For Patrol Car Seats, Deputies Look to Plastic

Sheriff’s Deputy Joan Raber was driving a potential robbery witness to eyeball a suspect in custody. She lectured him on the procedures to follow before identifying the suspect and asked if he understood.

The man, who had been fidgeting in the back seat of the patrol car the entire ride, said incredulously, “I got all that, but what I don’t understand is why your seats are so hard.”

Along with on-board computers, two-way radios, sirens, shotguns and other pieces of equipment in their patrol cars, deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have in recent years made use of a less recognized but very important piece of equipment--plastic car seats.

Since 1991, the Sheriff’s Department has been removing cloth and naugahyde seats from its 1,041 patrol cars and replacing them with seats made of a hard-molded material called ABS virgin plastic.

The sheriff’s deputies started replacing regular car seats to prevent suspects--riding handcuffed in the back of a patrol car--from ditching incriminating evidence, like knives or drugs, by shoving it between the bottom and rear cushions of the old cloth seats.

Each new plastic seat installed by the Sheriff’s Department costs about $220.

“It used to be a big problem,” said Deputy Bob Killeen. “Deputies would have to pull the back seats out and search them before their patrols and after every arrest.”

Those searches could prove more than just a pain in the neck.

Killeen said some deputies risked disease when they were jabbed in the hand by hypodermic needles hidden behind seats by arrested drug users.

Deputies from various parts of Los Angeles County said that they used to find an assortment of ditched items before the switch to plastic seats.

“We used to find credit cards, rings, necklaces, condoms, guns and knives back there,” said Deputy Rick Esquibel, who works at the Sheriff’s Department’s Temple station.

The plastic seats are one piece with no hiding places. They are also easier to clean: Simply wash out the rear of the car with a hose.

“Someone under the influence would many times urinate or vomit all over the seats,” said Sgt. Allan Harrington of the Sheriff’s Department Fleet Management Bureau. “The mess could get into the seats or behind them and be a big pain trying to get out of there.”

Harrington said regardless of how diligently the seats were cleaned, the rank smell would linger. He remembered the embarrassment of transporting a La Habra Heights city councilman after someone had vomited in the back seat of Harrington’s patrol car.

“The councilman tried to be polite, but I could tell the smell made him very uncomfortable riding back there,” Harrington said.

Comfort was another issue in changing to the plastic seats, Harrington said. Handcuffed suspects could suffer handcuff neuropathy, an injury caused by the pressure of sitting handcuffed against the cloth seats, according to Harrington.

The plastic seats avoid that by means of a little indentation molded into the seat where a suspect’s wrists can rest.

But the plastic seats are definitely a problem when a large group of deputies needs to go somewhere, forcing some of them to share the back seat.

“If you sit back there for more than an hour, it’s going to be a rough ride,” Killeen said.

He said that when forced to do that, deputies will pull out a blanket and use it to make the plastic a little more bearable.