Fountain Valley's New Top Cop

It seems appropriate that new Fountain Valley Police Chief Dan Llorens' office looks out over Slater Avenue, just one of the city's many busy streets. In a city where law enforcement is often more about community outreach than it is about search warrants and drug busts, keeping a keen eye on even the most quiet-looking street is a big part of the department's proactive philosophy, which starts from the top down. Llorens, who has spent his entire law-enforcement career in Fountain Valley and , sat down with Patch to talk about the rest of his views on police work, public service and community trust.

How does Fountain Valley differ from other cities when it comes to law enforcement, and how is it similar?
Fountain Valley deals with the same kind of issues that any other city deals with, regardless of size. We have them in smaller amounts, and with a lot of time in between. We have a relatively low rate of violent crime, but violent crime does occur, and when it occurs, it's not only tragic, it also involves a significant amount of resources on our part to deal with it. The more accurate picture of Fountain Valley is obviously a very quiet community where people grow up, go to school raise their kids and work and drive through every day without a care in the world. And that's the way we want to keep it. So the big picture of Fountain Valley is an extremely safe city to live, to work, to drive through, but we have to stay on it. We can't let up on the gas pedal because as soon as we do, people's behavior changes and they become less safe and they take more risks and we have issues that pop up.

What's your philosophy in terms of maintaining Fountain Valley's safe and quiet environment?
Proactivity is one of the hallmarks of our culture here. Every police department everywhere has its own culture: its own phrases, slang, its own things that are unique about it to other departments. One hallmark here in Fountain Valley is the proactivity of our officers. For the size of our department, we make a lot of arrests and stay very proactive, so the officers are expected to seek out the criminal element when the criminal element doesn't necessarily show itself. We do that by partnering with the parole officers, probation officers and by concentrating on repeat offenders who have shown a propensity to commit crime after crime.

How does your increased use of technology fit into the department's proactive culture?
We have to do our part in making sure we're doing everything we can to make efficient use of the city's dollars. Since we can't do all of the public outreach we'd like to do all of the time, we have to find ways to connect with people on a regular basis. Most contact people have with police officers tends to be negative: They get stopped for a traffic ticket, or they get a parking ticket, or they call us when their car's been broken into. We like to try to inform them and connect with them on a basis that's more positive. Pushing information out of what's going on from our perspective is a way they can see we're not hiding anything, and they know exactly what's going on in their neighborhoods. We have to stay on top of that because we don't want to end up in a situation where we're constantly chasing our tail.

What are your everyday goals for the department?
Our primary goal is just to provide the best possible service that we can. That's got to be ongoing. We are confronted with a society that asks more of its public safety personnel, and we have to be prepared to provide that service. Sometimes it's relatively dramatic, and sometimes it's as simple as getting someone some help or getting them a phone number or getting them connected with another agency. We've got to be able to provide service, and we've got to be responsive. So our goal is to connect with folks, find out what is important to them, and respond to that. If we ask folks to be our eyes and ears, but we don't respond to what they're telling us, they're going to stop calling. We need those 56,000 out there to be looking out with us, alongside us.

What's the key to getting residents to do their part?
There has to be that trust. When officers are driving in the middle of a tract on a summer's day when the kids are out of school, kids will wave to us with all five fingers. That's a positive sign that they connect with us and they know that we're on their side. So when something happens, they'll call us and know that we're going to respond appropriately. We could not function as a police department without the help of our residents, so we're going to do everything we can to maintain a good positive relationship with people.

For more information about Llorens' background, .