What you just described are California State Park Peace Officers. These are the Park Rangers for CA State Parks (Rangers), and Beaches (Permanent Lifeguards).
A small part of what they do is handling unruly people, the vast majority of the time they’re overseeing Jr. Ranger/Jr. Lifeguard programs, running park/beach/campsite operations, responding to complaints, being the first one on scene to render medical assistance, and enforcing rules on environmentally protected areas. They can give out tickets, but that’s usually a rare occurence unless you’re talking back and arguing with them.
The only thing they don’t usually do would be cutting down brush for forest fires, that’s usually contracted out to fire departments.
Some cities and counties already fund them to watch over their beaches/parks (especially when the boundaries become very mixed between which part of the beach is city/county vs state property).
For County and City PD, it’s different for every group and it’s up to the city/county to come up with
In general they all have quotas even if they don’t call them quotas. In many cases they have big incentives for making arrests and handing out citations.
In my opinion, what we need to do is push for a ravamp of how those quotas are handed out. Arrests and citations should be much lower on the list, while activities that can be beneficial for all parties should become their top priorities.
Higher incentives should be given for them to handle homeless outreach. They already interact with homeless people on a daily basis, reward them for helping these people to get access to benefits finding shelter or even just being someone that can be there for them to talk and tell their story.
Rather than just arrests/citations for crimes, try to find out the underlying issues that are causing these things and oversee/come up with projects that address those issues.
In addition it would be beneficial to have a system in place to review officers that make the most arrests out of their peers. If an officer is arresting way more than any of their peers, scrutinize each of those arrests instead of rewarding them for being the one to make the most arrests.
What you just described are California State Park Peace Officers. These are the Park Rangers for CA State Parks (Rangers), and Beaches (Permanent Lifeguards).
A small part of what they do is handling unruly people, the vast majority of the time they’re overseeing Jr. Ranger/Jr. Lifeguard programs, running park/beach/campsite operations, responding to complaints, being the first one on scene to render medical assistance, and enforcing rules on environmentally protected areas. They can give out tickets, but that’s usually a rare occurence unless you’re talking back and arguing with them.
The only thing they don’t usually do would be cutting down brush for forest fires, that’s usually contracted out to fire departments.
Some cities and counties already fund them to watch over their beaches/parks (especially when the boundaries become very mixed between which part of the beach is city/county vs state property).
For County and City PD, it’s different for every group and it’s up to the city/county to come up with
In general they all have quotas even if they don’t call them quotas. In many cases they have big incentives for making arrests and handing out citations.
In my opinion, what we need to do is push for a ravamp of how those quotas are handed out. Arrests and citations should be much lower on the list, while activities that can be beneficial for all parties should become their top priorities.
Higher incentives should be given for them to handle homeless outreach. They already interact with homeless people on a daily basis, reward them for helping these people to get access to benefits finding shelter or even just being someone that can be there for them to talk and tell their story.
Rather than just arrests/citations for crimes, try to find out the underlying issues that are causing these things and oversee/come up with projects that address those issues.
In addition it would be beneficial to have a system in place to review officers that make the most arrests out of their peers. If an officer is arresting way more than any of their peers, scrutinize each of those arrests instead of rewarding them for being the one to make the most arrests.