Beat of the Night : Law Enforcement Commanders Protect and Serve While County Sleeps

It’s a little past midnight on a warm summer weekend and Cmdr. Bob Elder of the Oxnard Police Department has everything under control.

Elder, one of the department’s four watch commanders, has officers responding to a domestic dispute, a barking dog and a few loud parties.

A little earlier, one of his officers brought in a man arrested for dragging his wife around their apartment after she got home late from church.

Then there was the raving drunk who started knocking his head against a window in the department’s booking room. When his head began to bleed, he licked the blood off the glass and started ranting about the devil and vampires.

“I don’t know where these people come from, but we always seem to find them,” said Elder, before going back to the paperwork accumulating on his desk.

All in all, however, it’s an unusually quiet Friday night in Ventura County. And Elder, along with a handful of other watch commanders throughout the county, is helping to see that it stays that way.

All veterans, the watch commanders are in charge of the police officers and sheriff’s deputies who patrol the streets and back alleys of cities across the county. It is their job to know where their officers or deputies are at all times, and to be a living encyclopedia for them when they have questions about law enforcement procedures.

“When you look at the position of watch commander, the gravity of questions being asked is so vast and the responsibility is so enormous that we only have the most experienced and respected officers in that position,” said Assistant Chief Stan Meyers, Elder’s boss.

With shifts that start in the early afternoon and go into the early morning, the watch commanders who work at the Sheriff’s Department and with the five city departments have the job of watching over the county as it sleeps.

As part of that job, they have to juggle calls and assign deputies and patrol officers to respond to everything from loud parties to drive-by shootings.

They decide when to call in detectives, when to call the crime lab and when to send in backup.

“They are the eyes and ears of the department,” said Chief Deputy Ken Kipp, who oversees the six watch commanders who work for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. “Essentially at night, the watch commander is in charge of all the Sheriff’s Department operations countywide. He makes the decisions.”

The same night that Elder is dealing with paperwork and drunks in Oxnard, Capt. Mike Gullon, the Sheriff’s Department’s watch commander, is scanning his four computers to check on the whereabouts of the 120 deputies who patrol Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Moorpark, Fillmore, Ojai and the unincorporated portions of the county.

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Gullon is waiting--as he does during most of his 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shifts--for something to break. And the quiet gives him a chance to muse about his four decades in law enforcement.

A department watch commander since the early 1970s, Gullon first became a police officer with the Washington, D.C., department in 1951.

Now, well into his 60s, Gullon said he likes his dusk-to-dawn shift.

“Because the criminal mind works best at night, that’s when the best police work is done,” he said.

Gullon has worked with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department since the early 1960s, and he has been a watch commander for 25 years.

He describes it as being a sort of night watchman for the county. Someone to guard over the more than 300,000 people that live in the area patrolled by the department.

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Gullon compares his work now to his time in the early 1950s when he walked a beat in Washington.

Strolling along on a winter night through the snow-covered city streets he could hear people snug in their beds snoring. And when something happened--a burglar smashing a window to rob a store or a scream for help--he could hear it echo through the snow-covered city.

“It’s not quite the same here, but it’s the same feeling,” Gullon said. “People sleep safely in part because they know they have someone to watch over them.”

In his windowless, sterile command center, Gullon sits in front of a computer that scrolls through the whereabouts of the deputies under his command. He tries to visualize them as they respond to calls.

“I picture them coming on scene,” he said. “Getting out of the car, knocking at the door, looking through the bushes. Whatever is happening I try to see it in my mind. It helps me think how things should be handled.”

Behind his desk sit half a dozen dispatchers at rows of computer panels, displays and communication equipment in front of them. The room looks like a mock-up of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Dispatchers--even on slow nights--must move quickly to answer all the thousands of incoming calls, so that none of the calls stack up, forcing people to wait for help. Officials estimate that last year the department handled about 750,000 calls.

The dispatchers rank the calls on a scale of 1 to 3 according to importance--with crank calls and calls about barking dogs on the low end and domestic disturbance calls on the high end. They also have to sort out the stray calls from people who use the 911 line to ask for things like directions to LAX.

Gullon acts as a sort of supervising air traffic controller for the department, making sure everything runs smoothly. And if disaster strikes, it’s up to Gullon to contact the right people and ensure that the regular emergency calls are handled.

One such recent disaster which started with a routine call was the fatal shooting of Deputy Peter John Aguirre Jr., who was killed early last month responding to a domestic dispute.

The Aguirre shooting happened just as the watch commanders were changing shifts. Gullon spent the evening with about six other officers making sure that the investigators at the scene were equipped with everything they needed, while also making sure that the department continued to run and calls continued to be answered.

“You have to keep going,” Gullon said. “Crime goes on and we have to keep doing our job even after something like that has happened.”

While Gullon is using the quiet time to muse about police work, Lt. Dave Inglis, one of four watch commanders who work for the 119-officer Ventura Police Department, is cruising in his patrol car.

“We need the extra body,” said the 51-year-old Inglis.

On a typical evening, the department may have only eight officers on patrol, and Inglis tries to stretch their coverage by going on patrol himself. But when officers respond to an incident, he tries not to interfere and lets his field sergeant handle the situation. When Inglis is busy, field Sgt. Randy Janes also handles the patrol briefing.

“We’re a small department, we do what we need to get the job done,” Inglis said.

The quiet this night seems to be permeating the county.

In Simi Valley, Lt. Mike Brewer’s only concern is having to send out officers to respond to a loud party.

And back in Oxnard, as the hour passes 2 a.m., Cmdr. Elder is wondering why it’s so quiet.

With more than a decade as a night watch commander for the department and three decades on the force, Elder has come to expect a bit more than drunks and wife beaters on a warm summer weekend. But he doesn’t try to explain what makes some of his shifts a walk in the park and others a nightmare.

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“People try to figure it out saying it fluctuates with the phases of the moon, or a full moon brings ‘em out, or the Chinese New Year or whatever, but I don’t care who you are, no one can really predict crime,” he said.

Elder has been on duty when the department had a record three killings in three minutes one night in the 1970s. And in the last three years he has seen two Oxnard police officers killed in the line of duty.

Those nightmarish shifts are always in the back of his mind when he hears a “shots fired” call.

“That can be the most nerve-racking few minutes, while you scramble to find out what happened,” he said. “You don’t know if an officer’s down or what.”

On shooting incidents, the watch commander’s experience comes into play, while he advises the patrol officers to seal the scene and wait for a field sergeant and the detectives.

Field Sgt. Lee Wilcox said having Elder’s expertise backing up the officers is critical.

“He makes sure everything gets done right,” Wilcox said.