous deputies were writing dozens of traffic tickets ‘by the book.’ Now a less punitive approach is being taken.

Before the dawn of what might be called the gentler and kinder age of law enforcement in Ojai, a traffic stop went down like this:

Dick Myers, driving his pickup truck down a quiet, country road, was pulled over by a Ventura County sheriff’s deputy who told the longtime resident he was doing 42 m.p.h. in a speed zone posted at 35 m.p.h.

As Myers was getting out of his truck, he was ordered by the deputy over his squad car bullhorn to instead continue across an intersection and stop. Myers complied and was promptly issued a second ticket--for not reattaching his seat belt when he got back into his truck to drive the 100 feet across the intersection.

It cost Myers an extra $24.

“It seemed kind of chintzy,” he reflected last week.

Wednesday, after a highly publicized shake-up of the Ojai sheriff’s office, Senior Deputy Jim Aguirre was cruising through Ojai on his afternoon shift when he came upon a white Mercedes-Benz illegally parked on busy California 33.

Pulling behind the car, the 35-year-old deputy first checked the car’s license plate number on his computer to make sure it wasn’t stolen. Assured that it wasn’t, he then walked around it, peering inside.

Moments later, the woman who owned the car appeared and said she had made a brief shopping stop and forgot about the no-parking law.

Aguirre, who has been patrolling Ojai streets for more than seven years, reasoned that no one is perfect and allowed her to drive away--without a parking ticket.

Asked why he didn’t give the woman a parking ticket for clearly breaking the law, Aguirre merely shrugged.

“She’s not blocking the roadway,” he said.

These two incidents say much about what Ventura County Sheriff John V. Gillespie promises will be a new era for the 7,900 residents of Ojai, a town whose ambience, beauty and reputation for a slower pace of life are well-known internationally.

The sheriff has the contract for maintaining the peace in Ojai, and in recent months Gillespie decided that the peace was being shattered by some zealous deputies who were writing dozens of traffic tickets “by the book.”

Such restrictive law enforcement angered many residents in this close-knit community, conversations between department officials and more than two-dozen local residents confirmed.

It wasn’t too long ago that Ojai’s deputies were more than cops on the beat. Old-timers recall that the deputies also were friends who could be counted on to drive a local home after a night on the town, with no questions asked about the person’s blood-alcohol content.

The pendulum began swinging the other way a few years ago, and at the beginning of this year any semblance of a laissez-faire attitude abruptly disappeared, according to Sheriff’s Cmdr. Merwyn Dowd, who headed the survey of residents’ complaints.

Suddenly, the sheriff’s deputies--particularly four of the nine deputies assigned to Ojai--had begun taking it upon themselves to write a plethora of traffic tickets for going a mile or two over posted speed limits or edging a few inches over stop sign street lines, Dowd said.

According to residents’ complaints to the sheriff, deputies also were harassing teen-agers.

The four deputies, plus a part-time employee, were transferred late last month to other Ventura County jurisdictions. And the chief of the Ojai office, Lt. Larry Weimer, took early retirement.

Last Monday, Sheriff’s Lt. Ken Kipp, a third-generation Ventura County resident and former commander of the Sheriff’s Academy in Camarillo, took over as the new head of the sheriff’s Ojai office--in effect, the city’s police chief.

“It’s a losing battle if you alienate the community,” Kipp said. “We have to be sensitive to community needs.”

Kipp, 40, is a husky, easy-going man, almost the stereotype of the “laid-back” Californian. His only marching orders from Gillespie, he said, were to convey to his deputies that he wanted the community to feel that “they are law-enforcement professionals, that they really do care.”

On this note, Kipp said Gillespie had told him to reassure the nine deputies who patrol Ojai that “there’ll be no purging of infidels, no lopping off of heads. Just go out there and do a good job.”

Before his first closed-door meeting with his deputies on Friday, he said he planned to tell them that 1991 has seen too much “black and white” in the enforcement of the law “and not enough gray.”

Kipp is acutely aware of the public’s growing apprehension of police agencies amid scandals in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. So Kipp’s message to his deputies is simple, yet within this framework:

“Law-enforcement services are an extension of the community. Deputies are part of the community. They have to demonstrate an interest and involvement in the community. They have to take some sense of pride in the community.”

Much of Kipp’s first week on the job was spent meeting with Ojai’s community leaders--the elected officials, business people and “old money” who are intimately familiar with what makes the community tick.

Still, he said he realizes there is more fence-mending ahead.

As Gillespie acknowledged in an interview last week that “complaints had been rolling in for about six months” just on speeding tickets. Bunches of them had been handed out for exceeding posted limits by just a few miles an hour.

“There’s a happy medium of logic and judgment which must be reached,” Gillespie said. “You can’t cite people for going two miles an hour over the speed limit. . . . The ticketing had become punitive. I said, ‘It shouldn’t be.’ ”

Among the local residents who had unpleasant brushes with Ojai’s deputies was Gillespie’s 23-year-old son, Shawn, who was ticketed in May for driving with an expired license and turning without making a proper signal.

A sheriff’s deputy ordered the car towed. Gillespie was angered by the incident and said it made him acutely aware of the multitude of towing tickets being issued in the Ojai community.

The timing of his son’s run-in with the deputy was an unfortunate coincidence with the growing unrest over the tough ticketing policies previously in force, said Gillespie, a former Ojai police chief.

But it had absolutely nothing to do with the decision to transfer the four deputies to other jurisdictions, Gillespie said. The tough ticketing policy was already a concern, he said. His son’s traffic problems simply made him more aware that many towing fees were also being charged.

Meanwhile, the sheriff added, “a siege mentality” was developing among the residents of Ojai and he had to take steps to put an abrupt stop to it--steps that would have been taken whether or not his son’s car had been towed.

Both Gillespie and Kipp said the four deputies had to be transferred, not as a punitive measure but to allow them to function with a degree of credibility in new communities.

Dowd, who investigated the community complaints, said the names of the four deputies--ranging in age from their mid-20s to their early 40s--came up repeatedly in interviews with Ojai residents.

“I told each (of the four deputies), ‘You have such a negative image in the community that as responsible managers we can’t leave you there,’ ” Dowd said. “Most understood.”

Although there has been positive feedback from Ojai residents since the shake-up, Dowd said that Kipp won’t be able to reverse community attitudes overnight. But he and Gillespie are positive that Kipp has the credibility to do the job.

For his part, Kipp is quick to say that efforts to reverse community attitudes are not going to translate into lax law enforcement.

“We’re not going to open up Ojai Avenue to become an Indianapolis Speedway,” Kipp said, adding that the description he prefers for the sheriff’s new policies in Ojai is “fair, but firm.”

At the moment, Ojai residents appear ready to give Kipp a grace period in which to make good on his promise of a new era in community relations.

“We make it clear we want law enforcement which is firm and fair, not overly aggressive,” said Ventura attorney Jack Fay, former mayor and member of the Ojai City Council.

Another Ojai resident, beautician Karen McNeil, said she takes Kipp at his word.

“Believe him? Why not?” she asked. “You have to trust people to do what they say.”