Volunteers Add VOICE to Crime-Fighting

LANCASTER —  Playing cops and robbers isn’t what these average citizens believe they’re doing.

But for at least a couple nights a month, members of Volunteers Organized to Improve the Community (VOICE) don uniforms and cruise the streets of the Antelope Valley, searching for criminals.

The approximately 140 civilian volunteers help Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies at the Lancaster station in some relatively risk-free patrol duties. “They are extra eyes and ears,” said Deputy Paul Ullman, the program’s director.

Think of it as a roving Neighborhood Watch, but VOICE goes a step further. Members cruise past schools and businesses looking for suspicious activity, direct traffic at accident scenes and parades, and have stood guard over corpses until authorities could remove them.

“They have made themselves available morning, noon and night, whenever we need them,” Ullman said. “And that’s a big sacrifice considering many of them have to be at work the next day.”

The VOICE members range in age from 18 to 80 and have all kinds of occupations. A background check is conducted to keep out those with criminal or bad-driving records. No law enforcement experience is required--or indeed wanted, Ullman said.

“We don’t really like to take off-duty security guards or people who want to be police officers,” Ullman said. “The mentality there is to make an arrest. The No. 1 rule [for VOICE volunteers] is that members don’t get involved.”

VOICE members patrol in pairs, wear no body armor and carry no firearms--not even the pepper spray, stun guns or other self-defense items that civilians are legally entitled to carry. The Plymouth Neon cars they drive, with a sheriff’s star painted on the side, have little in which to protect themselves other than a radio and cellular phone.

When they eyeball a crime or suspicious activity, they are forbidden to confront anyone, but must call the sheriff’s station to send a deputy to the scene.

But the restrictions on engaging criminals doesn’t mean that they are ineffective at stopping crime.

James Beall is a professional photographer by day, and at night the 60-year-old said he is “sniffing the air for narcotics, looking for lost children, and I once stood guard over a body for a weekend until the coroner could get there.”

Recalling a day when he was cruising a local supermarket, Beall said a robber burst out of the store carrying a case of liquor and tumbled over the hood of his patrol car. He immediately reported the crime. “Just having people reporting what they see helps the community,” he said.

Ullman said security at the annual Antelope Valley Fair has improved in the two years since VOICE members began roaming the parking lots. About 12 to 14 cars were stolen during the 11-day fair two years ago. Last year, the toll was zero, Beall said. “The crooks know we are there, and that is a deterrent,” Beall said.

The group also has been effective catching people dumping illegally in the desert, Ullman said. With binoculars and cameras to photograph dumping, a 10-person group caught two men pouring hazardous petroleum products near a well. They were charged with a felony, Ullman said.

But usually, the three-hour shifts two times a month are less eventful. That’s just fine with 62-year-old Verl Marshall.

“The best days are when absolutely nothing happens.”