Cover Story : Waterfront Lawmen : Little-Known Port Police Officers Patrol on Land, Sea and Air to Safeguard Lives and Property in the Sprawling Harbor

In a city swarming with law enforcement agencies, the Port Police may be the least-known cops who ever walked, drove, pedaled, flew or swam a beat.

Everybody has heard of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Most people are probably aware of airport, transit and school police, not to mention local police departments from Burbank to El Segundo.

Except for those who live or work at the Port of Los Angeles, it’s probably fair to say that most Angelenos have never heard of the Port Police. In fact, while South Bay residents may be aware that the Port of Los Angeles is one of the busiest commercial shipping ports in the world, people in Van Nuys or Pasadena or Beverly Hills tend to think that the port is some kind of marina.

Actually, it’s a teeming center of industrialism interspersed with pockets of recreational activity, 28 miles of waterfront where oil tank farms, lumber yards and auto storage facilities sit cheek by jowl with marinas and beaches and restaurants with harbor views. It’s a place where freighters tie up near luxury cruise ships, where grimy commercial fishing boats share the water with private yachts.

Every year more than $60 billion worth of goods pass through the port, bound to and from almost every country in the world. Every day about 50,000 people pour into the port area to work. For hundreds of others, the “live-aboards” in the more than 4,000 marina slips, the port is their permanent home. For others, the transients who sneak into container yards and set up housekeeping in empty shipping boxes, the port is a temporary home.

Patrolling and protecting all that are the Port Police, 55 sworn officers who patrol on land, in the air, on the water and even under the water. But you’ll never read a book or see a movie in which the hero draws his gun and shouts, “Freeze! LAPP!”

“We’re the best-kept secret in law enforcement,” says Lt. Ronald Boyd, Port Police operations commander.

*

When he’s working his special assignment beat, Port Police Officer Robert Myers doesn’t come face to face with criminals.

He comes face to face with fish.

About twice a month, Myers and others on the Port Police dive team put on scuba gear and descend into the oily, silty, bacteria-rich black water of the Port of Los Angeles to search ships. Armed only with flashlights, and working in water where the visibility may be measured in inches, they creep slowly along the bottoms of boats, looking for stashes of drugs concealed in rudders or stabilizer tubes or sea chests, the large grated openings that serve as water intakes for engine cooling systems.

Sometimes they find what they’re looking for. A couple of years ago, for example, dive team members found 55 kilos of cocaine sealed in welded metal boxes hidden below the waterline on a freighter from South America.

Myers admits that it can get kind of spooky down there.

“When everything around you is black and all you can hear is the sound of your breathing, it gets a little claustrophobic,” says Myers, 36, an officer for the last dozen years, first with the Burbank Airport Police and for five years with the Port Police. “We’ve had some people drop out after their first dive. It’s not exactly fun diving. But after a while, you get used to it.”

It’s not exactly clean diving, either, particularly after a downpour sends every conceivable kind of bacteria and assorted other crud flowing through the storm drains and into the harbor. If the bacteria level is too high, the divers won’t dive unless it’s an emergency. They all carry mouthwash and anti-bacterial eardrops to reduce the risk of infection from a dive.

The 12-member dive team was formed in 1989. All its members are volunteers who work patrol or other duties but are called in when divers are needed.

Dive team members do ship searches--in conjunction with the U.S. Customs Service--rescues, underwater searches for contraband or evidence (such as weapons), even retrieval of Harbor Department equipment from the ocean bottom.

In water that ranges from 30 to 60 feet deep, dive team members have to be prepared to find virtually anything on the bottom.

“There are crabs down there,” says Myers. “When you’re doing a bottom search, you can’t see very well because the silt gets stirred up. So when you pick up something and it bites you, it’s a little surprising.”

There’s also the usual jetsam: beer cans and bottles, as well as boat parts, tools--almost anything that can fall off a boat or wash through the storm drains. Divers recently found a 40-foot-long piece of machinery. Sometimes they find stolen cars. And in the past, they occasionally found cars with bodies in them.

“Until a few years ago, at least twice a year we’d get people and cars going into the water,” says Lt. Martin Renteria, Port Police investigations and administration commander, who heads the dive team.

Most of those cases were distraught people who drove their cars off wharves. After the port began putting up barricades at potential suicide sites, Renteria said, the port suicide rate dropped dramatically.

*

Swimming around in murky water is only one of the duties of the Port Police.

Operating under the Los Angeles Harbor Department, with an annual budget of about $6 million, the officers also protect the port and enforce environmental laws.

Burglaries, robberies, truck hijackings, domestic arguments in the marinas, car thefts, assaults, and traffic violations by boats and vehicles all part of the job. Port Police officers also perform foot and bike patrols in the Ports O’ Call Village, a waterfront restaurant and retail complex; the World Cruise Center, the embarking point for cruise ships, and at the Cabrillo Beach recreation area. Port Police officers make about 175 arrests each year.

The safety and environmental duties are more unusual. Last year, Port Police officers conducted nearly 30,000 safety inspections in container terminals, oil tank farms and ships berthing at the port. They also check the channels and other harbor areas for illegal dumping or discharge of hazardous wastes.

According to the people they serve, the port cops are doing a bang-up job.

“They’re great,” says Damaris Rausch, manager of the California Yacht Marina in the eastern portion of the port. “Any time we’ve called they’ve gotten out here immediately. They always seem friendly, and they’re very helpful.”

Bob Kleist, a spokesman for Evergreen shipping lines, one of the port’s largest companies, agrees.

“They’re totally professional, extremely cooperative, well-motivated, well-directed,” Kleist said. “I think they do an outstanding job.”

Despite recurrent rumors that the Port Police would be absorbed by the Los Angeles Police Department, Boyd says it’s not true.

“That rumor has been downgraded to even less than a rumor,” he says. “This is our swimming pool, and we’re going to continue to protect it.”

Like most police officers, they feel underpaid: a non-supervisory officer makes about $2,800 to $3,200 a month. The salary is a sore point with most of them, as are the limited retirement and disability benefits.

But most port officers say they wouldn’t want to work anywhere else. They especially like the diversity of the job. One day they’re on patrol in a squad car, another day they’re on bikes, another day they may be diving or making environmental inspections from a helicopter.

“I like the flexibility,” says Officer Daniel Aleman, a 13-year veteran. “For example, I’m a helicopter observer, I’m on the bike team, and I’m a senior patrol boat officer. This job allows us to wear a lot of different hats.”

*

“Water looks pretty clean today,” Aleman says as he peers out the window of a Bell 206 helicopter, 600 feet above the port.

Aleman is an observer on the chopper, which is owned and operated by the city General Services Department. Aleman’s mission is to check the water for signs of environmental contamination. That can range from a leaky oil pipe connection to a commercial fisherman illegally pumping out his bilges in the harbor.

Aleman also checks for breached fences at container terminals, evidence of break-ins on warehouse roofs and signs of anything out of the ordinary.

If he spots something on the water, he will summon the Port Police patrol boat by radio to check it out, and if necessary cite the offender. If he spots something on the ground, a land unit takes care of it.

*

“It’s definitely not like being a forest ranger,” says Port Police Officer Robert Reynolds as he steers his patrol car through a huge yard full of metal shipping containers stacked three and four high. “There’s a lot of chemicals around here, hazardous waste stuff. You don’t even know what it is.”

Reynolds, a five-year veteran who earlier worked as an airport police officer, is on routine patrol today, which means that he’ll cruise through everything from container yards to junk yards to slag heaps to the marinas--some upscale and some not--that line the waterfront. At night, some of the container storage yards become home to transient drug addicts and prostitutes.

There’s also a lot of people contact. And not all of it is bad. As Reynolds drives through a marina parking lot, the owner comes out to greet him.

“Appreciate you coming by,” the owner says, waving. “Nice to see you.”

“People down here are pretty friendly,” Reynolds says. “I think that’s because we’re friendly. We know all the people. We were doing community-based policing before they even called it community-based policing.”

*

“It’s kind of like a housing project,” Officer Dave Knight, 51, says as Port Police patrol boat Bravo 15 cruises past a marina. “You get everything here that you’d get in any residential area--burglaries, domestic fights, drugs, everything.”

Knight and his partner, Officer Henry Gomez, 41, are two of the six Port Police officers permanently assigned to the department’s two patrol boats. Knight has spent the last eight years on the boats. He is a 15-year veteran of the Port Police.

“It’s a good job,” he says. “I like being out on the water.”

Not everyone is necessarily glad to see him, though. On this day Knight spots a boater who’s exceeding the 5 m.p.h. inner harbor speed limit. He waves him over and does a safety inspection--checking for life jackets and other safety gear--and then cautions him about speeding.

The boat driver has an explanation: He was having motor trouble and needed to rev up a little to keep the motor running. Knight lets him go.

Ten or 20 times a weekend, people aren’t so lucky. They’ll get speeding or safety violation citations.

“We try to maintain good relations with the public,” Knight says. “But we have to think about safety too.”

*

Port Police Detective Ken Huerta remembers well the strangest thing that he’s ever seen stolen by cargo thieves. It was an entire truckload of rubber adult toys.

It just goes to show you, Huerta says, that cargo thieves will steal anything. Cargo containers, also known as “cans,” are the 20- to 40-foot metal boxes that can be transferred from a ship to a truck or rail car. Port thefts have included containers packed full of disposable diapers, children’s clothes, toys, bottled water, and quart cans of motor oil.

It’s not uncommon for thieves to sneak into a freight yard somewhere in the vast industrial sections of the Los Angeles area, hot-wire a parked semi-tractor trailer and simply drive through a gate or crash a fence. Other times, they will catch a truck driver at a stop light, stick a gun in his face and take the truck.

The thieves can be murderous. Last year, hijackers shot and killed a truck driver near Wilmington.

Sometimes, though, the drivers are in on it. A “broker” will approach a driver who’s making $5 an hour, non-union, and offer him $5,000 to give up a truck and then report it stolen. Often, Huerta says, the broker gets the truck and pays the driver only $500 or so, if he pays him at all.

It’s a huge business, probably the biggest criminal enterprise in Los Angeles, next to drug dealing. A container full of Pampers, for example, may be worth $40,000, and can be sold illegally, wholesale, for about $20,000. Container burglaries, in which the can is broken into in a yard and some of its contents taken, are a different category of crime. Huerta figures that every day in the Los Angeles area, about $1 million worth of goods are stolen or hijacked by cargo thieves.

Four years ago it was even worse, Huerta says. That’s when several law enforcement agencies--including the Port Police, Sheriff’s Department, LAPD and FBI--created Cargo CATs, the Cargo Criminal Apprehension Team. Huerta, 42, a burly ex-Marine and 13-year Port Police veteran, is his department’s specialist in container thefts.

Most of Huerta’s work takes place outside the port. Although several years ago the theft or hijacking of containers was a serious problem in the port area, recent security measures suggested by the Port Police--such as encircling the container yards with heavy cables in addition to fences--have virtually eliminated the problem inside the port. In 1993, five containers were stolen from inside the port area, compared to more than 500 container thefts and truck hijackings in the rest of the L.A. Basin.

As for container burglaries, Huerta says about one or two are reported to the Port Police every month, although the actual number may be much higher. Often, shipping companies don’t bother to report such break-ins.

That, Huerta says, is part of the problem. Too many companies accept cargo thefts as a fact of life, and don’t invest in security measures.

“A lot of big shipping companies just factor in a 5% loss of their cans,” he says. “They don’t care because that loss just gets passed on to the consumer.”

The stolen merchandise usually doesn’t wind up in flea markets or the black market, either, Huerta says.

“Most of the buyers are so-called legitimate businesses who buy it for one-third or one-half wholesale,” Huerta says. “A lot of them will then sell the stuff at close-out sales.”

But things have gotten tougher for cargo thieves since Cargo CATs was created, Huerta says. So far, the unit has made more than 400 arrests and recovered more than $70 million in stolen property.

But Huerta estimates that the recoveries are less than a quarter of the items stolen. And he doesn’t figure he’ll be out of work anytime soon.

“Crooks are stupid and lazy,” he says. “We catch a lot of them. But there are always more where they came from.”