Clergy Help Take the Edge off the Area’s Mean Streets

Donnie Williams was home eating dinner when the call came at 9:30.

Eight real estate agents had been robbed at gunpoint by three men who stormed a South San Gabriel office. One victim was in hysterics after learning that her boss was killed chasing the fleeing robbers. The woman, robbed at gunpoint five years earlier, churned with reawakened fear and anxiety.

Williams hurried to the Temple City sheriff’s station. Not until 2 a.m. did he leave the distraught woman’s side.

Senior pastor at the Family Church of Monrovia, the Rev. Williams, 45, is not a deputy sheriff or even a reserve deputy. He is part of a clergy team that for the past 10 months has worked side by side with station deputies.

“Preachers on Patrol” some call them. They respond at a moment’s notice to beeping pagers, hang on tight during high-speed chases, provide extra eyes and hands during patrols and, most important, they open their hearts to the homeless, to marital abuse victims and to the distraught and bereaved.

They can humanize and defuse hard-boiled conflicts that deputies encounter on the streets. Sometimes they even lend a confidential ear to deputies troubled by what they see and hear.

County officials say the eight ministers who serve at the Temple City station--part of a 62-member crew at nine sheriff’s stations--are helping to reinvigorate a decades-old program gone stale.

The enthusiasm, hard work and questions of the Temple City station ministers prompted the Sheriff’s Department to begin developing 16 hours of specialized training soon to be given to all volunteer ministers.

Clergy volunteers are nothing new for law enforcement agencies. A handful of San Gabriel Valley police departments have always had a minister or two on call, and these small-scale efforts continue today.

The Sheriff’s Department program is decades old, said Helen Reardon, volunteer coordinator. But it operated without guidelines and without a clear mission until she restructured it two years ago.

No longer were ministers just a bunch of names on a telephone list handed to deputies. They were right there in the passenger seat of black-and-white patrol cars, working beside the deputies.

At the Temple City station, the ministers ride patrol about once a week and have monthly meetings at the station. On patrol, they don a blue jacket with the word “Clergy” on the back. Other times, they are encouraged to drop in at the station, plus they take turns wearing a beeper 24 hours a day.

“This is a front-row seat on life, on people who need help,” said Stewart Levin, one of the volunteer chaplains.

Levin should know. In February, when his beeper sounded, it was a plea for help from deputies at the Santa Clarita station who lacked their own clergy volunteers.

The deputies were trying to help a grief-stricken family whose 2-year-old son drowned in a rain-swollen creek. The father, with the boy in his arms, had fallen into the creek and the strong currents ripped the boy from his grasp.

The scene at the hospital was chaotic as more and more family members arrived, all of them speaking Spanish. Levin quickly called the Rev. David Gonzalez, pastor at a La Puente church, and the two got to the hospital within half an hour.

There, Gonzalez comforted six grieving relatives prostrate over the child’s body. Gently, he eased the family into another room and calmed them down, allowing hospital workers to take away the child’s body.

Such calls show the dramatic need for volunteer ministers. But Temple City station Capt. Robert Mirabella had in mind a different need when he began recruiting them.

Assigned in February last year to Temple City, Mirabella inherited a station with a troubled image. A half-dozen deputies had been charged with on-duty crimes and scores of others were named in brutality lawsuits. Seeking to humanize the face of law enforcement in the 62.3 square miles patrolled by the 190 deputies under his command, Mirabella thought ministers could help the deputies learn the gentler side of dealing with people.

“I wanted the clergy to provide a model,” Mirabella said. “In the absence of the chaplain, the deputies would duplicate the behavior.”

But not just any minister would appeal to deputies schooled in life on the streets, Mirabella knew. Enter Williams, a street-savvy, 6-foot-tall, former karate champion with Hollywood connections and a sense of the dramatic.

Raised in “Rock Town,” which is street slang for Duarte, Williams in his youth ran with the Highland Gangsters, a black gang that in those days did little more than “throw rocks at white people’s cars,” Williams said.

A stint in the Marine Corps introduced him to the martial arts. After military service, Williams competed in karate tournaments, winning the Pan American Championship in 1979. Along with cash prizes, new cars and travel came cameo roles in movies starring martial arts champions Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris.

Williams blended all these elements 11 years ago in a ministry now housed in a row of warehouse buildings off California Avenue in Monrovia. Here the shouts of karate drills from youth classes compete with music from the church’s recording studio. All of it is meant to entice low-income and minority youths away from gangs, drugs and life on the streets and, indirectly, to God.

“My job is not to prove to you that there is a God,” Williams said. “If I can prove that there is a God, you don’t need faith. My job is to prove to you I believe in God and that He’s good, merciful, fair, understanding and that He’ll be there when no one else is here.”

After starting a pastor patrol program in Monrovia two years ago, Williams was snapped up by Mirabella when the minister called in behalf of residents complaining of unfair treatment by deputies. Williams’ martial arts expertise and unique ministry would appeal to deputies leery of a preacher in their car, Mirabella reasoned.

Slowly, reluctant deputies have been won over, said Ralph Paddock, a Temple City deputy sheriff. Deputies who feared the preachers would proselytize nonstop in the car or interfere with their jobs have found instead that the ministers are an asset.

Paddock recalled the time he answered a call and found a drunken man screaming his hatred of police. After Paddock’s ride-along minister, Levin, quietly spoke to the man, he calmed down.

Said Paddock, “He went from, “You guys are jerks” to “You guys have a tough job. I’m sorry you had to come out tonight. I shouldn’t have been drinking.”

The ministers also bridge the gap with gang members who fear the informant label if they talk to deputies. A conversation with a minister is safe and may even prompt a later conversation with the deputy, Paddock added.

“If (gang members) see me the next time, they might say, ‘Where’s that padre I saw you with?’ ” he said.

Domestic disputes can cool down fast when a minister arrives, Levin said. During one call, a woman with a knot on her eye continued to shout at her husband even in front of the deputy called to the home. But as soon as the deputy introduced Levin as the “padre,” the couple suddenly froze, ashamed of their behavior, Levin said.

Finally, ministers often provide the emotional help and follow-up that deputies don’t have the time or skills for. After one ride-along minister coaxed a drug addict into counseling, deputies stopped getting calls to go to his house to break up brawls, Deputy Mark Saldecke said.

Mirabella points to such successes as proof that the clergy program is working.

“We’ve had to go slow,” he says.. “And I don’t have statistics to show, but the ministers are beneficial.”