Police Support 48-Hour Alerts for Blackouts

Earlier this year, when widespread blackouts first began to roll their way across California, electric utility officials explained why they couldn’t give the public more than a few minutes’ warning before pulling the plug.

Advance notice, they explained, would give the upper hand to criminals, who could plan their day around out-of-service burglar alarms.

That was then.

This is now: On Friday, law enforcement officials throughout Southern California hailed a decision by Gov. Gray Davis to create an early-warning system that would give the public increasingly specific alerts during the 48 hours leading up to a blackout.

“It’s a huge improvement,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said at a news conference, where he was joined by senior officials of the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles Police Department, among other agencies. The governor announced his plan Thursday.

The governor’s plan was also endorsed by 35 police chiefs from throughout Los Angeles County. The chiefs held their annual meeting Friday in Palm Springs.

Since the blackouts began, “one of the No. 1 issues has been the lack of notification,” said Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian, who is president of the county police chiefs association.

What gives? What has changed since January, when officials from Southern California Edison insisted that they couldn’t give more than five or 10 minutes’ warning?

Richard Rosenblum, a senior vice president for Edison, said the utility had canvassed law enforcement officials earlier this year. “The general view at that time--and it certainly was not unanimous--was that for public safety reasons, it would be better not to release that information.”

Since then, he said, “there’s been a good deal more thinking . . . and that view has changed.”

Melekian (whose city is served by its own utility, not Edison) said he’d heard that explanation before.

“I remember, when they were saying that, I had trouble finding anybody who had been canvassed,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t. Somebody may have been.”

Were police worried about looting and burglaries in a blackout?

“We never were worried about that,” Melekian said. With blackouts lasting only about an hour in any one place and always occurring during daylight, “we haven’t seen any crime issues emerge and we don’t anticipate any.”

Baca said he did have concerns, but they were erased Monday, when Davis led a delegation of California officials to Chicago, where they met with Mayor Richard Daley and top public safety officials to compare notes on the threat of crime during blackouts. Chicago has a plan in place for dealing with electricity outages by determining in advance which intersections and other public places should receive the most attention.

The Chicago officials told the Californians that public safety isn’t jeopardized as long as law enforcement officials send forces to critically affected areas, Baca said.

“All of us were extremely relieved that . . . our fears about crime increasing by advance notice are just totally unfounded,” the sheriff said.

Baca said his department would be developing a plan for deploying deputies when blackouts strike. Other agencies said they were doing the same.

“We may contact businesses such as banks and jewelry stores, or any type of businesses that the criminal type may target,” said Lt. Clyde Stuart of the Huntington Beach Police Department.

Ventura County Sheriff Bob Brooks said he had been dreading this summer’s looming blackouts, but the 48-hour warning will make his job easier. During the past few rounds of rolling outages, Brooks said he was notified just a few minutes before the power was yanked.

“There really wasn’t time to do anything except shut our computers down,” he said.

Earlier this month, he met with several other sheriffs throughout the state to talk about how to cope with the power outages. “That was our No. 1 priority--being able to have adequate time to mobilize,” he said. “It was a good move on the part of the governor.”

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Times staff writers Anna Gorman in Ventura and Thuy-Doan Le in Orange County contributed to this story.