NORTHRIDGE : Officers Set Up Shop in Mobile Home

One phone, one typewriter and seven police officers to share them. It was a recipe for raw nerves and chaos when a community-based policing unit of the Los Angeles Police Department moved to the already crowded Devonshire Division offices last year.

So frustrated officers set about finding a new home. With the help of a $10,000 grant from City Councilman Hal Bernson’s office, donations from local businesses and hours of volunteer labor from residents and officers, the ruins of a mobile home have been converted into an office with a desk and phone for each officer.

The officers, who run Neighborhood Watch and community-based policing efforts, have been working in their new quarters in the parking lot behind the Devonshire Division headquarters in Northridge for several months. Sgt. Ralph Krusey, community-based policing coordinator, said the construction work, including installation of a sign, will wrap up in the next two weeks. A dedication for the new mobile home office is scheduled for 6 p.m. Sept. 1 at the station, 10250 Etiwanda Ave.

“When we got it, it had been completely gutted,” Krusey said of the mobile home. “It was in terrible shape.”

The home was donated by the Los Angeles City Housing Authority, said Greig Smith, spokesman for Bernson. Smith said it was originally purchased as housing for construction workers and briefly served as a homeless shelter. The shelter experiment was unsuccessful--the home wound up gutted, broken and packed several feet high with rubbish. Finally, it was stored in a yard in El Segundo, Smith said.

The cost of moving and restoring the home could well have been over $100,000 had it not been for the volunteer labor and donations of equipment from local businesses--including air conditioners, computers and desks, Smith said.

“If you saw that thing when we pulled it in there--cops were walking out, saying, ‘What is that doing in our parking lot? I don’t want to work in there,’ ” Smith said. “Now they alldo.”