Arresting View of Detox : Drunkenness: Officers say treatment centers--not jails--are needed to house people picked up for public intoxication.

When Port Hueneme Police found Roy Whittenberg passed out in a park restroom on New Year’s Day, they arrested him and put him in a padded cell so he would sober up. Standard procedure under California law.

Whittenberg, 46, snored and moaned when they tried to rouse him every 20 to 30 minutes, but would not wake up. When he stopped breathing 2 1/2 hours later, police rushed him to the hospital where doctors discovered he had died of an undiscovered skull fracture.

Had he been arrested in most other cities in the county, Whittenberg would have been taken to the Ventura County Jail.

There, all arrestees receive a routine medical check. Anyone who is unconscious or has serious injuries is sent to the emergency room at the Ventura County Medical Center before being booked.

But in cities such as Port Hueneme, with independent police departments and little money to pay nurses or county booking fees, police officers often must cope with drunks themselves, under a law that police countywide say fails to address the problem of alcoholism.

“Personally, I don’t think it should be a law enforcement responsibility, but it is because there’s nobody else to do it,” said Assistant Sheriff Oscar Fuller.

“It’s unfortunate that there are not some places and programs to deal with these people (who) need some treatment and need some help,” said Fuller, who oversees patrol deputies in five cities and all the unincorporated areas of Ventura County. “Because we all know the jail is not at all a treatment facility or anything that’s going to rehabilitate somebody. It’s simply a warehouse.”

The problem is as old as police work, as old as alcohol itself, many police officials say.

“It’s like at least three or four calls a day,” said Lt. A.J. Farrar, a commander in the Ventura Police Department’s patrol division. “You’ve got this slobbering drunk you can’t take care of. You pick him up off the sidewalk, you slide him in the police car.”

Ventura officers often look for a relative or friend who can care for the drunk until he or she sobers up. The department has no cells for holding drunks, and would rather let them sleep it off in someone’s home rather than pay the $120 booking fee to put them in the county jail, Farrar said.

“We’re not left with a lot of options. We don’t have an alcohol group or independent house to take care of these people that other agencies have,” Farrar said. “We’re not talking about armed robbers or burglars climbing out of windows. We’re talking about drunks.

“We’re using a criminal tool,” he said of the law. “It strikes us all as the only option available, but it’s not a real good one.”

Section 647(f) of the California Penal Code defines public drunkenness as a misdemeanor act of disorderly conduct. Anyone who is so intoxicated on alcohol, drugs or chemical fumes as to endanger themselves or someone else can be arrested.

More than a decade ago, dozens of public drunks were arrested, sentenced and jailed every week under that law by police and courts in Ventura County, said police officials.

But as more serious crimes increased, prosecutors stopped pressing the drunk charges and judges stopped jailing those defendants, leaving police as the last line of defense between public drunks and injury to themselves or others.

In addition, the number of people sentenced for 647(f) has dropped, largely due to the booking fees and the district attorney’s decision in 1991 to forgo prosecuting many petty misdemeanors, often including the crime of public drunkenness.

Now, in most cases, drunks are brought to police lockups or the Ventura County Jail, allowed to sober up, then released. The average stay is about six hours, police said.

Like other arrestees, public drunks booked into the county jail get a medical checkup--and treatment if necessary--before they are locked up, said Sgt. Gary Cook, who helps oversee the booking operations.

The charge stays off their criminal record, but many arrestees--as many as 80%, police said--are habitual drunks who wind up in handcuffs again soon afterward.

“Most of the people that are arrested under 647 are your common street-people-type drunks,” said Cmdr. Bob Brooks, who oversees the custody division of the county jail. “If they weren’t homeless or transient, they’d be drunk in their home, and they wouldn’t be arrested.”

Oxnard Police arrested 771 people for public drunkenness in 1992, then released 577 of them after they sobered up enough to care for themselves.

The remaining 194 were presented to the district attorney’s office for prosecution, of which 76 were dismissed outright and 118 were filed as misdemeanors or violations of probation, said Ed Champagne, the department’s court officer.

One Oxnard man, who Champagne declined to name, has been arrested under the public drunk law 125 times in eight years.

Many are homeless, chronic drinkers, said Oxnard Patrolman Bruce Reed.

“Over and over, it always seems to be the same faces,” Reed said as he cruised past liquor stores, public parks and rail yards frequented by public drunks.

Oxnard Police also encounter a lot of public drunks in La Colonia, near the corner of Cooper Road and Hayes Avenue, where he said “good, honest, hard-working people” drink hard on weekend nights, some passing out and awakening to find their week’s earnings have been stolen from them.

By contrast, only 119 public drunks were arrested in 1992 in Simi Valley, where police see street drunks as more of a “city thing,” said Lt. Dick Thomas.

“Our drunk people, the ones we take into custody, are usually as the result of drinking too much at a bar or in a party . . . then being out in public,” Thomas said. “We’re really suburbia, U.S.A.”

In Los Angeles, police used to pack drunks into vans and crowd them into holding cells without beds or food.

Then a landmark court case improved treatment of people arrested under that law--but only in Los Angeles County.

Robert Sundance, a homeless alcoholic who had been arrested more than 500 times in 25 years, challenged the law in 1975 as unconstitutional, fighting as far as the state Supreme Court in an attempt to prove that public drunks were sick, not criminal.

The high court in 1987 refused to hear his appeal of a ruling by then Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Harry L. Hupp, now a federal court judge, that the law was indeed constitutional.

But by then, the system had already been improved by Hupp’s 1978 orders that public drunks in that county should be carried in padded vans no more than 10 at a time, be examined by trained health workers within an hour of arrest and be given blankets, pillows and adequate room in the holding cells.

Since that ruling, arrests under Section 647(f) plummeted dramatically in Los Angeles, from 50,000 a year to less than 3,000 a year, said Carlyle Hall, one of Sundance’s attorneys. And the Legislature added another section to the Penal Code, allowing police to put public drunks into civil protective custody for 72 hours at a treatment facility.

But since then, he said, no public law group or individual has challenged the law further in Los Angeles or Ventura County.

Of Whittenberg’s death, Hall said, “What crime did that guy commit? He didn’t commit a crime, he just happened to have the bad luck to have the disease.”

But Port Hueneme Police Chief Robert A. Anderson said the county offers no treatment facilities as an alternative for handling public drunks other than locking them up until they are sober.

“I don’t think there’s very much differentiation in the way you can handle this,” he said. “What you’re doing is picking them up so nothing can happen, and . . . you want to make sure they’re OK before you let them out of here.”

A pedestrian found Whittenberg lying in the men’s room at Bubbling Springs Park at about 10:30 a.m. on Jan. 1, surrounded by his belongings, his bike and shoes left outside, Anderson said.

Police arrived moments later. Unable to wake him, they lifted his 200-pound-plus frame into a patrol car and transferred him to the city’s detox cell.

When they tried to rouse him during periodic visits to the cell, he would stir enough to wave them off, but he did not awaken, Anderson said.

When they noticed he had stopped breathing, the officers immediately started cardiopulmonary resuscitation and summoned an ambulance, which took him to St. John’s Regional Medical Center. There, doctors were unable to revive him, and discovered that he had suffered a fractured skull--probably in a fall in the restroom, according to the Ventura County Medical Examiner’s office. They pronounced him dead at 2:01 p.m.

Deputy Coroner Craig Stevens said traumatic head injuries caused Whittenberg’s death, and that his blood-alcohol level was .13% (.08% is the legal limit for drivers).

“If we had left him there, then we would be negligent for not trying to help him,” Anderson said. “If he hadn’t been found, then we’d have ended up with a person that’s dead in a restroom. On the other hand, if we brought someone in here and let them out the front door too soon and they get hit by a truck, we would have had a problem.”

Anderson said he has asked his staff to suggest a better way to handle public drunks, but no one has any suggestions.

Publicly funded programs in the county are severely limited.

A chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous meets at the county jail, and the sheriff runs a program for alcoholic inmates at the Ojai Honor Farm, where instructors teach about the disease of alcoholism.

But the program is open only to sentenced inmates. About 18 women and 40 men are enrolled now, sheriff’s Sgt. Cook said.

In the 1970s, the state operated detox centers in Ventura and Oxnard, where public drunks would be dropped off by police and urged by staff to admit themselves for treatment, officials said.

But funding for those programs dried up, leaving Section 647(f) as society’s only treatment for habitual public drunks, said assistant sheriff Fuller.

“That was really unfortunate, because it was a good alternative to jail time,” he said.

The county’s approach to public drunkenness is backward, said George Eskin, a veteran defense attorney who had represented Whittenberg in a drunk-driving arrest last year.

“One of the sad messages of the funding crisis is that we’re cutting out programs that deal with the causes of conduct that leads to crime, and funding programs that deal with the consequences of crime,” Eskin said. “We’re building jails, but we’re eliminating programs to keep people out of them.”

But many police officials agreed that until the county focuses on curbing the causes of public drunkenness, they will be left to punish the results.

“You can’t just turn around and walk away,” said Santa Paula Police Chief Walt Adair.

“An officer’s required to take some action. If he finds someone intoxicated to the point where he can’t take care of himself . . . he’s required to arrest that person,” Adair said. “I think it’s just a social problem.

“And has anyone anywhere in the criminal justice system had a successful program to handle repeat inebriates? I’m willing to bet you’re not going to find too many.”