Deputies Call Desert Stretch Their Beat

The sheriff’s deputy is responding to a routine call--a stranded motorist--but the circumstances surrounding it illustrate that his beat is anything but ordinary. In fact, it is believed to be the largest patrol beat anywhere in the nation.

He must drive 20 miles--from a traffic accident alongside Interstate 15 to this little town of 24-hour garages, coffee shops and the world’s tallest thermometer--and then north 30 more miles along a desolate, two-lane desert highway.

The sun has set quickly and within minutes, his four-wheel-drive patrol vehicle--equipped with four radios, cellular phone, computer, shotgun, rifle, road flares and emergency first aid supplies--is tooling through total darkness in wide-open desert.

There’s not a street lamp, a front porch light, an illuminated billboard--not even the headlights of another vehicle--in sight. The night’s black pitch swallows his high beams; the demarcation between earth and sky is provided only by stars and the slight glow of casino neon, 50 miles away at the Nevada state line, silhouetting the Mesquite Mountains to the east.

David Wachendorfer, a 29-year-old San Bernardino County deputy sheriff and former Kansas farm boy, isn’t even sure where to look for the motorist. The person called 911 by cellular phone to say he was stuck in sand somewhere alongside California 127, just a few miles from Death Valley National Park.

Wachendorfer will spend the next half hour looking for the motorist. He’ll train spotlights into the desert, illuminating only scrub brush and an occasional abandoned shack. He’ll turn on his red-and-blue rooftop light bar, hoping the motorist will take the cue and flash his own headlights. He’ll sound his siren, hoping for a honk in return. He’ll approach an apparently deserted mobile home--and unbuckle his seat belt so in case he’s being baited into an ambush, he won’t be strapped in.

Finally--because he can’t find the motorist, and the motorist hasn’t bothered to call back--Wachendorfer radios his boss, 100 miles away in Barstow, to say he’s giving up. Due to the distance and the hills, the transmission is broken by crackles.

“Either the guy got out on his own--and didn’t bother to let us know, so we could save the trip--or someone wanted to get me out of town for an hour,” Wachendorfer mutters to a passenger.

Indeed, it can be easy to dodge the lawman in these parts--or send him a hundred miles away into no-man’s land on a wild-goose chase. Except for three California Highway Patrol units frustrating freeway speeders between Barstow and Nevada, Wachendorfer is the only law enforcement around tonight.

Talk about being spread thin: His beat totals about 6,000 square miles, an area straddling the main drag between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, bounded by the hamlet of Afton on the west and Nevada on the east, and by the Inyo County line to the north and near Interstate 40 on the south. His beat is larger than the entire state of Connecticut.

Wachendorfer shares the job with another deputy, Gene Slack, 37. Together, they are “resident deputies” assigned to a single-room, windowless office in Baker. One works days, one works nights, and one or the other is usually on call the rest of the time, to be rousted from their side-by-side homes just down the street.

They’re lucky if they see their boss, a sergeant in Barstow, once a week--when they need to deliver a prisoner to the jail or pick up supplies. They were tapped for the outpost because of their proven ability to handle just about any kind of situation on their own, in a place that’s hotter than hell in the summer and bitter cold in the winter.

In exchange, they receive a $275-per-month salary bonus, pay just $50 a month to live in nice mobile homes provided by the county, enjoy free utilities, avoid daily squad briefings--and are not hampered by the endless string of calls-for-service and report-writing that slows down city cops.

Only about 2,500 people live out here--most of them ranchers, retirees and recluses. Baker’s the largest town, with about 450 residents, many of them working at the local coffee shops, markets, gas stations, tow yards and motels that make this place a 24-hour pit stop between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Desert folks aren’t apt to call a deputy to complain about a barking dog or noisy party. Besides, they know that it might take upward of two hours to get the deputy out to their place.

So the deputies are not abused out here with nuisance calls; a shift with two or three calls is considered busy--and, because of travel time, can consume an entire workday.

There are desert hamlets--places like Cima and Kelso, Ivanpah and Sand Valley--that Wachendorfer or Slack may not see for a month. When Wachendorfer drove off onto a sandy desert road earlier this day, he came across the burned hulk of a stolen car from Los Angeles that apparently had been there for three years but, because of the expansiveness of this beat, had gone undetected until now.

But that isn’t to suggest that these deputies are enjoying early retirement. They make their own work, in a way that has annoyed some of the locals and surprised city criminals who made the mistake of pulling off here for a cup of coffee or a tank of gas.

With their radio-linked front-seat computers, Wachendorfer and Slack spend much of their time simply running license plates to identify the owners--and see if they’re on the lam.

Slack sometimes just parks his patrol car at one of the local gas stations and, as motorists pull in, punches in their plate numbers to determine if they’re wanted. He has caught auto thieves, batterers, dopers and people wanted for probation violations.

“This is a choke point between Vegas and L.A.,” says Wachendorfer. “And if they pull off here and they’re wanted by somebody, chances are pretty good we’ll get ‘em if we’re around.”

They also pull over vehicles for the slightest of reasons, to see where it might lead.

The payoffs vary; once, when Wachendorfer spotted a pickup truck being driven without a license plate light, its three occupants jumped out. When the vehicle came to a stop in the desert sand, he recovered 30 boxes containing video cassette recorders, loot stolen from a passing freight train.

The deputies’ aggressiveness has soured some of the locals.

“One of them is named Slack--because he won’t cut you any,” mused Carolyn Jacobson, owner of a local motel and co-publisher of the local weekly newspaper.

Some residents are angry that the deputies are citing local drivers who do not have driver’s licenses, or whose cars are not registered.

That aggressiveness is the source of personal grief. Slack’s wife is a waitress at a local restaurant and is given the cold shoulder by regulars who have had a run-in with her husband.

On the other hand, the deputies often are aided by civilians. Wachendorfer uses a CB radio--his handle is “Baker Bear”--to elicit help from truckers in locating highway accidents or suspect vehicles.

Just the other day, townsfolk came to Wachendorfer’s rescue. He was called out of bed and dispatched to the bus station, to remove a belligerent occupant of a Greyhound bus.

The man finally got off the bus--but then balled his fists, struck a fighting pose and resisted being handcuffed. Wachendorfer sprayed him with pepper spray, a struggle ensued and the suspect was finally subdued--with the help of two local businessmen.

“I would have been in trouble, if it weren’t for them,” Wachendorfer said. “That’s the biggest challenge in working out here--the lack of backup.” Still, he said, he can’t think of a better job. “There’s not been a single day when I didn’t want to go to work,” he said. “I’m a lights-and-siren junkie, and I love the wide-open spaces.”