Long Beach Votes to Keep Its Own Police : Law enforcement: The council narrowly rejects a proposal to eliminate department in favor of sheriff’s deputies.

The Long Beach City Council narrowly voted Tuesday to reject a controversial proposal to abolish the city’s Police Department and replace it with deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

By a 5-4 vote, the council decided to eliminate the final year of its contract with the Sheriff’s Department to patrol the north and northeast sections of Long Beach. In making the decision, the council gave approval for the training of 49 new city police officers to replace the deputies and their supervisors currently working in the city.

The city’s $6-million-a-year agreement was scheduled to expire in July, 1994.

The majority of the council who voted to end the sheriff’s contract said that the deputies--hired in 1990 to bolster the city’s understaffed police force--were not supposed to be permanent fixtures in the city.

And the city would probably lose direct local control over law enforcement if the Police Department were abolished in favor of the Sheriff’s Department, the council majority contended.

“There clearly have been a lot of emotions over this issue,” said Councilman Evan Anderson Braude, who voted with the majority. “We are going back now to full policing with the Long Beach Police Department.”

With the additional 49 officers, the Long Beach department will have 722 officers, Police Chief William Ellis said.

The four councilmen who voted in opposition said the Police Department was not up to full strength. They contended the department will have problems matching the performance of the Sheriff’s Department in a year. Sheriff’s deputies were praised by some residents as an improvement over Long Beach police officers because of faster response time to citizens’ calls.

In addition, they argued that the Sheriff’s Department had proposed patrolling the city for at least $11 million a year less than the $96 million it costs the Police Department to do the job.

Councilman Les Robbins, a proponent of abolishing the Police Department, wanted to keep the deputies in town for at least another two years.

“We’ve traded in a Rolls-Royce for a Chevrolet,” said Robbins, who is a sheriff’s sergeant in East Los Angeles.

A sheriff’s representative, Lt. Marvin Cavanaugh, quickly left the meeting to inform his superiors of the vote. Cavanaugh said the loss of the contract was not a big blow to his department, noting that the council members have been complimentary of his deputies’ performance.

“The situation was never one in which the sheriff tried to take over this city,” he said. “He was acting at the request of the City Council.”

Long Beach City Manager James C. Hankla first suggested hiring sheriff’s deputies to boost the understaffed city police force.

In recent years, the Police Department was more than 100 officers below full strength because of vacancies, early retirements and work-related disability claims.

Residents in the north and northeast sections of Long Beach complained that they had to measure police response on less serious calls in hours and even days.

But what was intended to be a stopgap measure eventually took on a new character. Robbins and Councilmen Douglas S. Drummond and Warren Harwood began pushing in the last year to abolish the local police force and replace it with deputies.

They were buoyed by the favorable reaction from some residents to the presence of sheriff’s deputies.

The city recently held four hearings to gauge the sentiment of the public. In three of the four hearings, the public seemed to favor the local police. The majority of people attending Tuesday’s meeting favored the Police Department as well.

After the vote on the sheriff’s contract, Mayor Ernie Kell proposed placing a measure on the November ballot to impose a special tax to pay for 100 more police officers.

Community correspondent Kirsten Lee Swartz contributed to this story.