Chula Vista cops ready for stadium task

Can law enforcement take on a new stadium?
By Brandon Stone
San Diego Stadium Watch

The gruff voice of public information officer Bernard Gonzales confidently says what over 212,000 Chula Vistans need to know. Can the Chula Vista police department patrol and control if there’s a new stadium in their town?

“I don’t think there any question that we can do that,” Gonzales said.

It is a question that hasn’t been addressed as much as others since Chula Vista began its talks with the San Diego Chargers. Lost in the shuffle of taxes, environment and feasibility is safety. Stadiums attract many things – tourism, events and commercial interests are just the tip of the iceberg – but the core of all of it is people. The problem is that it doesn’t designate which people it attracts. For every Charger fan that would come through a Chula Vista turnstile to cheer for their team, another could come in with a knife or a gun – or some thing even worse.

“We have discussed various options in very general terms with the City of Chula Vista,” Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani said, “but since we don't even have a final site at this point, those discussions have not moved beyond the very preliminary stages. These issues are very important for host cities, of course, and they deserve careful consideration.”

The department has been part of the city council’s talks with the Chargers, but hasn’t been primarily focused on.

“I don’t think we were the first people on the list to be informed,” Gonzales said, “but certainly during meeting with higher-ups at the city the police department was included in the loop. I’m sure early on in the process the question had to have been asked – what do you think about this stadium idea? Could the police department handle it? City leaders have certainly asked that before.”

Despite its recent financial woes, Chula Vista is still a city on the move. Population has rocketed and homes that now contribute to the city’s budget problems were once booming with new renters and owners. The police department had that in mind when building their current station in 2004. That same station will be depended on to strategize in case a stadium comes to the city.

“The new police station was built for expansion into the future,” Gonzales said. “It took a police department that was crammed into a small 50,000 square foot facility and placed that department into a 150,000 square foot facility. … Chula Vista is growing, and the building was meant to serve the community for the next 25 to 30 years, if not longer.”

Protection and safety in stadiums are nothing new. According to crime studies, over half of U.S. football stadiums are located in high-risk crime neighborhoods. More and more stories of violence in parking lots come out. Traffic accidents on highways and streets go up.

The people who run Qualcomm Stadium battle this every season. The stadium features a long list of rules for those that come into the area, and the stadium is policed by a mix of San Diego police on foot, car and horseback along with Elite Security and the Highway Patrol keep the area as safe as they can manage. San Diego Police’s Special Events Unit leads the stadium effort. Lt. Dan Chrisman of Special Events declined to be interviewed for this reporting, noting that the main role of his group is to maintain traffic flow.

Crime inside the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot isn’t a small thing. According to police records on Sundays from September 2007 to November 2007, there is a spike in crime between game days and other days. On September 9, for example, 90 incidents were recorded. They included violations for traffic, public drunkenness, and narcotics. Compare that with September 16, where only four incidents were reported. Of the 466 total incidents recorded, all but 19 were during Chargers games.

In Chula Vista, protection on this scale has not been done on a regular basis. Chula Vista police serve one of the 100 biggest cities in the nation as well as indirectly police visitors and aliens from the Mexican border, but the department has never covered a professional stadium the way one on the bay front or east side would ask them to do. Cities in comparable size to Chula Vista that host major venues are New Orleans, Lubbock and Orlando, and only Lubbock has favorable trends as of late. A bonus for the department is that Chula Vista police chief Rick Emerson hails from Pasadena, where he dealt with UCLA games and the Rose Bowl each year.

No matter what information is out there, the department is still dealing with the unknown.

“Until you see a plan,” Gonzales said, “until you see a stadium, until you get an agreement, it’s hard to react and respond to these things and it’s hard to have an opinion about it because all you have is an idea. You don’t have anything that says ‘Here’s where it’s going to go, here’s what its going to look like, here’s what we’re going to do with it, and here’s how your services are going to be needed.’ Until then, it’s all speculation.”

Even with speculation, organizations still need to be prepared. Officers still need to be trained on how to handle the situation, enforcement has to work on communication skills, and equipment has to be ordered. Everything must fit with the needs of a building that attracts as many as 100,000 people on a given Sunday.

Some of the forces that could be used for Charger games include a special task force sent out by the police department for traffic control while the others work the surface streets like normal.

“If you put a stadium next to a trolley station, it’s going to reduce the traffic … that would be entering the stadium,” Gonzales said. “If you put it out in the middle of a field somewhere and you’ve got to build roads to it that would have a different type of impact.”

The Chargers would still have to plan on hiring their own paid private security. According to Gonzales, it would be up to the Chargers to control the stadium internally.

“The stadium would be under the private ownership of whoever decides to build it,” Gonzales said. “It’s not owned by the police department, so we would not handle it.”

If the stadium ends up on the bay front, then agencies such as the Harbor Patrol, Coast Guard and even U.S. Customs could come into play. The Port of San Diego controls protection there, and currently has vessel patrol for wildlife, a vehicle team, a bike team and mobile command vehicles.

A media relations employee for the Port of San Diego withdrew comment, only saying that they would work within the Chula Vista Bayfront Master Plan to protect the area.

“If the stadium is in our jurisdiction, we become the primary law enforcement agency,” Gonzales said. “Everybody in the county communicates over the same radio system, so communication is not a major issue. We have good relationships with every law enforcement agency in the county. Building those bridges in terms of communicating on a major event isn’t something that is difficult.”

Even if Chula Vista has the time, resources and power to keep a stadium in line, there is still the money issue. With jobs on the line all over Chula Vista, the police department may not be able to afford putting in the funds to upgrade or create service.

The Chargers promised Chula Vista a privately funded stadium. They did not promise funds for protecting it.

“Obviously, teams that have needs that require the local police department,” Gonzales said. “They pay for those needs to mitigate the impact of the city. So we would expect that the same type of things would happen here.”

Fabiani did not commit to funding law enforcement, but did endorse the importance of “evaluate carefully the public safety cost implications” when building a stadium.

“Generally speaking, in the NFL teams and cities split costs in some form or fashion,” Fabiani said. “In some places, for example, teams pay for all services inside the stadium premises and cities provide services outside the stadium.”

Gonzales thinks the police department is ready to take up that task.“The police department doesn’t create its needs,” Gonzales said, “it responds to what the city requires … we respond to what the city needs. …We respond and we adjust. And that’s what we would do with the stadium.”