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Published on 02/17/1997 All articles from this issue

My 'cop class'

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By Joanne Griffith Domingue

He handed my partner and me each a gun and a flashlight. Then he sent us into an office building to do a search because a silent alarm had been triggered.

Christina looked into the office cubicles on the right, I checked the ones on the left. We didn't talk. We listened. We crept. We paused. We flashed the light under desks, behind file cabinets. Then on to the next cubby.

The only existing light was red from exit signs or green from glowing computer monitors.

We had almost finished our search. I crept around a corner, shined my light into one of the last offices, when the beam picked up the glittering eyes of the intruder who had tripped the alarm. He had squeezed himself under a desk.

I shot him before he could shoot us.

Lights came on, congratulations were passed around. We'd caught the intruder - who in reality is Sgt. Stan Hirayama, training manager for the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office.

My partner in the search, Christina Negrete, and I are students in the Sheriff's Community Police Academy. The topic that night was building searches. The guns were fake although they were the shape and weight of the real thing. The tension was genuine.

My "cop class" began Jan. 14 and continues until April 1, from 6 to 9:30 every Tuesday night.

This is the eighth of the citizen academies the Sheriff's Department has run since the program began in 1993. Participation is by invitation but any interested citizen may apply. I'm told some wait as long as a year.

There is no charge, they feed the 16 of us dinner, and all the sheriffs who teach the class are volunteers.

I'm missing the Los Altos City Council meetings for the length of the academy. But I am lucky to have this opportunity to learn about the Sheriff's Department, which provides law enforcement to Los Altos Hills as well as unincorporated areas of Los Altos.

The seven women in the class represent a range of interests, from Lori Fraasch, a coroner's investigator to Barbara Zschaler, a nurse at the veteran's administration hospital in Palo Alto.

Different reasons drew the nine men to the class, from Casey Dick, a special events coordinator at De Anza College to John Zipp, a Monte Sereno resident and interim CEO of Hope Rehabilitation.

"When they said they tried for a diverse class, they were successful," said Shields Neely, a class member and an engineer with National Semiconductor. "I don't see any common thread."

There is one. We're all interested in how law enforcement works and want to be better informed about the Sheriff's office and its county-wide programs.

The anti-drug program DARE, comes into Los Altos schools. The "sober graduation" program that gives high school students a tour of the morgue involves our high school students. All our 911 fire calls now go through county communications. Many county-wide law enforcement task forces - narcotics, car theft, sexual assault, Avoid the 13 - benefit Los Altos, too.

I'll be heading east, out of headquarters in downtown San Jose, to King and Story roads, on Feb. 28 for a 10-hour ride-along.