It’s a Serious Game as Officials Step Into Deputies’ Shoes

It is a scene that law enforcement officers routinely face. Bryan Proctor, a.k.a. George Simmons, has beaten his wife and is bunkered in his living room. With two felony convictions, he is resisting arrest, afraid that he will be convicted again and imprisoned for life under the state’s three-strikes law.

As Sally Flowers and Hal Malkin ask Proctor to surrender, he lunges at Flowers. She quickly draws a canister of pepper spray from her belt and squirts the irritant into his face. Proctor wails as he thrusts his hands to his eyes and buckles into a crouch.

Malkin is hesitant. He asks for guidance from bystanders: “Do I attack him now ?” he asks, before falling onto Proctor’s back and smothering him on the ground.

Malkin’s reticence is understandable. Neither he nor Flowers are real police officers.

Like those watching the confrontation, they are council members from cities that contract with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to handle their law enforcement. Proctor isn’t really a criminal, but a deputy leading the politicians in a role-playing exercise to practice forcefully subduing someone.

The rough-and-tumble play-acting was part of an all-day seminar Saturday that put 25 council members from throughout Los Angeles County through a series of mock police tasks. At the same Monterey Park training facility used by deputies, the lawmakers fired pistols at a shooting range. They maneuvered a squad car through an obstacle course. They learned the difference between a carotid restraint, which deputies use to knock a suspect out by cutting off blood to the brain, and a chokehold, which is lethal and forbidden.

To solve a dramatized murder case, they trudged through a bungalow filled with bullet shells and rag dolls laid out to represent dead victims, searching for a missing murder weapon.

The Sheriff’s Department staged the event to give the council members who use their services an insider’s view of their work, said Deputy Natalie Macias, who directs the sheriff’s community partnership programs. “Sometimes the only contact council members have with the department is when a resident of their district says some deputies stormed into their house. Now they’ll know the reason why something like that might happen as opposed to [authoritarian] stereotyping,” she said.

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Macias said the department has been running the workshops for council members for two years, but Saturday’s program was the first time they had done such a hands-on, all-day program. The more advanced seminar was open to council members who had completed earlier programs, which were mainly classroom sessions that provided general information about the department, Macias said.

“The whole thing was an eye-opener,” said Malkin, who is on the La Mirada City Council. “When we’re sitting down to negotiate their contract, and they ask for X number of dollars, it’s hard to understand why they need that stuff if you haven’t been in their shoes,” he said.

Deputy Proctor, who spent much of the day wearing a red padded suit as various officials hit him with batons, kicked his shins and tried to wrestle him to the ground, said he hoped the council members would better understand how deputies decide when to use force or fire their weapons. “We have a split second to decide. After that, the judges, juries and courts have all the time they want to analyze what we did,” he said.

Stuart Siegel, a councilman from Hidden Hills, said what he learned from the program could be useful.

“When somebody says they don’t understand why a deputy sprayed tear gas, we can see that if it was used on an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair it’s not a good reason, but if it’s a guy with two strikes who might get violent we can better understand why a deputy would act,” he said.

Ultimately, the seminar pleased the department’s paying customers. “I realize it’s a sell job and public relations, but that’s fine,” said Malkin.