Lax Control Over State Humane Officers : Law enforcement: Animal control ‘deputies’ may wear uniforms, carry guns and make arrests, but their ranks are virtually unregulated.

When Capt. Barbara Fabricant ordered that Steven Hazzard give up his beloved guide dog, Starsky, while she investigated allegations that he kicked the animal, the blind computer programmer balked, but obliged out of deference to the law.

Although Fabricant had neither interviewed Hazzard nor examined Starsky to determine if the charges were founded, she was, after all, not only a state humane officer, but “director of criminal investigations.”

And Guide Dogs for the Blind, the Bay Area group that trained Starsky, told Hazzard that Fabricant had threatened to haul in their executives on felony charges, too, if he did not cooperate. So Hazzard, of Westchester, spent the next five months unemployed and mostly homebound, without his “eyes” and his best friend.

What Hazzard and the guide dog association did not know was that the .357-magnum-toting, uniform-wearing “Capt.” Fabricant is a strange sort of cop, one of a little-known group of non-governmental peace officers.

They are authorized by the state of California to carry guns, conduct criminal investigations and make arrests throughout the state. They can wear uniforms and badges nearly identical to those of Highway Patrol officers. Yet despite the powers conferred on them under an obscure civil code, a Times investigation has found that humane officers such as the 68-year-old Fabricant operate virtually unregulated and unsupervised.

They are nominated for their positions by private animal welfare organizations--which can be founded by a single person--and in many cases are given badges and are authorized to carry guns with little or no training. They are on no government payroll. They belong to no police department. They have no chief.

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No government agency supervises them, or even keeps track of who they are or how many are out there--not even the California Department of Justice, which oversees the professional qualifications of other peace officers throughout the state.

“It’s scary,” said Norman Boehm, executive director of the state Justice Department’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, in a recent interview. Like other state officials, he said he was unaware of the police powers and lack of oversight on such officers until asked about them.

“I don’t know what they’re doing. Who in the world is out there carrying guns? . . . I have no idea where they get their authority. You need a job with a government organization in order to act as a peace officer.”

Actually, according to Civil Code 607f, you don’t.

Under the code, private animal-welfare groups submit names of humane officer candidates to the presiding judge of the county’s Superior Court for approval. The candidates pay a $5 fee and need only 12 hours of training in animal care and a course in state humane laws within a year of receiving the badge. (Fabricant holds classes at her Canoga Park home.)

Los Angeles Superior Court official Georgene Nagamine said: “Our job is to just send the forms up north for processing.”

If training is not available within 100 miles, the law says humane officer candidates are exempt from even that requirement, as are people who became officers before 1977.

All it takes to slap on a gun belt and carry a weapon is an introductory firearms course available from community colleges, a course that Boehm said “amounts to nothing.”

The candidates’ fingerprints are sent to Sacramento for a cursory Justice Department check for a criminal record. After that, they are on their own until they have to reapply three years later.

The records of state humane officers’ identities are kept in each county’s principal courthouse or recorder’s office. State officials say they have no idea how many there are, or who they are.

“I don’t see any oversight,” said Michael Van Winkle, spokesman for the Justice Department’s law enforcement division. “No one here is aware of any.”

Humane officers have been around for more than 80 years, throwbacks to a time when cities and counties had nobody trained or available to investigate complaints of animal abuse, poisoning and theft. Local humane societies were authorized to provide deputies to fill the gap.

Although many California counties and most large cities now have paid, professional animal control officers, the humane officers linger as “one of those loose things from way back in history,” said Darrell Stewart, a former state highway patrolman and current spokesman for the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which sets standards for all law enforcement officers in the state.

After a lobbying effort aided by protests from organizations for the blind over Hazzard’s loss of Starsky, a private association of state humane officers persuaded the state Legislature this summer to enact stricter training requirements, effective next year. But some critics, and some animal rights groups, say much more needs to be done.

“You have a lot of these loose cannon people . . . all of these Lone Rangers running all around the state,” said the Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ new executive director, Madeline Bernstein. “We need to wipe out these gun-toting people who are out there claiming to be officers. . . . Who the hell knows whether they’ve gotten all the credentials or not?

“Everyone and their mother wants to be a humane officer,” she added, “so they can go out and carry a gun and shoot people who are mean to animals.”

Fabricant says she agrees. “I want all this exposed,” she said Friday. “Take away the right to carry a gun, and you will eliminate 90% of the phonies. And then only people who want to help animals will be humane officers.”

Humane officers are not required to go through the rigorous background checks and psychiatric evaluations that conventional police forces employ to weed out potential problem officers, Stewart said.

“You need those people to be absolutely stable, of sound mind,” Stewart said. “It’s frightening if through loose regulations, inappropriate people are carrying firearms. It’s bad enough in rural areas, let alone urban ones.”

Indeed, court documents and interviews show that humane officers have been accused of overstepping their authority, ruining crime scenes and evidence and generally confusing and confounding other law enforcement efforts.

County records obtained by The Times show that Fabricant has used her status as head of an animal rights organization named the Humane Task Force to create her own group of gun-toting deputies that include lawyers, doctors, contractors, actors and a retired watch repairman. The group, which Fabricant directs out of her home, has in the past year asked that 21 more people be made officers.

Wayne and Barbara Chronister are suing one of Fabricant’s former deputies for the return of cats seized in a raid on their Riverside County home last year. In another raid months earlier on the family’s previous home in Glassell Park, one of Fabricant’s lieutenants, news media in tow, arrested Barbara Chronister’s daughter and seized dozens of animals that the officer and Fabricant suspected were being abused.

He “put (the daughter) in the clink” on suspicion of animal cruelty, Fabricant said. Police freed the woman that night, but misdemeanor charges are pending against her.

Linda Adams, an attorney for the Chronisters, said the family has been terrorized by Fabricant’s group and other animal rights activists. “They want to have their own arm of the law. Some animal rights groups are utilizing these officers as their own personal posses,” Adams said.

She said Fabricant approached her several years ago, saying Adams’ legal expertise would make her a good addition to Fabricant’s humane officer team. “She tried to hire me, and she never met me before. She said if I wanted to carry a gun and badge and wear a uniform, I could,” Adams said. Fabricant confirms she tried to recruit Adams.

When humane officers who had worked with Fabricant appeared at a city Board of Animal Regulation Commission meeting several months ago, one was ejected for carrying an illegally concealed firearm, according to a city official who was present.

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During last year’s Malibu/Calabasas fire, as firefighters were frantically trying to evacuate residents from the area ahead of the onrushing flames, Fabricant asked a radio station to broadcast appeals summoning equestrians with horse trailers to the fire line to help rescue panicked horses.

“Fire departments kept saying, ‘Who is doing this?’ (Other law enforcement) organizations kept saying they didn’t know,” said one official familiar with the case.

Fabricant responded that she never knew emergency officials were upset by her actions. “We personally transported over 1,000 horses, not to mention cats, dogs, birds, you name it. If we had not been there, what would have happened to all those animals?” she asked.

After the Jan. 17 earthquake, Fabricant, in full uniform, held a news conference outside the city’s West Valley Animal Shelter, urging viewers not to turn over to city officers any of the hundreds of panicked pets running loose from their homes because “most people do not trust Los Angeles animal shelters.”

City animal control officers, who have butted heads with Fabricant for years, were irate. They said they received complaints that Fabricant and her aides were collecting lost dogs and cats and keeping them.

“Here we are working our butts to the bone, understaffed, trying to unite people with their pets,” said Lt. Richard Felosky, then a supervisor of the city Animal Regulation Department for the West Valley. “It was an unbelievable situation.”

Fabricant said they only confiscated dogs and cats that looked as though they did not have owners. “We picked up 53 dogs from the various parks,” she said. She said she took some of them home with her while she looked for their owners.

“My house was a mess,” Fabricant said.

To be sure, there are many humane officers who go through far more training than the law requires, such as the officers of the Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Other humane groups, such as those in Glendale and Marin County, voluntarily forbid their officers to carry guns unless they are headed for a dangerous neighborhood or may need the gun to put an injured animal out of its misery.

“If we need to, we can contact the police,” said Glendale Humane Society director Michael Peatrowsky.

But there are many others who secure nominations from small, little-known organizations, according to leaders of other animal welfare groups and officers of official agencies, like the city Animal Regulation Department.

Some are well-meaning but radical animal rights activists, said Bernstein of the L.A. SPCA, which has its own crew of humane officers.

The origins of Fabricant’s group are unclear except that Fabricant started it and then had herself nominated to be a humane officer, according to court records. She concedes that she made up her impressive title--captain in charge of criminal investigations--as she began to accumulate deputies.

A friend told Fabricant: “ ‘You can’t get much higher than captain,’ ” she recalls, “so I’m a captain.”

Some of her deputies, Fabricant concedes, joined up just so they could “carry a gun, kick ass, make arrests and throw their weight around. People are wearing badges that have no damned business having badges and guns.

“It’s a scary situation,” she agreed. “Let’s say one of my officers shoots someone. I can be sued.”

During a recent day out in the field, Fabricant acknowledged that she has had to “decertify”--yank the badges of-- many of her officers because they became problems. County records show that one of them was an ex-husband, John Toth.

Another one “had (police) lights all over his vehicle. He was pulling people over on the freeway, making arrests. . . . He was throwing his weight around. . . . I found out how devious people are, and what lengths they’ll go to carry concealed weapons.”

Fabricant said she does not know how many humane officers she has working for her, or how many she has “decertified.”

“I hate to even think about all the dumb things I’ve done here,” she said.

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In at least one case, county records indicate that a Los Angeles-area humane officer suspended by Fabricant helped create another animal rights group, nominated himself to be an officer and swiftly regained his badge.

Fabricant, known as a leader of psychics and fortunetellers in the San Fernando Valley, is the widow of Sid (The Squid) Fabricant, identified by police as an organized crime figure when he died in the early 1980s. One of her sons is in the Hells Angels, she said, and the front door of her home bears a decal: “Support your local Hells Angels.”

She has equipped her 1977 Plymouth station wagon with red and blue lights and official “diamond E” license plates so that it resembles a police car and is exempt from state fees.

The courts sometimes send Fabricant convicted people to carry out “community service” sentences, including one person Fabricant put to work trapping stray cats, according to city animal control officers.

One day recently, Fabricant responded to a complaint phoned in by an animal rights activist. Because she was wearing black stretch leotards, a tie-dyed blouse and sandals, she had to show her badge to persuade an Asian family that spoke little English to let her into their house.

Holding the badge to a peephole in the door, she said: “I’m a police officer. Policia. “

She said she often does wear her uniform at lunchtime because “if I go (to restaurants) in uniform, we get half price.”

And what of Hazzard and Starsky?

His troubles started when he was attacked on the street, Hazzard says, and several witnesses mistook the commotion for him kicking the dog.

After Fabricant ordered the guide dog association to confiscate Starsky, pending her investigation, its members examined him, declared that he had not been harmed and returned him to Hazzard. Fabricant called executives of the association, threatening them with arrest unless Starsky was re-confiscated, according to Hazzard’s complaint in a lawsuit that he brought against the guide dog group to get Starsky back.

After five months and $25,000 in legal fees, a retired judge appointed as mediator ruled there was no evidence that Hazzard had abused Starsky and ordered him returned. Many witnesses testified in his suit to regain Starsky that Hazzard never so much as raised his voice to the dog, and would apologize if he accidentally walked into him.

Hazzard’s lawyer, Mark Brylski, complained in his brief that Fabricant’s handling of the case “reflects a lack of impartiality and professionalism and a willingness to use threats in order to obtain her objective.”

California is not the only state with law enforcement personnel like the state humane officers. Bernstein of the L.A. SPCA said she recently left the New York-based SPCA after the board of directors became embroiled in scandal over their carrying guns, which she opposed.

New York, however, has a state agency that monitors credentialing of all sworn peace officers, from humane officers to transit police to fish and game wardens.

“There is a central registry and they are on top of it all,” Bernstein said. “There is no such thing here. It certainly would get rid of a lot of the crap if there were.”