Budget Ax Kills Sheriff’s School Deputy Program

Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Connolly fights crime by reaching out to school troublemakers, struggling students and children on the fringes of gang life.

These youths are at risk of becoming criminals, said Connolly, who for the last year and a half has spent part of each day counseling students at Eliot Middle School in Altadena.

Connolly has helped the students stay out of trouble and in classes, Principal Delano Yaborough said.

“He was quite valuable,” Yarborough said. “There were some significant changes in the behavior of a number of students that he worked with.”

But Connolly, who is known around campus as “Deputy Dan,” will not be going back to school in the fall. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has decided to eliminate the Crescenta Valley Regional Sheriff Station’s successful school liaison deputy program in anticipation of a $66.5-million shortfall in the department’s $812-million budget for the 1992-93 fiscal year.

Nine other positions--two community relations officers, five sergeants who supervise patrol units, an administrative officer and a lieutenant--are also being cut from the area’s force of 148 employees, who are divided between the main station in La Crescenta and the Altadena substation.

In addition to these cuts, the Altadena facility will be closed to the public from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., although deputies will be on staff to respond to calls.

The reductions, set to take effect July 1, are expected to save the department $800,000. The affected deputies will be transferred to other stations to fill vacancies and help reduce overtime.

Capt. Michael Quinn, area commander, said service in the region will be noticeably affected. Although deputies will continue to respond rapidly to emergencies, he said, they will be slower to respond to calls reporting such crimes as burglaries.

Deputies will also try to fill the gap left by the loss of the community relations officers, who learned about incipient crime problems and the concerns of area residents by attending local meetings.

“They go beyond ‘nice to have,’ ” Quinn said of the community relations officers. “These are positions you need to have. They can stop problems before they become problems.”

Although deputies will not be able to attend all community meetings, Quinn said, they will go to some.

“It’s going to be a hit or miss situation,” he said. “I can’t take a patrol unit out of the field to attend a Kiwanis meeting.”

But Quinn said he is most upset by the loss of the two school resource officers, whose task of developing personal relationships with troubled young people cannot be taken up by others.

During his year and a half at Eliot, Connolly spent many hours on the playground and in the hallways talking to students.

The affable deputy also attended many school functions so that students would come to think of him as a familiar part of the campus landscape. And eventually, many confided in him about their personal lives.

“The kids need someone to attach to,” said Connolly, who will be returning to regular patrol duty. “I want to be someone they look up to. What I work on is helping build self-esteem.”

Connolly played a similar role at 12 area elementary schools, where he also spent time each day this year. The station’s other school liaison officer, Deputy Kyle Bistline, developed similar relationships with students at Crescenta Valley High School and Rosemont Junior High School in the Glendale Unified School District.

Arguing that these relationships can stop children from sliding into a life of crime, Quinn has asked Supervisor Mike Antonovich for funds to save the positions. So far, though, the captain has received no reply, although a spokesman for Antonovich said the supervisor would like to see the program continued.

“If we get in there with officers who can deal and relate with these kids, a lot of them are salvageable,” Quinn said.

Nationwide, similar school liaison officer programs have been praised for providing students with positive role models who can counter the peer pressure to get involved in gangs and other criminal activity, said Robert Trojanowicz, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University.

“We always talk about how we need prevention, how we can’t just react to a crime,” Trojanowicz said. “An effort like that is a true prevention effort, but in a budget crunch, the prevention effort is always the first one to go.”