Best Foot Forward : Palmdale: With a little shoe leather and a lot of personal contact, sheriff deputy’s beat is helping clean up crime problems in the rough streets of downtown.

Sheriff’s Deputy Paul Pfrehm spent a few minutes looking for trouble in the alley behind Bill’s Barber Shop, then stepped inside the shop, which dates back to the late 1950s.

He asked shop owner Bill Berrow if he was having any crime problems. The barber, scissors poised over a customer’s head, smiled: “So far, we’ve been pretty fortunate,” Berrow said.

As the deputy prepared to leave, he stuck his hand inside a glass jar filled with wads of Bazooka. “I’m going to steal a piece of gum from you, Bill,” Pfrehm said.

The barber laughed: “Let’s just call it evidence confiscation.”

The scene may sound like “The Andy Griffith Show,” but it occurred along the rough streets of Palmdale’s aging commercial district, where prostitution, drug-dealing and vandalism have frightened away shoppers.

To combat these problems and help revive the area, Pfrehm is engaging in a variation of a treasured police tradition--the downtown foot patrol. It’s a timeworn formula: a little shoe leather and a lot of personal contact.

His is the only such patrol in the 1,563-square-mile high-desert region assigned to the Antelope Valley Sheriff’s Station. In this sprawling area, most patrol car deputies hustle from one call to another, rarely getting a chance to talk to anyone who isn’t a crime victim or a suspect.

Pfrehm, on the other hand, is encouraged to make small talk with the business people on his beat and listen to their crime concerns. His patrol, launched last October, is garnering praise from downtown merchants.

“The one-on-one contact makes you feel like you’re not just a number to the Sheriff’s Department,” said Kim Hinson, owner of Francine’s Florist. “I’m sure it’s good public relations, but it does help, having him visible. A lot of criminals live around here. Seeing him coming in the business, seeing the patrol car in the parking lot, they’re both a deterrent.”

In truth, Pfrehm (pronounced “Frem”) does not walk a classic foot patrol. His turf is a four-mile stretch of shopping centers, mini-malls and office buildings, spread out suburban-style along Palmdale Boulevard. Sticking strictly to the pavement, he says, would be impractical.

In a 1990s high-desert version of the foot patrol, Pfrehm, 32, cruises the boulevard, pulling into one shopping center after another. He rolls slowly through the parking lots, waving at merchants and checking the rear alleys for drug dealers and vandals. He tickets jaywalkers, illegal waste dumpers and motorists parking illegally in handicapped parking spaces.

Usually, Pfrehm conducts the patrol between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., five days a week. Another deputy covers the other two days. During their downtown patrol stints, the deputies are mostly freed from handling routine crime calls in other parts of the city.

This allows Pfrehm to park his patrol car along his route and walk from store to store, chatting with the merchants, many of whom know him by name.

“It’s not like what you’d think, the way it was in the ‘50s, with an officer walking down the street, swinging his stick and talking to everybody,” Pfrehm said. “But we make a lot of contact with people. The whole idea is to get out of your car and talk to people.”

Inevitably, the talk turns to safety concerns.

When Pfrehm stopped by on a recent afternoon, Hinson, the florist, talked briefly about Valentine’s Day sales, then told the deputy that hazardous old stoves and refrigerators were being dumped behind a nearby shop.

He promised to notify city officials, who could order the removal of the appliances.

“That’s a good example of something we stumble into,” Pfrehm said.

A few doors down, he playfully scolded Miriam Waddell, owner of Speedy Clean Laundry, for continuing to park in a rear alley that is sometimes unsafe. Then he listened sympathetically as she spoke about having to replace three windows broken by vandals over the past year.

“It gets expensive when you keep having to do it over and over again,” she said.

After checking a few more businesses, Pfrehm returned to his patrol car and drove to Courson Park, south of the boulevard. He pulled the patrol car onto the lawn and drove through the park, looking for people breaking alcohol laws.

Although the park appeared to be an ideal place for a foot patrol, the deputy says he usually drives because lawbreakers often run off into the neighborhood the minute he arrives, and they’re easier to chase on wheels.

No one bolted this afternoon, but Pfrehm used the computer in his car to check the driver’s license of a man who had been sleeping on a park bench.

Even minor offenses can sometimes lead to an arrest for more serious crimes. While walking though a shopping center, Pfrehm once stopped a jaywalker and found that he was carrying jewelry stolen from a nearby home.

On another occasion, the deputy said, “I stopped a guy riding a bicycle on the sidewalk here, and I noticed . . . he had stolen a seven-pound corned beef from the supermarket here. I marched him back to the store.”

To make shoppers feel more comfortable downtown, Pfrehm tries to keep the parking lots clear of transients and people who are panhandling illegally.

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In one lot last week, Pfrehm spotted a woman carrying a gasoline container and telling shoppers she was out of fuel and needed money. The deputy suspected it was a scam and told the woman she could not beg for money in the shopping center.

“I didn’t know you couldn’t ask people for help,” protested the woman.

“It’s a form of extortion,” he replied.

When the name she provided turned up nothing on his computer, Pfrehm let the woman go with a warning. But a few minutes later, he spotted her getting into a pickup truck, ran the license number through his computer and came up with arrest warrants for traffic violations under another name.

In her pocket, the deputy found a canister containing a small amount of what appeared to be marijuana, and he took the woman to jail.

Although the Sheriff’s Department has no hard figures, the deputies and some merchants believe the downtown foot patrols are reducing prostitution, vagrancy and other crime problems along the boulevard.

“That has improved,” said Al Beattie, a downtown muffler shop owner who is president of the Palmdale Business Assn. “But I don’t think that perception has gotten out to the community yet. I think some of the community still feels that it’s not too safe downtown.”

The foot patrol is part of a stepped-up downtown law enforcement effort ordered by the city last year after Beattie and other merchants complained that Palmdale was neglecting the Central Business District in favor of newer shopping areas, such as the Antelope Valley Mall.

Beattie believes the patrol is a move in the right direction. “This is a step back, maybe in the right direction, to create better communication among the residents, the business owners and the deputies,” he said.