The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : A Cool Haven for Deputies in Hot Pursuit

For decades, the rugged landscape of mountains, desert roads and secluded clearings made the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys ideal places for felons to use as hideouts or a dumping ground for dead bodies.

Police officers pursuing them had to work in harsh surroundings with temperatures soaring well above 100 on summer days and plunging to 20 on winter nights, with no amenities for miles.

“If we have a standoff or containment, deputies would be working off the back of a radio car in bad weather, with no lights and no bathroom,” said Sgt. Michael Becker of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“That’s the way it was in the old days.”

The old days are gone because the Antelope and Santa Clarita valley sheriff’s stations now each have their own mobile command posts, providing them a refuge if they have to wait out a criminal in the wastes of the Mojave.

The trailers are a kind of station-away-from-the-station, offering a bathroom, kitchen, telephones, desks, maps, computers, photocopiers, faxes, cellular telephones, radios, couches for sleeping and a large generator for power.

For the past decade, the 40-foot Mobile Command Post trailer at the Antelope Valley Sheriff’s Station has been the only thing between the deputies and the barren land that is their beat.

About eight times a month, the trailer is dispatched to serve as a base for deputies searching for remains of bodies in remote canyons, or chasing fugitives who fled into the desert, or trying to rescue lost children or hikers in the rugged mountain.

When a Littlerock woman was killed by a bomb she found while rummaging through trash on a dusty back road earlier this year, the command post provided a staging area for deputies working on the case for three days.

After a state Forestry Division search-and-rescue plane went down while searching for another downed plane, deputies were able to marshal a massive three-day operation out of the trailer, sleeping, eating and organizing in comfort.

In May, homicide detectives took the command post out for days at a time to dig for bodies with an archeologist.

Another 35-foot trailer, dubbed the Emergency Mobile Home, was donated to the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station last year by the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Rick Lichten said the trailer is still being outfitted to the level of the Antelope Valley’s trailer.

Santa Clarita city officials have invested more than $10,000 in the last few months to get the trailer--which arrived with only desks and chairs--ready for deployment, and it is now equipped with desks, a photocopier, police and city radios, cell phones, computers, air-conditioning, a heater, a kitchen and a bathroom.

The mobile home has already seen action.

When 10 prisoners escaped from the Pitchess jail last month, it was activated in the station’s parking lot “so the station could be free of the incident and handle day-to-day law enforcement,” said Lichten.

The Santa Clarita trailer needs a tow truck--deputies usually borrow one--so it can deploy on a moment’s notice.

The Antelope Valley’s $55,000 trailer--purchased for the department by money that came from the cities of Palmdale and Lancaster as well as the county--is pulled by a double-cab truck donated by a private sheriff’s booster club and a local car dealership.

Fun-seekers at the Lancaster City Street fair in June were able to peek inside the silver trailer with a sheriff’s department emblem on the side. The trailer also doubled as a coffee and roll-call room for deputies on patrol at the fair.

In Santa Clarita, deputies have dispatched their white trailer to the Valencia Arts and Sports Festival, a recent anti-abortion march and the opening of a storefront community center.

“It is self-contained and we can go anywhere with it,” Lichten said.

“It makes it a lot nicer than taping a map on the hood of a patrol car and directing people from there.”