Armed PRIVATE SECURITY in Lakewood?
Officials discuss ACCOUNTABILITY when hiring firm.
By Brian Maquena
April 6, 2022
LAKEWOOD, CALIF. — Officials on Tuesday discussed upgrading to armed private security guards for patrolling Lakewood’s neighborhoods as they awarded a $175,000 emergency public safety contract.
Southwest Patrol Inc. won the city contract to patrol Lakewood’s neighborhood’s and commercial districts as part of a three-month long pilot program. The committee was delegated the authority from City Council to hire the private security firm, Councilman Todd Rogers said.
“I believe they are armed,” said Public Safety Director Josh Yordt about Southwest Patrol Inc. guards patrolling parks at the City of Bellflower.
Councilman Todd Rogers noted that some of the company’s guards are licensed to be armed and asked if Lakewood could upgrade to armed guards. Yordt said that was possible and that Southwest Patrol Inc. had provided a dollar amount for armed guards and that the costs were still competitive if the guards were armed.
The private security patrols will be up and running within two to three weeks, Yordt told the committee.
Southwest Security Inc. will provide four patrol vehicles with one guard each, said Yordt. The patrols will run between 10 p.m. through 6 a.m., seven nights a week, and would include the entire city.
“The focus is highly visible patrols, marked vehicles, uniformed guards within our residential areas,” said Yordt. “Each guard is assigned a geographical beat.”
This will include parks, commercial and residential areas, as well as around the Lakewood Center Mall. Security guards patrolling Lakewood’s neighborhoods will have marked vehicles with a light bar and a magnetic logo of Lakewood attached to the doors.
However, that raised some concerns by Mayor Jeff Wood.
“Anybody can get a magnate and stick it on their car,” Wood said.
City Manager Thaddeus McCormack said the city would do public outreach.
“People need to know what they’re going to look like,” Rogers said.
When asked by Rogers regarding accountability of the private security guards, Yordt said that Southwest Security Inc. will provide a daily patrol log.
It is unclear whether this patrol log will be made available to the public.
Yordt said the City of Bellflower, which has also hired Southwest Security Inc. for patrolling parks, gave satisfactory reviews of the company. McCormack said it was more than satisfactory. Rogers said Bellflower councilmembers were really happy with the company.
Yordt also said that he saw no complaints against the company when doing his review.
“They didn’t have any black marks,” he said.
The private security guards will possibly have their vehicles stationed in the city’s water yard. This will allow the guards to begin and end their shifts in Lakewood, not patrolling outside areas. Guards will also communicate via cell phones.
Eight other private security firms also put in bids for the contract: Allied Universal, Industry Security Services Inc., AEGIS Security & Investigations, Securitas Security Services USA Inc., CrimeShield USA, Los Angeles Professional Security, Sentinal Strategic Services, and RMI International.
Yordt, Seargent Pacheco of the Lakewood Sheriff’s Station, and an outside, third party expert—Daryl Evans, public safety manager for the City of Cerritos—reviewed the proposals, wrote Bill Grady, communications officer, via email.
Yordt recommended to the committee that they hire Southwest Security Inc., saying the company’s proposal was simpler and more concise and that of Allied Universal, which came in a close second in Yordt’s proposal. Yordt said Allied Universal was a larger and more corporate company.
Public safety crisis in Lakewood?
This emergency public safety plan came about due to the public outcry against violent catalytic converter robberies behind the Lakewood Sheriff’s Station.
The Lakewood Populist uncovered a video showing crimes in early March behind the Lakewood Sheriff’s Station in which hooligans sawed off catalytic converters while holding baseball bats. One hooligan was ready to bash a female resident’s head if she came out of her house after she confronted them from her side window.
Lakewood officials prevented the release of one of the videos showing these hooligans, even though the resident who gave them this video publicly asked the city to publicize it so as to ward off the crime. It was the Lakewood Populist who found the other video that was eventually shown on Fox 11 News, KTLA 5 News, NBC 4 News, and ABC 7 News. Even that LA Times did a story on the issue.
Due to the outcry and TV news coverage, all sprung by the Lakewood Populist’s March 12 article, the city’s Public Safety Committee (Wood and Rogers) held an emergency meeting on March 15. It was here that the $400,000 public safety plan was crafted before being sent to Council on March 22.
The plan included money for: private security patrols, as well as funding for more LA County Sheriff’s Department patrols, 10 license-plate cameras, a radar trailer with a mobile message board attached, and subsidies for residents to purchase home security cameras and for the city to put on public safety events.
Despite all this, the city is insisting that there is no major crime spree in Lakewood, implying that the fear of crime is all in residents’ minds.
On March 16, the City of Lakewood sent out what may be a hastily prepared newsletter regarding the catalytic converter robbery, which by then had gone viral on TV news stations. The newsletter gave a lot of focus to things to the city was doing at combatting crime rather than the apparent breakdown of the city’s public safety, as witnessed in the video with baseball bat wielding hooligans.
“Lakewood’s investment in public safety works. Property and violent crime overall declined in Lakewood in 2021, and there were no homicides in the city in 2021,” the newsletter read.
This flies in the face of a statement by LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who specifically highlighted Lakewood when talking about certain cities suffering from crime more than others.
“Countywide our challenge has been homicides and grand theft autos. ... But a lot of the smaller cities are actually been kind of little islands where it’s been relatively better than the bigger cities, you know, like Santa Clarita and Lakewood, for example,” Villanueva told Artesia City Council at a special December 6, 2021 Council meeting. (See the 35:00 minute mark of the video with Sheriff Villanueva.)
The Lakewood Populist is following up this story with a look at a data analysis to get a better picture of the state of Lakewood’s public safety situation.
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