Night on patrol in Ventura County: From heroin to headlights (2024)

Under a sky colored by the final moments of sunset, six Santa Paula police officers and a German shepherd named Django surrounded a mobile home. Theypounded on doors. They angled flashlights into windows.

“We know you’re inside!” Officer Chris Rivera yelled. “Open the door or we’re going to boot it!”

In the home, the officers believed, two people were hiding. Both were wanted on warrants.

It was 6:34 p.m. on a Friday in March. Across Ventura County, police forces readied for a night when temperatures in the 70s promised a busy shift, one that would be marked by heroin, broken headlights, accusations of domestic violence and a dead man.

Nine journalists with The Ventura County Star spent part of the night riding shotgun in squad cars from Simi Valley to Saticoy.They slid across back seats as deputies made abrupt U-turns. They watched interactions with quarreling families, gang members and people who had nowhere else to turn.

Paired with new patrol officers in most cases, they talked about protecting communities, reactions topolice-involved shootings and mid-shift text messages from worried family members.

Sometimes, the observers just sat as the officers in cruisers checked out dark alleys, shining spotlights, searching for the unusual or just showing their presence.

The mistake, Ventura County Sheriff's Deputy Scott Baxter said after stopping a car with a broken headlight in Nyeland Acres, is thinking anything is routine.

"If you ever go into a situation or you try to do something and you think, 'OK, I've done this a million times' and you kind of lighten up a little bit or you're not on your toes, that's when you put yourself in a bad spot," he said.

In Santa Paula, before officers rushed to a mobile home park lined with towering palms, the shift started like it always does.

“Stay 10-8,” said Sgt. Jeremy Watson before sending his team into the night, referring to the code for patrolling the streets. “Stay busy. Have fun. Be safe.”

6:30 p.m. Simi Valley

Officer Matt Cartwright slammed on his brakes, hit his flashing lights and spun the wheel to pull over a motorist headed the opposite direction. When he stopped her, she was cooperative. She was also doing 56 mph in a 45 mph zone.

Cartwright gave her a warning.

“I usually write up people at 13-15 mph over the speed limit,” he said. “That’s just my personal preference.”

6:39 p.m.Ventura

The first call came before Officer Miguel Espinoza drove away from Ventura police headquarters.

A teenager threatened family members with a butter knife and wanted to hurt herself, a voice from dispatch reported on the radio.

When Espinoza arrived at the west Ventura home, papers, pillow cushions and soil from a plant were strewn across the floor. Family members said the teenagerhas a history of mental health issues.

They wanted her committed to a behavioral health hospital.

As the girl’s father talked to a crisis stabilization unit in Oxnard, Espinoza and Officer JC Rodriguez leafed through the drawings in her sketchbook.

“That’s a real talent you’ve got there,” Espinoza said before taking her to the crisis unit.

The 34-year-old officer grew up in Santa Paula and enrolled in the Air Force, to his mother’s displeasure. She wasn’t happy when he started working as a patrol officer more than a year ago in the beachside community of Ventura.

Mom came around. She still sends texts in the morning to make sure her boy made it through the night. She sent another message upon learning a Whittier police officer had died in a shootout after responding to a traffic accident.

“Just be safe,” the note said.

It’s a tense time to be a police officer.

Police-involved shootings have triggered intense criticismand nationwide protests.

People see the news or social media, and it affects themone way or another, Baxter said Friday.

"You have to be willing to understand that everybody has different views, everybody has different backgrounds, everybody has different thoughts and feelings," he said. "You just have to accept it and deal with it."

On patrol 1½ years, he started on the streets at a time when ambush-style shootings of officers across the nation rose to the highest point indecades.

The unrest also brought support.

The day after five police officers were killed in a Dallas ambush in July, the Santa Paula Police Department was filled with cards and treats.

Baxter gets the positive reactions on his day-to-day routinetoo, whether it’s someone in a neighborhood he patrols or a stranger in line at Starbucks.

A couple of weeks ago, he ran in to grab a coffee, and a woman in front of him told the cashier, “I’ll pay for the deputy behind me, too.”

7 p.m. Ventura

Inside the room where Ventura County Sheriff’s deputies start and end their 12-hour shifts in Ventura, someone wrote: “You are loved. (Signed) Mom” on a message board next to the phone.

A map of the county’s gang territories hung nearby.

Baxter, 42, sat at the 7 p.m. briefing in his tan and green uniform, jotting down notesas the day shift ran through earlier incidents that could bleed into the night.

An argument that had turned physical. A stolen black Mercedes. A dispute between a woman and her boyfriend – now her ex-boyfriend, a deputy clarified.

Before the sergeant sent them off, he reminded everyone to take guns away on “5150” calls, code for a psychiatric hold, or domestic disputes.

“Make sure we take them out of there,” he said. “We pulled a shotgun and a 9 mm out of that RV today.”

On the other side of the Conejo Grade, Deputy Mark Plassmeyer headed out of another windowless briefing room,this one in Thousand Oaks,and toward the parking lot.

He carried a plastic yellow case that looked like a toolbox but held his Taser gun. His service revolver sat in the holster of his black leather belt. He hoisted straps to two other standard-issue guns over his shoulders.

Those two – one loaded with bullets, the other for less-lethal ammunition – he would carry in his patrol car for the 12-hour shift. Plassmeyer loaded his riot helmet in the trunk, too.

“I may not use them for years, but you want them when you need them,” he said.

7:10 p.m. Oxnard

Oxnard Police Officer Meagan Tobey turned on her body camera before walking into a store.

The camera, one of the dozens the department bought last year, beeped and vibrated as it recorded everything she encountered.

It was her first callof the nightand a familiar one.

Police can receive four theft reports a day from the Ventura Road business that has no security cameras, said Tobey. She's 27 and has spent four years patrolling Ventura County's largest city, a place made up mostly of working-class, Latino families.

But the problem is larger than that one spot in astrip mall. Part of Tobey’s job as beat coordinator is to try to find long-term solutions.

Ads used to cover other store windows, blocking officers from seeing inside and potentially stopping a robbery. But Tobey successfully urged stores to remove them.

She wanted to talk to a store manager Friday about getting cameras but was toldto contact corporate headquarters. She took down a number.

In the meantime, she would head over to the mall a few more times that night. “Police presence is a huge deterrent,” she said.

7:15 p.m.Simi Valley

Cartwright stopped for dinner at his favorite taco truck on Simi Valley's Patricia Avenue. As always, he tried to pay. He was refused.

He ate in the dark in a secluded spot off Los Angeles Avenue. The isolation, he said, reduced the chances of an ambush.

7:23 p.m. Santa Paula

The mobile home bust didn't work out. The suspects with the warrants weren't there. Less than an hour later, Rivera was in a shopping center parking lot of Santa Paula's Main Street delivering a lecture.

The man sitting on the fender of Rivera'spolice SUV had been driving with a broken left headlight. And a suspended license. And about $6,000 in unpaid fines.

He was only driving for few minutes, he told Rivera, just long enough to pick up his 8-year-old son.

“You’re not getting it,” Rivera said before impounding the car and issuing a court summons. “The worst part about it is you have your son with you.”

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• How we did the story

Rivera, a bear of a man at 6-foot-2 and 270 pounds, once worked as an assistant vice president for Bank of America.

The desk job is history. For much of the past 18 months, the 29-year-old father of four has worked 12-hour shifts patrolling the roughest part of a mostly Latino city of 30,000 people. He crashes through fences on chases instead of going over them and strikes up conversations with everyone from students at the local Catholic college to gangb*ngers.

“Have you heard about me?” he asked a suspect later that night. “I’m Rivera. I’m fair.”

It is his credo. It is why he gives warnings instead of tickets and offers a peanut butter cup to a convict.

"As long as you treat them with respect," said Rivera, who is also pursuing a master's degree in public administration, "they're going to remember that."

8:15 p.m. Simi Valley

Lights flashing, OfficerCartwright chased after a car that had run a red light.

His brakes were bad and he couldn’t stop in time, the mantold the 30-year-old officer, who wrote him a ticket.

“Surprisingly, he shook my hand even though I gave him a ticket,” Cartwright said, climbing back into his police SUV.

The hand-shaking took some getting used to when Cartwright returned four years ago to Simi Valley, the department where he started as a teenager in the explorer program.

During astint as a Los Angeles police officer, a handshake, even a thank-you, was rare. Simi Valley is different. It's apredominantly Republican city with a reputation of being pro-police law and order. Handshakes happen all the time.

“I was like, ‘Whoa, hey, why you getting so close to me?’ And they were like, ‘Hey, I’m just trying to shake your hand.’ So I kind of had to adjust to that coming out here.

“’Wow, you actually like me?’” he said with a laugh. “It’s awesome.”

8:26 p.m. Santa Paula

The man carrying the shopping bag filled with peanut butter cups and Sour Patch candy looked up Santa Paula'sVentura Street and pointed. He told Rivera he had tossed the hypodermic needles the moment he saw the police SUV.

The search was on. Officers with flashlights found more than a half-dozen needles and substances believed to be heroin and methamphetamine in two black kits tossed under cars.

Also tucked inside one of the kits was the man’s parole identification, a status confirmed by the black monitoring device wrapped around his ankle. He just did four years in state prison.

“As soon as he pulled his hoodie off, I knew him,” Rivera said.

8:53 p.m.Camarillo

Cars filled every space on the Plateau Court cul-de-sac in Camarillo, one of five cities that contract with the Sheriff's Office for services.Deputy Allen Herme had found the party that had triggered a disturbance call.

“Here we go,” he said.

After being told by a man in a white shirt the festivities were almost over, Herme offered a gentle warning. There would be no citation unless he had to come back again.

That, he said later, rarely happens.

Herme, 34, once sold houses for a living. When the market tanked, he applied for the sheriff’s academy.

He spent six years working in the Ventura County Jail before starting to patrol Camarillo's mostly white, middle-class neighborhoods on his own. He hasn't faced a situation where he felt as if his life was in danger. No one has pointed a gun at him.

But sometimes he calls his father after the occasional pursuit. Every once in awhile, he sends a text to his wife during a shift. Usually, it bears a kissy face emoji.

“It basically lets her know, ‘Look, Allen is alive,’” he said.

9:08 p.m El Rio

Two men and two women sat inside a car when deputies pulled up on a dead-end street.

They were young. They carried a little marijuana with them.

“It’s just such a minor thing now,” said Deputy Baxter of the substance, noting that at most it could qualify as an infraction for carrying it in public.

Baxter has two daughters at home, 8 and 15. He came to law enforcement a little late, starting the sheriff's academy at 34. He worked in banking in college and then at a startup telecommunications company in Camarillo, before deciding it was time.

"When I was younger, it was always something I wanted to do," he saidin the samemeasured tone he used in talking with a partneror a potential suspect.

On patrol, he letspeople go for busted lights more often than writing a ticket, handsout career advice to a 19-year-old pulled over forspeedingand runs scenarios over in his head to prepare for the unexpected.

He doesn't know if anyonecan ready themselves forthemoredifficult things on the job – sitting with parents while they're told theirbaby is deador seeing a family living in conditions no one should.

He talks tohis wifeabout those calls. She's a nurse and sees the same kind of things.

The group in El Rio, a working-class community sandwiched by farmland and Oxnard, received a lecture but no citations Friday.

The driver, who deputies determined wasn’t under influence, waved out the window as she drove away, calling out, “Have a good night.”

They weren’t bad kids, Baxter said. They were just trying to find a spot to hang out and picked the wrong place.

9:20 p.m. Oxnard

Tobey looked over at the computer screen near her dashboard: A subject had been found bloodied in a laundry room in an apartment complex on Gonzales Road and H Street.

She hit her lights and siren,racingdown Oxnard's dark streets and an alley to get to the scene.

A pair of women were standing outside, waving her in, saying their neighbor was hurt.

“The two ladies really downplayed it,” Tobey said later.

She walked in and saw a man on the ground, bleeding and unconscious.

Paramedics came but left again with a still-empty stretcher. Theypronounced the man dead.

“Once I saw what I saw, I asked for additional help,” said Tobey, who stayed until 1 a.m.

The death,at first labeled suspicious, was determined to be natural causes. The Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office said there was no sign of trauma or foul play.

View an interactive timeline of the night.

9:33 p.m.Thousand Oaks

The driver of the car with the missing headlight jumped out and walked toward Plassmeyer.

“Get back in the vehicle,” the deputy ordered.

The man kept walking.

“Get back in the vehicle!” Plassmeyer shouted again.

This time, the man complied. He explained he didn’t pull over initially on a busy street with no shoulder because he was worried for the deputy’s safety.

He received a warning from Plassmeyer. The deputy assesses every situationin a nonstop game of what-if.

"You're constantly thinking, 'How am I going to approach this person, how do I gain compliance from this person? How do I safely take this person into custody?" he said.

Plassmeyer served in the Army and was deployed in Iraq. The 43-year-old deputy has patrolled the city of Thousand Oaks for about two years, driving in a cruiser equipped with an old-school Thomas Guide map and a thick folder of forms covering burglary, domestic violence and psychiatric holds.

He works in a quiet suburban city. The calls he dreads are suicides involving young people.

“You try not to think of your own children,” said Plassmeyer, who has a 4-year-old boy and a 1-year-old daughter.

9:45 p.m. Ventura

Officer Espinoza pulled up to a storefront station off Ventura Avenue.

A woman had shown up there, saying she left home after her boyfriend had hit her in the face.

He was still at their house, so was their baby, his mom and others who lived there.

Espinoza headed over with another officer.

Domestic calls can be unpredictable. Unpredictable can be dangerous, but Espinoza tries to think of any call that way.

The boyfriend told a different story. He never touched his girlfriend, he said.

His mom carried the couple’s baby girl out of the house to show officers the child was OK. Wearing just a diaper, she watched quietly as the adults talked.

9:55 p.m.Santa Paula

The parolee accused of carrying drug paraphernalia stood in a small holding cell at Santa Paula police headquarters, waiting to be transferred to Ventura County Jail.

Officer Rivera was in a separate room mixing chemicals.

“If this turns blue,” he said, using a kit to perform a preliminary analysis, “it’s going to test presumptively positive for methamphetamine.”

It turned blue. The substance suspected to be heroin turned the right color, too: pink.

Rivera sees his job as cleaning the streets of violence and drugs. It’s part of why he feels born to be a cop. He likes helping people. He likes the action.

But he patrols with his eyes wide open. He understands the risks.

He’s been on the streets for 18 months and has already had at least one moment where he thought his life was on the line.

It came about three months after he started patrolling. He was running after a man accused of deadly assault and brandishing a weapon.

The man reached into his waistband. Rivera pulled his gun, convinced the man was armed. He screamed, ‘Don’t reach! Hit the ground!”

The suspect kept running. He tossed something into the grass.

It was a cellphone.

“It hits you like a ton of bricks,” he said of the emotions that surged with the realization of what could have happened if the man grabbed a gun from his waist. He tried to explain why he hasn’t shared the story with his wife.

“I think I don’t want her to worry.”

The night wore on.

Rivera rushed off to help parents deal with an intoxicated son. In Camarillo, Deputy Herme calmed a teenager who said he was tired of living. Baxter pulled over one more motoristwith a missing lightin Nyeland Acres.

By midnight, police across Ventura County had made more than 118 arrests throughout the day — for suspicion of fraud, public intoxication, domestic violence and other crimes. They took at least two guns off the street and seized drugs including methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and opioids.

The next night, the late-shift officers gathered in the same windowless briefing rooms. They loaded their cruisers with spare ammunition, Granola bars and disinfectant wipes. They drove back into the streets.

Reported by

Cheri Carlson andAnthony Plascencia in El Rio, Nyeland Acres and Saticoy;Amanda Covarrubiasin Thousand Oaks;Megan Diskinin Camarillo;Mike Harrisin Simi Valley;Tom Kisken andChuck Kirmanin Santa Paula;Wendy Leungin Oxnard; and Arlene Martinezin Ventura.