CAMPAIGN ’94 / L.A. COUNTY : Crime Is Down, Fear Is Up: What Should a Sheriff Do?

The Times posed the following question to six candidates for Los Angeles County sheriff:

Crime statistics are down, but people seem to be more fearful for their safety than ever. What is it you would like us to know or understand better about law enforcement?

GIL CARRILLO has 22 years as an L.A. County deputy sheriff; he started the first plainclothes gang unit in East L.A. and co-led the ‘Night Stalker’ investigation.

When you watch the TV news at 4 p.m., the first 10 to 15 minutes are simply violence--not only locally, but all over the United States. So people see this and tend to believe that it’s happening everywhere. Certainly a man going nuts on a train in New York is not going to have one bit of impact on the citizens here, on their safety. People have to know that we’re concerned with what is happening here in Los Angeles County; we have to alleviate their fears and go on a marketing blitz or a positive campaign to show them what the Sheriff’s Department is doing.

When I was a teen-ager, on the corner with the rest of the young boys in my neighborhood, there was a deputy sheriff who helped me. He helped me graduate from high school, talked me into going in the service at 17. That wasn’t called, back then, “community policing.” That was just good old-fashioned police work. Now we just want to get back to that. I want to give back what was given to me a long time ago.

TAB RHODES has been an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy for five years, and has worked as a radio talk-show host on KIEV.

Sheriff’s department personnel, as well as law-enforcement personnel throughout the county, have become handcuffed by either political overreaction or overreaction of management and through a general feeling of low morale.

If we feel we are being left out there alone to hang for whatever may occur, you’re going to find that police are going to stop being preventive, stop being proactive and they’re just going to respond to calls.

An awful lot of people have told me straight out, “We’ve become firemen.” It used to be that we drove down a dark alley looking for drug sales. It used to be we’d drive up to a group of gang members and try to disperse them. Now we get a call, we go and respond to the call. We react rather than prevent.

The community has to really get behind their law enforcement. And we in law enforcement have to improve and come back from an image that has been tarnished in the last three years.

My biggest opponent is not Sheriff Sherman Block. It’s apathy. People are not concerned--they say they are, but they’re not genuinely concerned about crime until it affects them directly.

I would like to bring a whole new positive image into law enforcement. In a candidate forum the other day, someone brought up the 21 deputies that were indicted in a drug scandal. Well, we need to get people to stop thinking about those 21 people and focus on the 6,000 that were out there protecting them last night.

Right now we need an awful lot of support. There are not enough law-enforcement officers out there. We’re going to need the support of the community more than ever.

JOHN STITES has been an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy for 13 years and currently holds the rank of sergeant.

The crime issue is not as serious as people think. Any crime is a problem, but crime is down. Some people are using it as a basis to further their political careers.

The major issue is the budget. In our department, we’re looking at a $300-million to $400-million shortfall.

The amount of crime depends on how much the public is willing to get involved in assisting law enforcement.

First, you have to go to each community. The law-enforcement needs of the public are decided by the public. They know what crime problem angers them the most. And we educate them by letting them know how we can address that within the law.

In the contract cities (where deputies patrol in lieu of a local police department), it’s a little bit more difficult, because they have their own governing bodies that are supposed to address that issue. In the unincorporated areas, the areas that we pretty much cast aside, they get the least police services, and when the cuts come, they are always the first to be affected. They just don’t have an opportunity to get involved. They have very little representation, because they’re represented by the Board of Supervisors, and you know as well as I do that it’s very difficult to get any supervisor rowing in your direction.

Department morale is the other thing I would like to address. Because of some management policy decisions, we’ve got people out there who are basically punching the clock. They’re wearing the tan and green, they’re getting in their cars, but they’ve lost their desire. Morale is so low.

People are unaware they can vote in a sheriff’s election. If they live in Montebello, or Burbank, for instance, they have their own law-enforcement agency. They say,”Hey, we don’t vote for the sheriff.” They don’t recognize the authority and the power that the sheriff has, or that he should be using, to better the county’s law-enforcement services.

We’ve had just three sheriffs since 1932. They homestead and pass it along. There has to be a term limitation on that office.

ROBERT IRMAS was an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy from 1972 to 1980; he is currently a judgepro tem for the L.A. Municipal Court.

The Sheriff’s Department, although one of the major social institutions in the community by way of its employees and its budget, is virtually an unknown in the county community. It is, in fact, an extremely closed shop. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the LAPD was the bad boy on the block, and they were taking their licks; the Sheriff’s Department, for the most part, avoided that type of public scrutiny. Now, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, things have changed. We’ve had a series of extremely bad shootings in the last several years, we’ve had the Kolts Commission (a July, 1992, report on Sheriff’s Department policies), and the fact is that the relationship between law-enforcement agencies and the public has changed dramatically in the last several years.

But even the second-year report of the Kolts Commission states that there have not been some very needed, significant changes in the department. The morale of the line law-enforcement officers is as low as it’s ever been.

I think that the feeling between the public and law enforcement has gotten a lot better, vis-a-vis the LAPD. Sherman Block is part of the Daryl Gates-Ira Reiner generation, and I think people will be happier if they can elect new leadership.

I think the crime statistics are skewed. The incidents per 100,000 population may be down, but the crimes that are being committed are more ruthless, more violent, more mindless. You go home and your front door is open and your TV is gone and your stereo is gone and your silver is gone--that’s the story 10 years ago. Now you come home and your TV and your stereo and your silver is gone, but they’re waiting for you to come home so they can take your car keys, beat the snot out of you, assault your wife and kidnap your kid. So the fact is that the numbers may be down, but the brutality and violence connected with crime are going up.

ROBERT H. LEWIS JR. has been with the Metropolitan Transit Police for more than 12 years; he’s currently a sergeant.

Statistics show that crime is down. What they don’t show is the change in lifestyle that citizens in our community are making. People are a little more cautious. They’re staying home more because of our crime problem and fear of crime. Over a period of many years, we’ve created a situation where instead of us feeling that the police or Sheriff’s Department is there to serve and protect the community, we treat a lot of the community as if they need to serve us. And we need to change that attitude.

Once the people see that we’re trying to become better, I think they’ll accept us more. Right now, instead of looking at us as the savior, a lot of our citizens fear the Sheriff’s Department as much as they fear the criminals on the street. It shouldn’t be like that. I’m a cop. I have a badge in my pocket. If I didn’t, I would have a problem.

I was stopped by a sheriff’s deputy about a year ago. I was in my car, a nice car, and as soon as he stopped me, I showed my badge and he was respectful and nice and we talked about law enforcement. I had just pulled out of a store, and he swooped on me maybe a half-block away. He said the store has been robbed a lot, and I fit the description, so that’s why he pulled me over. Fit the description of a robbery suspect!

Being a black American, I shouldn’t have to carry a badge in my pocket to not be messed with by law enforcement. What if I didn’t have a badge? Do I have to sit on a curb? Do I have to have my car searched? And you have to understand that in South-Central L.A., in certain areas, that’s a way of life. You go try that in Devonshire, and you’re not going to get away with it. Simple as that.

So yes, there is a problem, and I would like to address this problem and make a change for the better.

SHERMAN BLOCK has been Los Angeles County Sheriff since 1982.

The single most debilitating affliction in our community today is the fear of crime. It has caused individuals to make changes in their daily routines. It has caused businesses to reorder their priorities, and it has even caused government to reorder its priorities.

The fact that statistics indicate that crime is down slightly over the past year I don’t think is any indication that the threat has been reduced. I think that the reduction is due primarily to citizens avoiding situations where they might otherwise become victims.

If we are going to deal with the kind of crime that is generating this level of fear--primarily the fear of violence, particularly street violence and random violence--the only way to repress that kind of crime is with adequate resources on the streets of the community. And of course, over the last several years, this community has suffered greatly from a lack of adequate law-enforcement resources. When we have been forced to mobilize to deal with specific situations, be it an earthquake, Rodney King trial or anything else, the result has been a repression of random violence in the streets.

If people want to measure the impact of crime on our community, looking at statistics is not going to give you the true picture. The accurate measure is the presence or absence of fear. And even with the reduction in crime represented by a couple of percentage points, I don’t think the presence of fear has been reduced one iota over the last several years.