Pastors on Patrol : Volunteer Chaplains Ride With Police to Lend Spiritual Help in Crises

Two weeks after signing on as a chaplain with La Habra police, the Rev. Tony Barnes stood in a living room with the sheet-covered body of an AIDS patient who had taken a drug overdose, seeking to console the grieving mother.

“She said, ‘I have a pastor.’ I said, ‘I’m just here in any which way. Do you want coffee? I’ll make you some coffee.’ ”

As police officers gathered information and evidence, he answered the telephone, relaying messages to her from friends and police. And they began to talk. “We talked about God, his situation. She told me all about everything. We talked about life from A to Z.”

Barnes, minister of the Vine, a 160-member nondenominational church in La Habra, is one of 23 ministers, priests and rabbis who have volunteered at least 24 hours a month to patrol with La Habra police officers in a recently established counseling program offering around-the-clock spiritual help to families in crisis.

Wearing his new badge and beeper, Barnes, 43, has advised parents with an out-of-control teen-age daughter. He has offered solace to an elderly woman whose 92-year-old husband died in his sleep. He helped discover and save a man in the process of suicide and accompanied him and his former fiancee to the hospital.

“We try to help,” Barnes said. “We’re just there to serve the people in a time of need.”

The program, which began Nov. 1, has come together just before the holidays, when authorities expect higher levels of depression and stress. This year, financial pressures related to the recession are expected to exacerbate domestic violence and alcohol-related problems.

“There are a lot of hurting people out there,” said Lt. John Buchholz, a police officer and church elder who administers the program. “These people are here to help if they want it.”

He said he and the former police chief, both active in Christian churches, aimed to use a willing and “untapped resource” to fill the gap left when busy police officers were forced to return to the field and leave grieving or troubled families to deal with a death, a suicide or a domestic fight.

The program was patterned after one in Billings, Mont., Buchholz said. While some local cities have a few chaplains on call and a few contract with the county’s Law Enforcement Assistance Program, La Habra’s is thought to be the county’s only program in which chaplains are scheduled 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

So far, with the program eight volunteers shy of its goal of 31, some of the chaplains are signing up for extra duty.

Buchholz said the program is unique in that it also tries to help the officers.

After a month, they have had no complaints about their nonsectarian advice.

In at least one other city, however, residents have alleged that chaplains and officers were too eager to help.

San Clemente City Councilman Thomas Lorch said he received a call six months ago from parents who complained that they could not get help from police in retrieving their 17-year-old son, who had left home and moved in with a born-again Christian family.

The parents blamed the city’s chaplains and some police officers who were affiliated with with the born-again Christian movement. The boy has never returned home, Lorch said.

Suggestions were made that the city enlarge and diversify its four-pastor chaplaincy program to include religious leaders of other faiths.

In La Habra, Buchholz said, he has tried to ward off potential problems by including Catholic and Jewish leaders and instructing chaplains not to proselytize community members or officers. Only ordained ministers are allowed to participate.

Another concern is the safety of chaplains. In a mandatory training course, they are instructed where and how to stand in certain situations and to interject themselves only at the invitation of the officer.

But it’s not always easy for the pastors to take a back seat. “It’s kind of difficult for them to bite their tongue and wait until it’s their turn,” said Buchholz.

“We respond when an officer asks us to respond,” said the Rev. Rex Spraggins, pastor of New Life Bible Center and chaplain coordinator. “Then we can go in and talk to the individual. Hopefully, he will seek whatever counseling he needs after that.”

The chaplains are issued business cards with the title La Habra Police Chaplain.

Spraggins was recently invited by a sergeant to console the victim of an attempted rape.

“I was invited to go in and work with the woman, talk to her, go in and pray with her, calm her down, calm her daughter down.”

After he learned she was Catholic, he contacted a priest, who in turn contacted her.

In another incident, he said, he began talking with a man who had been drinking and became involved in a minor traffic accident. “I told him he was blowing his life by using the alcohol. I tried to reason with him. All of a sudden it seemed like a light shined. He stopped right there in front of witnesses and everything and just hugged my neck.

“I gave him my card. I think I’ll hear from him someday.”

Spraggins, 57 and a grandfather of six, said he was frustrated at first by situations involving children. After one call when he saw a 14-year-old beating his mother, Spraggins said, he talked to Barnes, who then began organizing a church program where such children can be referred. “They need someone to be with them on weekends, get them interested in something and show them somebody cares.”

In his new experience as a chaplain he has seen a different side of La Habra, where he has lived for 28 years.

“I’ve been shocked at some of the conditions of the city and what has happened in the neighborhoods, going into homes and seeing the conditions. It’s very sobering, the disarray, the dirt, the way people allow themselves to live.”

But it is a learning experience that Barnes relishes.

“You get unattached to the world, working with kids and ministering. It attached me back to what’s really happening. I’m now getting those experiences that only life gives you.”