Gray Patrols : Senior Citizen Volunteers Help Police Cut Costs, Keep Officers on the Streets

The white SHOP patrol car pulls up next to the West Covina black-and-whites and 62-year-old volunteer Bill Clark hops out, pops the trunk and hands a Polaroid camera to Community Service Officer Bill Stevenson.

Stevenson thanks him. Without SHOP, he would have had to trek back to the station for the camera to photograph the hate crime on South Heritage Drive, a swastika drawn in lipstick on the back of a high-schooler’s car.

“I keep my own camera in the car for these situations,” Clark says with a smile. “We aren’t all Silly Hopeless Old People.”

SHOP, short for Seniors Helping Our Police, is part of a growing list of programs in which San Gabriel Valley police departments use senior citizen volunteers. The senior volunteers free officers from the menial tasks of law enforcement, from directing traffic to ferrying evidence to the district attorney. In the process, they help cut costs and keep more police on the streets.

About 10 senior patrol programs exist or are being formed in the valley’s 29 cities, both in police departments and at county sheriff’s stations.

Clark oversees the 30 SHOP members in West Covina. After kicking the tires and flashing the roof lights, the retired Gas Co. supervisor usually spends “pretty boring” days driving around in his Chevy Caprice looking for trouble, anything from traffic accidents to rescuing an injured possum.

He also issues parking tickets, especially handicapped parking violations, which net the department $330 per citation. He plans on staking out a neighborhood school where parents have been ignoring the blue-and-white wheelchair signs when they park to pick up their kids.

“You never can tell what’s going to happen,” he said. “We do have a lot of days of nothing, but I prefer to have it that way.”

A recent Tuesday morning disappointed him. Besides the hate crime, Clark was called to three separate “TCs”--copspeak for “traffic collision”--and he dutifully parked his car behind the black-and-whites, turned on his lights and took the place of the officer diverting traffic.

“The SHOP people relieve us so we can go out on other calls” and write the reports, said Officer Jolene Simonton as she finished up a report on an accident in which a Mustang ran head-on into an olive tree.

Clark makes his rounds armed only with every American’s right to make a citizen’s arrest. “We’re told to stay away from any heavy action,” he said, though he has assisted in one arrest in his two-year SHOP career.

“I was hailed by a citizen who spoke only Spanish,” Clark said. “He kept pointing to a service station across the street. Finally, someone came up who could interpret, and I learned that someone at the station had tried to sell him a stolen vehicle.”

Clark kept the suspect under observation and radioed for backup. “Officers came and arrested him,” said Clark, puffing on a cigarette.

Thanks in part to the strict rules forbidding any gung-ho heroics, not a single senior patrol officer has been hurt on the job in the San Gabriel Valley, said Capt. Russ Brown, who helped start the Claremont Police Department’s Retired Senior Volunteer Patrol program almost 10 years ago.

Liability insurance for the seniors is provided by the cities they work for, he said.

Brown estimates the 20 senior volunteers in Claremont save his department about $50,000 a year. “We came up with round figures a few years ago, and we figured a savings of $10 an hour for every volunteer hour they worked,” he said. “They work about 5,000 hours a year.”

Grants or city money pick up the tab for the senior citizens’ uniforms, equipment and the other start-up costs associated with the programs.

Senior patrol uniforms are different from regular police garb--Claremont’s officers wear blue and black while their seniors dress in tan--but all volunteers wear metal badges.

“We started out with cloth badges,” Brown said. “But then people had an identification problem. One of our seniors would give them an order and they’d say, ‘Who the heck are you?’ ”

The real badges had an effect on the seniors’ attitudes as well, said Claremont’s volunteer patrol coordinator, Bob Spees. “They gave our organization more meaning, and we were proud to wear the uniform,” the 69-year-old said. “It told us they had confidence in us, that they felt we wouldn’t embarrass the department.”

Getting officers used to the senior volunteers is the biggest hurdle for most departments, said West Covina Lt. Lee Rossman, who supervises the 3-year-old SHOP program.

“Bureaucracy is slow to change, so it took awhile for the seniors to become accepted,” Rossman said.

Clark agrees. “When it first started, the officers thought, ‘What’s this group of old people doing here?’ Now they call us in when they need us.”

Personal safety governs the extent of Clark’s involvement. “I’m not armed. If I get involved in a ‘hot’ situation, I’m just another responsibility for the Police Department, so they’re pretty adamant that we stay away.”

Jokes about the volunteers have softened and taken on a more playful one as well, Rossman said.

“See Dave there?” Rossman points. “He retired from SHOP to become a police officer.”

West Covina’s second-oldest sworn officer, Dave Shively, gets a ton of ribbing; at 51, he’s a year over the minimum age to be eligible for SHOP.

The senior citizens’ biggest challenge is learning the vehicle codes and the police phonetic alphabet, Clark said. In the West Covina program, training consists of seven weeks of lectures and videos; then the seniors go out on ride-alongs with officers and experienced SHOP members.

Not everyone earns a SHOP badge--out of his latest batch of 20 recruits, only seven made it through training, Clark said.

The job can be tough, frequently involving countless hours of rocking from heel to heel waving traffic past accidents.

“But we feel we need to give the community something back,” Clark said. “We want to give (the community) something back for all the years it took care of us.”

Citizen Patrols

Cities With Established Senior Volunteer Programs Claremont Police Department West Covina Police Department Baldwin Park Police Department La Verne Police Department

Cities With Established Citizen Volunteer Programs (no age requirement): Arcadia Police Department El Monte Police Department Azusa Police Department

Cities With Senior Volunteer Programs in the Works Monterey Park Police Department Walnut Sheriff’s Substation San Dimas Sheriff’s Substation