Next Sheriff Remains Close to His Roots : Law enforcement: Larry Carpenter has lived his entire life in Fillmore. He began his career as a reserve police officer there 27 years ago.

By RON SOBLE

Nov. 30, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Larry Carpenter, Ventura County’s next sheriff, is a down-home guy.

Carpenter, who has called the gritty farm town of Fillmore home for all of his 46 years, lives within three blocks of where he spent the first year of his life and just a few miles from the horse ranch where he was raised.

The burly Carpenter and his father, Fred, still have Saturday morning breakfast at Charlie’s cafe, a venerable Fillmore eating establishment.

And, in a time when almost no top cop allows his home telephone to be publicly known, Carpenter says his number will remain listed even after he becomes the county’s 17th sheriff in January.

“Everybody in Fillmore knows who I am,” he said. “It hasn’t created a problem. And I think it’s a safety valve.

“People can call if they’re upset about something. I get to hear about things. I’m accessible. And maybe they have a better attitude about the Sheriff’s Department when they hang up.”

Ventura County supervisors voted unanimously in September to appoint Undersheriff Carpenter to succeed Sheriff John Gillespie when he retires at the end of the year. Under the present salary schedule, Carpenter’s salary will be $98,982. However, a committee reviewing the salaries and perks of top county officials is set to release a report on Dec. 15 that could affect Carpenter’s new salary.

Assistant Sheriff Richard Bryce provided an explanation for Carpenter’s low-key approach toward the public at a time when, in some nearby venues, relationships between citizenry and local police are strained.

“He likes people,” Bryce said. “It isn’t at all uncommon to see him bumpin’ around the county in a patrol car,” spending time with deputies or the people they’re sworn to protect.

And Bryce made another--unsolicited--point about his boss:

“He’s as good as there is.”

Carpenter will have to live up to that accolade, considering the financial crisis his agency is facing along with other county departments caught up California’s dollar squeeze. This year, Ventura County supervisors cut about 4% from his $68-million budget.

Anticipating further budget cuts, he said he might be forced to take the unprecedented action of laying off some of his agency’s 595 deputies “as early as next year.”

Other cuts might include reducing the number of patrol cars and instituting early release of jail inmates.

“The total restructuring of the department has to be looked at,” he said.

Budget hits will also affect the way that the sheriff enforces the law in the county, Carpenter said.

For example, he said, “I don’t think we’re going to spend as much time on barking dogs and neighborhood disturbances.”

Serious crime prevention, however, will not be compromised, Carpenter said.

Even the opening of the new Ventura County Jail near Santa Paula, a facility under the sheriff’s supervision, could be jeopardized because the facility will need initial county funding of about $12 million to operate fully.

Carpenter, however, is convinced that the 752-bed jail will open in 1994 as scheduled, budget crisis or not.

“The county will either open it or a federal magistrate will open it,” he said matter-of-factly. He cited cases elsewhere in which agencies have brought civil rights actions, alleging overcrowded conditions at an aging jail, to force the opening of a new facility.

He said he expected the first prisoners to be transferred to the new jail sometime in 1994, “probably right in the middle of an election year.”

That’s the year Carpenter will be facing his first race for a full four-year term.

If he survives the budget crunch without damaging political skirmishes, he made it clear that he intends to campaign for sheriff in two years.

“It’s my life,” he said. “I was born and raised here. I know the people.”

Carpenter got his first taste of what it’s like to be a cop among town folk 27 years ago as a Fillmore reserve officer.

That was when Fillmore was riding twin economic booms generated by oil drilling and the nearby state water project. It was a time when the town had its own police force (it’s a sheriff’s contract city now), under the command of Earl Hume, then the longest-tenured police chief in the country.

Saturday night was a page out of the Wild West, Carpenter recalled.

“There were a lot of brawls,” he said. “But I never fired a shot at anyone.” In fact, Carpenter said, he’s never had to use his weapon.

Back then, “you’d use your hands and you’d wrestle. Choke holds were absolutely common. And nightsticks were used.”

Carpenter thinks it was a better time for a street cop.

“I have to say it was a little friendlier basis than it is now on the street,” he said. “Once the alcohol wore off, it wasn’t too hard to get along with the folks, and it did help to know the people. If I got in a jam, there was always someone who knew me.”

Carpenter joined the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department in 1969. His first day on patrol was the opening of deer season on a hot August weekend in Piru Canyon.

“Traffic was backed up from the highway to the dam,” he said. “I was there by myself.”

His supervisor reassured him that he could handle it, and he did.

“I just kept the fights down and the drunks off the highway.”

From that first assignment, Carpenter rose up the promotion ladder--making sergeant in 1974, lieutenant three years later, commander in 1980, and assistant sheriff two years later. When Gillespie was appointed sheriff in 1984, he was named undersheriff, the No. 2 job.

Along the way, he led a crackdown on heroin trafficking, helped quell a riot in the Oxnard jail and supervised high-profile investigations of major crimes.

One of Carpenter’s priorities is to attract more minorities into the agency. Only 10% of the department’s sworn personnel are Latino in a county with a Latino population almost three times that figure.

Carpenter is not proud of that statistic.

“It’s much less than it should be,” he said.

“I grew up in a bicultural area and I can tell you nobody has to tell me we don’t have enough Latinos in this department. We have a large Latino population and we need to be as sensitive as we can to that.”

Women constitute only 12% of sworn personnel, and Carpenter said he would also strive to raise that figure.

“It’s hard to recruit qualified people,” he said. “Of every 100 who take the test, we wind up with five or less.”

To attract more recruits, he said, the department needs “to convince families in the Latino population that being a cop is OK, an acceptable form of employment. If we can do that, we’re going to get the people.”