PACOIMA : Larger Station a Relief for Foothill Police

After enduring more than two grueling, dust-choked years of working in cramped quarters, officers at the Foothill Division are finally working in a modern, remodeled station.

Using $5 million provided by a 1989 bond measure, the Los Angeles Police Department has completed a 240-car parking garage and added about 10,500 square feet of working space to the division’s headquarters in Pacoima.

“Before, we were really crammed,” said Sgt. Al Yarbrough. “But now there’s enough room so we’re not sitting on top of each other anymore.”

Capt. Ron Bergmann, the division’s commanding officer, hopes the nearly complete remodeling will boost morale at the division, which following the Rodney G. King beating became a focal point for criticism of the department.

“These officers have worked under some unbelievable conditions,” Bergmann said. “So this new station will give us a chance to get our heads above water.”

In addition to putting up with heat, dust and noise during the renovations, officers also had to leave their cars at nearby Whiteman Airpark and take a shuttle to the station while the new garage was being built over the old parking lot.

Patrol cars parked on nearby surface streets were vandalized, and paperwork sometimes got lost in the office shuffle. But the renovations were direly needed at the station, which was built in 1962 to hold 120 officers. It currently houses 234 officers as well as 32 civilian employees.

Now the division’s 37 women officers, who have had to change clothes in a trailer, have their own locker room complete with teal-green lockers. The station was built without quarters for women officers because there were few on the force in the 1960s.

Detectives who once had cramped quarters in the station’s north end now occupy an expansive mauve-and-gray room with modular furniture. Foothill is also the next division in line to receive dozens of computers, thanks to a funding campaign headed by Mayor Richard Riordan, which has raised $11.5 million in cash and equipment to modernize the LAPD.

And a central air-conditioning and heating system will relieve officers of having to face another simmering Valley summer in a station with a less-than-perfect cooling system. The station would get so hot that a patrol sergeant once stated matter-of-factly that if he placed a police report under his arm, it would stick.

The expansion has also included the creation of a conference room, larger report-writing and record-keeping rooms and four new interview rooms for detectives. Still to be completed are the roll-call area, the men’s locker rooms and a coffee room with adjoining patio.

Once they are finished, possibly by early April, Bergmann plans to hold an open house and a tour of the new station. Though the expansion was designed to accommodate the division’s needs into the next century, Bergmann said he anticipates more crowding unless a proposed sixth police station is built in the Valley.

“In reality, we’re already too small,” Bergmann said. “As the department increases in size, we’re going to be cramped again.”