A Place for the Police

SANTA ANA —  After eight years of planning, 2,500 tons of steel and some questions about the cost, the Santa Ana Police Administration and Jail Facility opens today.

Spread across eight acres, the downtown Santa Ana complex is a village of classrooms, a computer lab and a split-level shooting range that will also turn a profit for the city.

The jail was built to ease expected overcrowding in the city jail, while the administrative offices will more comfortably accommodate the 700 police employees who now spill out of police headquarters and into two floors of City Hall.

The jail and office facilities, built to last the city until 2050, will be a technological leap forward for city workers and serve as a home away from home.

“If you were a police officer,” said Capt. Pete Jensen, the project administrator, “you could sleep here, do your ATM banking here, do your dry-cleaning, and you could eat here.”

But with a $107-million price tag, the facility is not without its detractors.

The city issued a bond to pay for the jail, but later was strapped for funds as it faced losses in the Orange County bankruptcy. The city then turned to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for a $13.9-million loan against future HUD grants.

That loan has been an issue for some local activists who say the money should have been used for housing. Critics also have attacked the building’s cost.

Arturo Montez, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, for example, compared the jail to the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel, which sold for an estimated $50 million in 1995.

“Buy the Bonaventure,” Montez said. “Ship [the criminals] up to Los Angeles. We could rent out the extra rooms and give these guys room service.”

Police officials say care has been taken to cut costs in many areas, from the use of carpet squares that are easily and cheaply replaced, to powerful and efficient touch-screen computers that eliminate the need for extra employees.

“With one touch,” said jail administrator Russell M. Davis, “the system can do four, five, six operations.”

And behind the steel, concrete and technology, officials say, is a philosophy about how the right environment can alter people’s behavior.

For example, forget movie scenes where prisoners are allowed only one call. Inmates can make as many calls as they want from the booking area phones as they look out onto a small garden (which is caged).

The philosophy, Davis said, is to provide a calming environment for suspects that also will make life easier for police personnel.

If prisoners “want to behave themselves, they can watch television or make a phone call,” Davis said. “If they want to act like an idiot, we can lock them up.”

Each police officer will provide “direct supervision” of up to 64 prisoners by walking among them in a day room rather than monitoring them by video.

Davis said the concept, used successfully in many jails nationwide, forces officers and inmates to get to know each other and work together.

“We’ve spent 200 years trying to build a better box,” Davis said. “Then it dawned on people, ‘Let’s try to control their behavior rather than contain their behavior.’ ”

In the ultramodern Police Department offices, many of the walls are detachable, allowing conference rooms to be converted into offices, and offices into classrooms. In the jail, sliding steel gates can instantly increase the number of cells an officer oversees.

“We didn’t want to be boxed into a corner,” Jensen said. “We wanted the building to work with us.”

The best seat in the house at police headquarters is not reserved not for the chief but for the operators, who are often the public’s first contact with police. The operators will occupy a fourth-floor corner with views of downtown Santa Ana and the Big A at Anaheim Stadium to the north.

“A lot of people say the chief should have gotten this space,” Jensen said. “But this is the group that really does a lot of the grinding-out work.”

The jail, with 256 cells and a capacity for 473 prisoners, male and female, far surpasses Santa Ana’s needs. Jensen said the current city jail must deal with up to 150 people on a busy weekend.

But Jensen said it was cost-efficient for the city to add the extra beds and rent the excess space. Officials expect to fill the jail with federal prisoners from agencies such as the U.S. Marshals Service, whose needs will become more acute once a new federal courthouse just blocks away is completed.

Jensen said he hopes to recoup the jail’s $7-million annual operating cost by renting cells.

The shooting range is expected to be another moneymaker, as law enforcement officers from throughout the county pay to train at the 24-hour facility neatly tucked underneath the parking garage stairwell. Classrooms also will be available for rent.

Critics of the jail have pointed out that city officials have long opposed expanding county jail facilities in Santa Ana by saying that the city already has its fair share of cells.

But Jensen countered that unlike county prisoners, federal prisoners will stay in Santa Ana only during their trials. They will serve their terms and be released in other cities.

“We knew the sheriff couldn’t do it; he didn’t have the space,” Jensen said. “This is our site. This jail is for our prisoners.”

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New Home for Headquarters

Santa Ana’s new police administration building and jail is designed to ease prisoner overcrowding and centralize police functions. The city’s police force had been operating out of a building erected in 1959 and remodeled in 1966, six substations, two floors of City Hall and a temporary jail. Details on the new facility:

Size: 501,200 square feet

Cost: $107 million

Elements

* Administration: 236,300 square feet in four stories houses all operational and administrative functions; accommodates department expansion through 2050

* Holding facility: 168,400 square feet in four stories includes 256 cells with capacity to jail 420 inmates; includes full-service kitchen and laundry

* Vehicle storage: 96,500 square feet in two stories and basement with spaces for police vehicles and motorcycles; also includes two-level firing range

* Tunnel links the holding facility with the Orange County Intake & Release Center; will be used to transfer inmates between the two facilities

Source: Santa Ana Police Department