Panel takes bite out of rural crime fighting

WILLOWS – It's true that Glenn County Sheriff's Sgt. Jim Miranda sometimes doubles as dogcatcher and that his and his crew's big activity for the day recently was to shoot down a roaming bull headed for the interstate.

It's also true that from 3 a.m. until 7 a.m. every day, he has only two deputies to patrol a county measuring 1,318 square miles. Now even that level of coverage is being threatened by legislative budget cuts working their way through the Capitol.

"I have one who covers the north and one who covers the south," Miranda said. "Now, is that acceptable for anywhere? If I'm out here in the middle of the night at 4 o'clock in the morning on a car stop and my closest backup is 20 minutes away, I mean, how much can I enforce? Even if I wanted to?"

If Miranda's troops feel strapped now, they better get used to more of it. Thursday, a state Senate budget subcommittee cut all $18.5 million in funding for a rural law enforcement program that provides $500,000 a year each to California's 37 least-populated counties, including Glenn.

But the rural sheriff's program accounted for only a small part of the half-billion-dollar whack that the subcommittee took out of local law enforcement. The panel also wiped out a $119 million program for local prosecutors, jails and cops. And it eliminated $119 million targeting juvenile offenders, $35 million in booking fees the state had been paying for local police agencies, $201 million earmarked for juvenile probation camps and $29 million used to stop methamphetamine trafficking.

The move went beyond Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposed budget, which asked to cut the law enforcement programs by 10 percent.

With the state looking at a $20 billion budget deficit, Sen. Mike Machado, D-Linden, said his subcommittee had no choice but to take a machete to programs it deemed discretionary.

If counties want the programs, Machado said, they're going to have to find a way in their own budgets to pay for them.

"We have to be straight up," he said, citing cuts already facing schools, colleges, senior health and children's disability programs. "Local governments are going to have to take some responsibility and do what they think they need to do at their end to continue their obligations."

While the cities and counties sort it out, police and sheriff's representatives say they are bracing for the impact.

"You're talking about a loss of 1,300 officers, statewide," said John Lovell, a lobbyist for the California Police Chiefs Association.

Nick Warner, a lobbyist for the California State Sheriffs' Association, said the cuts will put his clients in "dire straits."

"This is real," he said. "It's not about power and fiefdoms. It's about people and service."

State Senate Republican leader Dave Cogdill of Modesto said last week that his caucus will fight to restore the funding, especially for the rural sheriffs.

"It's a drop in the bucket as it relates to the overall size of the budget," Cogdill said. "But it's huge for those small counties that rely on that money and have now for a number of years."

The rural sheriffs' grants have been on the books since 2001, helping bolster the budgets for every north state county outside of Sacramento and the Bay Area. Placer, Yolo and El Dorado participate. So does pretty much every county in the San Joaquin Valley outside the urban areas of Stockton, Fresno and Bakersfield.

In the mountains, Plumas County Sheriff Terry Bergstrand said his unhappy secret is that nobody patrols his 2,618-square--mile county from 3 a.m. until 8 a.m. every day. The last deputy off and first one on take the off-hour calls.

Bergstrand said it's not that much of a problem because his deputies have their own patrol cars – funded by the state grants. If they lose that money, however, they'll be doubling up on vehicles and adding at least 20 minutes to their response times, he said.

"Everything we have is just about purchased out of that," he said of the $500,000. "We also use it for wages, benefits, insurance and equipment, and we have one officer who is hired with that that we would lose."

The sheriff said he'd hold off on layoffs as long as he could, but that he'd have to cut pay 10 percent and that "we'd be losing cars right away" if the Legislature upholds the subcommittee's action.

In Glenn County, Sheriff Larry Jones was even more blunt. "I'd fall on my sword," he said, before he'd go along with the cuts.

"I can't afford any," Jones said. "Public safety would be in dire jeopardy if further inroads were made into my budget."

A little less than half of Glenn County's 29,195 residents live in its two incorporated cities, which have their own police departments. With about 15,000 people in the unincorporated areas, Jones' sworn force of 32 officers, including himself, slightly exceeds the FBI-suggested ratio of two officers per 1,000 citizens.

But abstractions don't take into consideration the long drives to back up cops in trouble, the demands of 24-hour coverage or the growing complexity of rural crime where gangs are now common, metal scavengers are pilfering farm equipment and deputies play social worker for troubled kids.

On a recent patrol in Glenn County, Miranda backed up the Willows police on a probation sweep, helped one of his deputies handle a call where a tattooed woman reported she was under attack from her crank-addled mother, and assisted California Highway Patrol and Orland police officers question the parents of a teen tearing up the neighborhood on his all-terrain vehicle.

All that, in three hours.

"We're expected to be the jack of all trades," Miranda said of rural cops. "And yet they want us to do increasingly more and more with less money. And there's just no way around that."

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• Call Andy Furillo, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1141.