‘Filling the Hurt Slot’ : Southland Police Chaplains Confer in Buena Park

The Rev. Dale Johnson tends to 400 congregants at his church in Cypress, but his toughest work as a minister is done from the passenger seat of a police car.

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Johnson figures he’s logged thousands of hours on patrol as a volunteer chaplain for the Buena Park Police Department. During 12 years in one of law enforcement’s least-known jobs, he has consoled fatigued officers, talked a suicidal man out of a locked car and delivered no small share of bad news to the relatives of victims.

It’s demanding work for no pay, blending the heart-thumping excitement of police work with the patience and soothing presence expected of a member of the clergy.

“It’s just filling the hurt slot,” said the Rev. Robert Gardner, a chaplain for the Glendora Police Department for 25 years and regional director of the International Conference of Police Chaplains.

About 100 police chaplains from around Southern California were gathering at the Buena Park Hotel and Convention Center on Wednesday for a three-day conference that includes sessions on suicide negotiation, officer-involved shootings and a memorial dinner for a Los Angeles County sheriff’s chaplain shot dead last year while on patrol.

There were wrenching recollections about the emotional and sometimes macabre work of chaplains, who get paged in the middle of the night to calm family disputes or tell a resident that a loved one has died.

Chaplain Rex Spraggins, pastor of New Life Bible Center in La Habra, wiped away tears as he recalled how he and other chaplains helped La Habra officers cope with the news in October that a fellow officer on duty was killed by a suspected drunken driver.

“It still hurts me. It really does,” Spraggins said.

But he and other chaplains say the work is gratifying. At times their presence alone is enough to quiet household fights, they said. Often, chaplains are first to help survivors by calling other relatives and making funeral arrangements.

After a teen-ager drowned in Buena Park last year, Johnson, pastor of Mount Calvary Lutheran Church, went to the hospital to console her father and friends.

“They were just in shock,” he said. “I let them say to me whatever they wanted to say to me. The father--I just let him put his arms around me and let him cry.”

Chaplains are increasingly being called en masse to disasters through a system of mutual aid. The idea was first used in Orange County during the Laguna Beach firestorm in 1993, when 23 chaplains came from around the county to comfort stricken residents.

“We just went and walked the streets. We went from person to person and talked with them and prayed with them,” Spraggins said.

Chaplains are ordained clergy who receive weeks of police training, including how to handle firearms, where to stand during arrests and how to call for help on the radio. Most ride patrol a few hours a week. Although unarmed, they wear a police uniform with chaplain’s badge and clerical collar. They are there to comfort, not proselytize.

“You’re not out there pushing your particular preference of religious faith,” said Duane Tellinghuisen, a retired pastor who rides up to 40 hours a month with Buena Park police.

Buena Park Police Lt. Mike Schwartz said some officers at first rejected the idea of sharing their cruiser with a chaplain.

“They’d go, ‘Yeah, I don’t want him in the car with me,’ ” Schwartz said.

But he said most officers grow to enjoy the company. “It’s a healthy thing for them,” Schwartz said.

Chaplains counsel officers about constant job stress--or even problems with a spouse or child. Johnson said he was consulted by an officer saddened after answering two crib deaths in a week.

“They know it’s safe to talk to the chaplain,” he said.

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Officer Steve Hohnstein, a 15-year veteran of the Montclair Police Department, hoped to set up a chaplain’s program in his city. Hohnstein said he talked to a department psychologist after watching a colleague fatally shoot a 13-year-old burglary suspect several years ago, but was dissatisfied. “He had no clue,” Hohnstein said.

Tellinghuisen said he recently cheered up an officer who was discouraged by what he saw during a family disturbance.

“Sometimes,” Tellinghuisen said, “they just need reassuring that the whole world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket.”