PIERCE COLLEGE : Police Seek New Look, New Image

The Pierce College Campus Police will have an easier job enforcing traffic regulations if a proposal for traditional blue uniforms and black-and-white vehicles is approved by Donald C. Phelps, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District.

Campus Police Capt. Ken Renolds said the khaki uniforms currently worn by the officers and the all-white police vehicles often cause officers to be mistaken for security guards.

If the proposal is approved, the new image may help curb the number of traffic violations caused by motorists who go to and from work at Warner Center and use the college as a shortcut to bypass the DeSoto Avenue and Victory Boulevard intersection, Renolds said.

“These motorists completely ignore the traffic regulations. It happens daily,” Renolds said. “We catch them along El Rancho Drive going 50 miles per hour in a 25-mile zone with posted speed limit signs.

“Cars also run the stop signs in plain sight of our vehicles because they don’t realize they are police vehicles. They think they’re security vehicles,” he added.

Pierce and Mission are the only two colleges in the district that don’t have black-and-white police vehicles, Renolds said.

Campus police at Pierce have conducted vehicle studies during the last two years using black-and-white cars from the Los Angeles Police Department.

“The public tends to recognize them as police vehicles and obey the traffic rules,” Renolds said.

The change at Pierce would involve repainting the five cars they have now and getting new cars, Renolds said.

“We need new vehicles. “All of our cars have more than 100,000 miles on them.”

At Valley College in Van Nuys, police vehicles were painted black and white a month ago.

Lt. Robert Reeves said that the black-and-white cars “have a psychological effect that causes motorists to obey the commands of the officers and red lights and sirens.”

Part of the reason some district campuses have black-and-white vehicles and others don’t is because the district doesn’t have a police chief, said Renolds.

A proposal for hiring a police chief to head officers on the nine campuses in the district is currently under study.

“The campus police units are not centralized. The chief of police would be in charge of setting policy and keeping us uniform as a police department,” Renolds said.

Phelps told the campus police captains that he supports the idea of having a district police chief or director, according to Renolds.

Renolds also supports having a police chief because he could “call him up for advice at a district level. All we have now is a council of police captains.”