RIDING WITH THE BLUE
This article was published in the February 22, 2025 Edition.
“The night shift is a little different,” Sergeant Daniel Hansen said, handing me his heavy spare flashlight to hold. It was “one of the best weapons” the police department had in case I needed to defend myself.
We had this conversation about an hour and a half into my police ride-along, where I spent my Saturday night shadowing Mammoth Lakes officers in a police cruiser. It was 5:30 p.m., and my first chauffeur, Sergeant Jason Heilman, was releasing me to the night crew.
Hansen mostly works nights, a consequence of his promotion to a supervisory position after 17 years of service in the Mammoth Lakes Police Department. It usually takes him two coffees and a Yerba Mate to make it through his 10-hour shift from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m., he said.
I got the ride-along idea from Mayor Bubser, who had sat in the same seat a week prior and shared her experience during the Feb. 5 Mammoth Lakes Town Council meeting. At that meeting, the Council decided to remove 24/7 police staffing from its 2025 Town Council Key Objectives.
“We don’t necessarily want the public to know we don’t have 24/7 police service,” Councilmember Bill Sauser said. The council agreed to keep it as a priority in their minds but not to advertise the shortfall publicly.
Alas.
On Saturday night, there were three officers on duty and one in training. There are sixteen officers in the department including the Trainee, Detective, Chief, and School Resource Officer, Heilman said. The department can only provide 20 hours of patrolling each day, and it’s still strapped for workers even during coverage periods.
The town has attempted to address the staffing issue by sending community recruits in the police academy. The academy is six months long. After graduation, recruits must spend an additional 16 weeks training in the field. So, start to finish, a recruit is almost a year in until he/she is considered ready for patrol on their own.
In the state of California, officers can also “lateral” to any department, meaning they undergo a 16-week training period and then assume the role in their new county. It’s much easier for police departments to “lateral” officers than to have a new officer fresh out of the department, Heilman said. They learn faster.
But that’s not usually an option for hiring, since fewer people want to be police officers overall, contributing to a nationwide shortage. Heilman blamed this downturn mainly on public expressions of distrust of law enforcement following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd.
Officers have been under more scrutiny since then, and Heilman thinks that’s part of why people don’t want to be cops.
“When I started and I was 21 years old, there were 100 applicants for two positions,” he said. “Now, sometimes I feel like there’s two applicants for 100 positions.”
National data reflects this decline. From March 2020 to August 2022, the number of local law enforcement employees decreased by 4%, according to reports from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau.
According to census data, Mammoth Lakes has less than 8,000 residents. But on busy weekends, the town can fill up by the thousands, and Heilman estimated there were at least 30,000 people in town on the Saturday night of my ride-along.
The calls over the course of the night were nonstop but varied in severity: on the mellow end, an injured child from a snowball and lost dogs and on the more extreme end of the sprectrum, drug felonies.
Most of the calls the police receive in Mammoth are related to alcohol and drugs, the officers said. They tend to lap the bars several times a night on the weekend, anticipating bar fights or domestic violence disputes.
The reason why so many officers respond to each call – something they’ve gotten backlash for – is mainly for officer safety, but also for paperwork reasons.
On my ride-along, in the Canyon Lodge parking lot, a suspected drunk driver had rear-ended a ski patroller’s truck. One of the officers was filling out the accident report, while the other two were arresting the driver and trying to get him to submit to a breath or chemical test.
A little later, we all met up at the hospital, where the arrested driver was taken for a blood test. The officers decided not to take him to Bridgeport after the test but to release him to a trusted friend — this keeps officer in the field versus on a transport up 395.
The county jail is in Bridgeport, about an hour from Mammoth. If one car is on a transport, they’re not in Mammoth.
Staffing is the main concern of the department, Hansen said explicitly, around 1 a.m., outside a house we’d received a call from. The dispatcher had simply given an address and a description of the call – a woman screaming “help.”
He’d sussed out the situation before letting me out of the car, and we were waiting together in the driveway for paramedics to assess the situation and clear the building.
Hiring and retaining officers is becoming increasingly difficult, he said. There are fewer hirable candidates available and many positions available with higher compensation packages – Hansen himself had been urged by a buddy to join a different police force, enticed by a lower cost of living and the opportunity to work with new technology.
It’s been a while since an officer has left the department, Hansen said, but they’ve had a number of “close calls,” where people have expressed a desire to leave.
The biggest hiring attraction, though, for police officers, Hansen said, is to be in a town where their government backs them financially and otherwise.
He remembers the first time – sometime in the early 2010s – his shift ended without another officer coming to take his place for a number of hours.
It was the first time, in his experience, that the town couldn’t offer 24-hour police service. The town has since fluctuated between 20- and 24-hour police service since.
The Mono County Sheriff’s department and the California Highway Patrol staff assist the MLPD when they can, but that help has limitations. For example, at the end of the night, a CHP officer had pulled a driver over for suspected intoxication, but CHP protocol says officers must have backup on scene after 12 a.m., and Hansen had to join the call.
When we got to the Norco station on Main Street, the CHP officer had begun preliminary alcohol screening on a driver. The suspect had blood streaming down his face from a fight at Lakanuki, and he blew over the legal limit. The officers found brass knuckles and a methamphetamine pipe in his pocket.
At that call, Hansen demo’d a TruNarc device, a drug testing device which doesn’t require police officers to expose themselves to the substance, unlike previous models.
At Wednesday’s Town Council meeting, the Mammoth Town Council decided to put funds towards the purchase of two TruNarc devices to be used within Mammoth and the County, which Hansen told me could signal that the town is looking to invest further in law enforcement.
