Verdict Not in on Private Oceanside Security Force : Policing: At the trial run’s halfway point, less than a third of the businesses and individuals needed to keep the service afloat have signed up.

Donald Miller dons his dark aviator sunglasses while cruising some seedy Oceanside back alley, looking out for his customers, and always looking for mischief.

He’s not a crook. He’s a cop. Sort of.

“There’s no way of telling how much crime we’re deterring by coming through the alleys like this,” said the 63-year-old Miller, a veteran of the West Covina police force and now a private security officer.

The businesses and residents on Miller’s downtown Oceanside beat, as well as other North County cities, have long been crying out for more police coverage to deal with the prostitution, drug dealing and vandalism in the area.

Now they are getting the opportunity to put up or shut up.

Bel-Air, a security firm, was hired by the city of Oceanside for a 90-day pilot program to patrol downtown streets 24 hours a day. But, as the program reaches its halfway point Tuesday, less than a third of the businesses and residents needed to keep it going beyond the trial period have actually come aboard.

An attempt earlier this summer to recruit businesses for a similar program in Vista also fell flat.

Those declining Bel-Air’s services said patrolling the streets is the job of the Police Department and that is why they pay taxes and business license fees.

It’s too soon to gauge the program’s impact on the area’s crime, and even Bel-Air officials hesitate to predict what will happen. As of yet, Bel-Air patrol officers have made no arrests in Oceanside. Some critics say the program will just shift crime from one area to another.

All agree that the program highlights how much law enforcement has changed since the days when a patrolman walked his beat, making sure doors were locked.

“There is a reality and an understanding that we can’t do it all any longer and that we have to handle the emergency calls for services that are our charge and responsibility,” Oceanside Police Chief Bruce Dunne said. “And if there is time left over, we try to do the random, preventive patrols.”

Dunne concedes that the role being filled by the Bel-Air patrols is one that only 10 years ago had been an integral part of his patrol officers’ duties. But, with 165 sworn officers, about 30 fewer than just three years ago, Dunne said, the department cannot continue providing those services.

Oceanside paid Bel-Air $9,000 to conduct the pilot program. The company hopes to lure enough subscribers to keep the program running on its own without city sponsorship.

Businesses would pay $50 a month and residents $10 a month to have one armed private security officer patrol the area 24 hours a day. The officer could be reached by clients at all times by cellular phone, and the firm promises a five-minute response time.

The driving forces behind the pilot program said higher taxes for more police are not the answer.

“We are spending enough taxes as it is,” said Bill Fritzsche, chairman of the redevelopment committee for the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce, which came up with the idea.

“We’re not going to spend more money because, I think, so much money gets eaten up in the bureaucracy of trying to do the job,” Fritzsche said. “The end result is that we don’t get enough bang for our buck.”

Nearly halfway into the pilot project, Bel-Air officials said more than 100 businesses and residents, out of nearly 3,000 in the area, have signed up, pledging a little less than a third of the $12,000 a month needed to keep the project afloat beyond the trial period.

Still, the company is confident that, by the end of the trial period, it will have enough clients to continue.

“There’s still tremendous interest in the program,” said Bob Sundeen, general manager of Bel-Air, who sees the program as the logical extension of Neighborhood Watch. “I can only envision it getting bigger, with more cars, more people and a larger area to cover.”

Observers, however, have words of caution about the program and raise questions about liability and the effects of having armed, non-sworn patrols roaming the city with little supervision.

Under the Bel-Air program, the security officer is alone on patrol during the night and early morning.

“We have to watch out for how these people conduct themselves,” said Larry Beyersdorf of the county public defender’s office.

“If I lived in Carlsbad, I’d be concerned about a private police agency going around chasing all the people they considered undesirables across the border into Carlsbad,” he said.

Bel-Air emphasizes that all of their officers are either ex-police, former military police or have received police academy training.

Also, the company holds liability insurance policies totaling $33 million, and its contract relieves the city of any liability in the event of a wrongful death or lawsuits, Oceanside officials point out.

Some North County businesses, however, just don’t feel the extra expense is justified.

Merchants in neighboring Vista earlier this summer passed on a similar program with Bel-Air. There, only 39 merchants out of a market of about 400 signed up to hire a security officer, despite the fact that a survey of downtown businesses showed that increased crime in Vista was their largest concern.

“The business people in the end were not willing to cough up the money,” said Jean Ann Mayberry, general manager at the Vista Town Center Assn., an organization representing downtown merchants. “They wanted the city of Vista to do it; that’s why they pay taxes.”

Those in Oceanside cite similar reasons for not participating in the program.

“We’re paying city licenses and taxes,” said Doug Ferony, owner of Sandwich King. “I’d like to see it come out of the city’s funds to beef up the downtown area. There is a ton of vandalism, and there is a lot of crime localized in this area.”

Some of those who have signed up said there have been glitches in the Bel-Air system.

“I’ve had more minor thefts than before they started,” said Paula Barksdale, whose real estate agency has had two petty thefts since contracting with Bel-Air. “I don’t know what else to say, but I hope it improves.”

But Barksdale, who has also signed up to have her house protected by Bel-Air, stands by the agency, saying that “it’s needed, and if the service is good, I think it’s inexpensive protection.”

“I’m just hoping that they are devoting their time and attention to the people who have signed up rather than the people who haven’t,” Barksdale said. “I am the only one in my complex who has signed up, but they are also getting the benefits, as far as I’m concerned.”

Paying for police protection is a lot like paying for, say, public television. Although everyone in the area benefits from it, some people don’t pay for it, in the hopes that others will. But if everyone did that, Bel-Air wouldn’t make a buck.

People in Vista and Oceanside both said no single crime statistic has been responsible for the sudden call for Bel-Air’s services by business owners. Neighboring San Marcos, too, has been pushing for a greater law enforcement presence, with a new sheriff’s substation scheduled to open there next month.

But an annual report by the San Diego Assn. of Governments showed that the property crime rate in all three cities actually declined between 1987 and 1991 and from 1990 to 1991. The violent-crime rate, which increased, did so at a pace slower than in the rest of the county, and only Oceanside had either a property or a violent-crime rate higher than the county average, the study showed.

“A lot of the things that we’re dealing with, particularly in the downtown area, is a perception of crime and getting people to feel better,” Police Chief Dunne said.

Dealing with perception rather than actually eliminating crime may end up being the security patrol’s biggest accomplishment.

“No one really knows how effective it could be,” San Diego State University Prof. Joel Henderson said. The little research on the subject has been inconclusive, he said.

Indeed, Bel-Air’s Sundeen said it would be nearly impossible to tell what crime, if any, the service deters. “We would probably never be able to have a true picture.”

Prostitutes, drug dealers and the homeless--who account for many complaints to Bel-Air--don’t disappear by asking them to move on, Henderson said.

“One of the arguments against Neighborhood Watch was that it would simply displace crime,” said Henderson, who specializes in criminal justice administration. “The counter-response has always been, ‘I don’t care if it moves, that’s not my problem.’ ”

The fact that the Bel-Air patrols are armed may deter crime, but there may also be a downside.

“If you put an armed guard up there, there are a lot of people that say that invites a stronger (show of) force,” Henderson said. “Now a guy knows that there is an armed guard there, and he has to prepare for a gun battle.”

That reasoning, Henderson said, is why police officers in England don’t carry guns.

Legal questions also arise over what the security officers can and cannot do under the pilot program.

Private security and sworn police officers operate under separate rules, and both state and federal laws make sharp distinctions between the two.

Attorneys said private security officers lack many of the powers of sworn police officers, such as being able to demand identification from a person they suspect of committing a crime.

But security officers have more latitude in some law enforcement areas. For example, evidence seized by a security officer that is admissible in court might be considered illegal if that same seizure was made by a sworn police officer.

But because Bel-Air has been hired by the city to perform a police function, the company lacks the authority of police officers and yet may be bound by the stricter rules of search and seizure, said Beyersdorf of the county public defender’s office. Since the pilot program is a unique situation, its boundaries have not yet been tested in court.

“There has been a lot of legitimate concern in communities about the homeless people and people who are loitering, and I would be concerned about large numbers of private security wandering around without supervision,” Beyersdorf said.

“If we get into a situation where a city or a large group of people were using this as a ruse to chase people out of town when they couldn’t do so with regular police officers, we should be concerned.”

Also, although citizens do not have the right to resist arrest by a police officer, security guards do not enjoy that protection, “so you could have some nasty instances where a person resists an unlawful arrest,” Beyersdorf said.