Call Her Captain : Head of Lynwood Sheriff’s Station Offers Civility and Tough Talk

In some respects, Sheriff’s Capt. Carole Freeman is a hard-liner.

“I don’t subscribe to the belief that youngsters who go out and kill in drive-by shootings are simply neglected kids who haven’t got anything to do, or that graffiti is somehow an expression of art by some youngster who doesn’t have a canvas on which to paint,” she said in an interview at her command post, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Lynwood station.

“It is antisocial behavior,” she said.

As for the ballyhooed gang truce, Freeman said: “The subsequent reaction to it by politicians and others in the community that it’s somehow a good thing that we’re having this truce is not unlike the Stockholm syndrome, where you thank your tormentor for not doing evil things to you. I think the gang activity is really keeping communities hostage.”

On the other hand, Freeman is a conciliator, busy these days preaching civility to the deputies she commands.

Lynwood, a community with a Latino majority, recently set up the Lynwood Law Enforcement Review Board to present complaints or commendations to sheriff’s deputies contracted to patrol the city. The board is to comment on how the department is performing in a community where deputies have been frequently criticized as insensitive and sometimes abusive to minorities.

“I don’t see it as anything negative or confrontational,” Freeman said of the review board.

A 22-year veteran, Freeman is one of the few women with major command responsibility in the Sheriff’s Department. Four months ago, she was assigned as captain in charge of the Lynwood and Firestone stations, both in areas severely affected by the spring riots.

Before that, she headed the Safe Streets Bureau, charged with suppressing criminal gang activity. Early in her career, she was one of the first 12 female deputies assigned to patrol duties. And, in 1975, she became the first woman to supervise patrol deputies.

“Someone in the department, a good friend, said: ‘Yes, Carole, you’re a pioneer,’ ” Freeman recalled. “I said: ‘That sounds like I should be some sort of a chicken franchise.’ Either that, or I’m incredibly old.”

Joking aside, Freeman’s superiors express confidence and pride in her and in the two other higher-ranking women in the 8,000-deputy department--Cmdrs. Carol Painter and Gladys Helena Asbhy.

“She’s had the respect of the employees in every assignment she’s been in,” said Assistant Sheriff Jerry Harper.

The Lynwood post is a particularly tough one. Before Freeman took charge, there was an organization at the station known as the “Vikings,” which was accused of holding white supremacist views.

Members of the Vikings have been transferred, but Freeman continues to confront morale problems common in a department beset with budget woes and community tension.

When Freeman was first interviewed--before the County Board of Supervisors pared projected Sheriff’s Department cuts by $35 million--she said many deputies she supervises feared the prospect of what would have been the first layoffs in the department’s history.

But after the supervisors’ action, she said: “There’s a great sigh of relief that collectively we’re not going to have to face these enormous layoffs.” But, she cautioned, “we’re still in for a tough time in the long haul” because millions of dollars must be cut from the department’s budget.

The problems caused by outside tensions are even more serious, she believes.

“As citizens, we lean on law enforcement to solve juvenile delinquency and drug trafficking and all the social ills of the world,” Freeman said. “It’s absolutely unrealistic.”

And, she said, the result is a cadre of sheriff’s deputies who are under tremendous pressure.

“There’s more calls for service,” she said. “There is a greater level of activity with respect to aggravated assaults, violent crimes, drug activity.

“I don’t think any one of these stations realistically is any different with respect to the type of employee. We have a solid group of individual deputies who are genuinely interested in doing a good job, who are interested in police work, who want to come to work and feel proud of what they do.

“By the same token, we also have, as in any organization, a number of individuals who misbehave, who step on themselves, stub their toes, and I’m not talking in a malicious way.”

She said she strongly supports Sheriff Sherman Block’s recent letter to all department personnel calling on them to avoid racism, sexism or bias in the performance of their duties.

“These are tough times, and there will be temptations to give in to fatigue,” she said. “But that’s never an excuse to be insensitive to people. I guess when you’re in the middle of a problem, it’s easy to make very large generalizations, and what that does is diminish you as an individual and makes you ineffective in the community.

“An officer has a bad contact with a citizen, and he goes back to someone else and just projects that attitude onto the next individual. So we don’t make friends for law enforcement. It takes an awful lot of patience.”

Freeman said she is committed to community relations, in part because she believes that law enforcement must confront crime in partnership with the community.

Freeman has a picture on her office wall of Margaret Adams, who in 1911 became the first woman sheriff’s deputy in Los Angeles County. And there is also a photo of the 12 deputies who in 1972 became the first women to go on patrol.

Born in Baltimore, Freeman came to California as a teen-ager and was the first member of her family to get a college degree, at the University of Redlands. Later, she earned a master’s degree in management from Cal Poly Pomona. She also is a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy at Quantico, Va.

Freeman said she was influenced to enter law enforcement by a cousin who became a narcotics officer in Nevada after serving in Vietnam.

During her time in the Sheriff’s Department, Freeman also has been a watch commander and lieutenant at the Santa Clarita Valley and Malibu stations, a detective lieutenant in the Central Investigations Bureau, a burglary investigator and a captain commanding the transportation bureau.