Simi Police Bicycle Detail Pedals to Early Success : Law enforcement: Barely a week old, the five-man squad has made felony drug arrests, traffic stops and countless face-to-face contacts.

Lurking near a shiny mini-truck with a claw hammer in his hand, the would-be burglar did not even hear Simi Valley Police Officer Dave Livingstone cruise up behind him in the dark.

“Hi, whatcha doing there?” Livingstone asked.

Turning lazily, the suspect suddenly found himself gaping into the helmeted cop’s gun muzzle and his mountain bike’s blazing halogen headlight.

“Oh, well I. . ., “ he struggled. “Someone’s been breaking into my friend’s car, I’ve been watching his car, someone’s breaking into cars around here.”

Taking the hammer, Livingstone frisked the man and grilled him for a few minutes, then told him to get lost and flung the hammer into the brush.

Car burglars have been hitting this string of parking lots along the Arroyo Simi and slipping away on footpaths where police cars cannot go. Maybe, Livingstone said as he rode away Wednesday night, the bikes will change that.

With its new five-man bicycle squad, Simi Valley joins Ventura, Oxnard, West Hollywood and Venice in putting officers on bikes to bring them closer to the street.

Barely a week old, the program here is surprisingly successful, said Livingstone’s colleague, Officer Bo Stephenson of the department’s Special Enforcement Detail.

The unit is used to working on gang and drug cases from unmarked cars. Yet in just a few nights, two-man teams of bike-riding officers have made felony drug arrests, dozens of traffic stops and countless face-to-face contacts.

“We’re a pretty aggressive unit, and we thought, ‘Aww, bike detail--it’ll be more of a P. R. shot,’ ” Stephenson said. “But we found out we’ve been able to do the same thing on bicycles we’ve been doing in cars.”

The customized 21-speed Giant ATX mountain bikes can go quickly where bulky cruisers cannot--down narrow alleys, through apartment complexes and along the Arroyo Simi trails that stretch the length of the city.

They can easily sneak up on lawbreakers who are conditioned to watch for police cars but never consider bicycles a threat--people smoking dope, throwing gang signs or just driving dangerously through Simi Valley’s strip malls.

“You’re out here in the open, and you can smell things, you can hear things people are saying,” Livingstone said, rolling through Sycamore Plaza. “People riding by in a car might be talking about drugs, and they don’t think that you might be a cop.”

Proving his point, a Chevy Blazer roared up to a stop sign directly in front of Livingstone and chirped to a stop.

“Hey!” Livingston shouted, “Pull over!”

Astonished, the 16-year-old driver complied, sitting still for a stern lecture before Livingstone let him go.

Later, Livingstone cruised through Rancho Simi Community Park and stopped a teen-ager clad head to toe in baggy black Raiders’ gear.

The teen-ager identified himself as a member of a Pomona gang, just hanging out with his friends--enough for Livingstone to fill out a field interview card that will help police track the youth in any future gang conflict in town.

“My name’s Officer Livingstone,” he said, scoping the boy’s pupils with a flashlight for signs of drug use. “I’m in charge of gangs out here, and I don’t want you causing any trouble out here.”

After patting him down for drugs or weapons, Livingstone moved on.

Bikes, the officers concede, are limited.

Pedal-pushers must send for a cruiser to pick up anyone they arrest.

They cannot race to a crime scene more than a mile or two away.

And high-speed chases are out of the question.

But the bicycles give the officers the mobility to patrol more than 20 miles a night, and an intimacy with the public that seemed to vanish in many departments decades ago with the advent of patrol cars.

“I think it’s great, I love the personal touch,” said Jim Marx, a midtown resident whom Livingstone met on patrol Wednesday night. “It’s like it was when the cops used to walk a beat.”

The bike is also a kid magnet, and Livingstone doles out dozens of DARE stickers and pencils to the littlest ones.

“That’s a bad-ass bike,” said one teen-ager outside a video-game parlor. After quizzing Livingstone on the bike’s Japanese cranks and shock-absorbing forks, the youth said admiringly, “Smoooooth.”

At a total cost of about $1,000 apiece, the department has fitted off-the-rack bikes with dual rechargeable headlight systems, mileage computers and first-aid kits.

The officers also carry 9-millimeter service pistols with extra ammunition, pepper spray and collapsible steel batons that won’t tangle in a rider’s legs the way full-length nightsticks would.

In 40 hours of bike training at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Academy, they learned everything from curb-hopping and repair techniques to special nutrition and ways of using the bicycle as a weapon.

They also learned how to maximize stealth and mobility, gliding quietly on narrow rubber tires and well-oiled gears along paths only a few inches wide.

“If we drop down to the granny gears and feather the brakes, we can pretty much ride into apartment complexes,” Livingstone said.

Later, Livingstone used that method to search for an Alzheimer’s patient who had been missing for two days.

Whenever the man had disappeared before, he was always found close to home. So while cruisers prowled the streets, Livingstone threaded his way along the maze of sidewalks and driveways crisscrossing Simi Valley’s densest neighborhoods.

The man was not reunited with his family until the next day, but Livingstone had searched territory in less than an hour that would have taken far longer on foot.