Citizens on Patrol: A cop's best buddy

COEUR d’ALENE — Terry Drube was never employed as a policeman.

For three decades, until his retirement in 2004, the Coeur d’Alene man managed businesses — a Sara Lee bakery, an Anheuser-Busch plant. He was disconnected from the shoe leather and sometimes in-your-face confrontations known to a beat police officer.

When Drube retired at 52 years old, however, he looked for something that fit his demeanor. He eventually joined the Coeur d’Alene Police Department’s volunteer COP program.

That’s why this morning, Drube stands on a snow berm in a street near East Sherman Avenue peering into a Winnebago Explorer RV and listening for a cat.

“You can see it,” he says.

The tabby is black and white and sidles up to a partially open driver’s side window.

It purrs.

“It’s been in there for a week,” Drube says. ”I don’t know what it’s eating.”

The cat, however, is not Drube’s concern.

As part of the COP, or Citizens On Patrol, program, Drube is attached to an abandoned vehicle unit. His job is to get vehicles, like the RV, off the street so plows can clear the roadway.

“It’s definitely abandoned,” Drube says.

He places a tag on the Winnebago’s side view mirror and steps back to call Animal Control.

“We’re not authorized to enter a vehicle,” explains Drube, dressed in a blue uniform with arm patches. A radio rides the utility belt on his hip.

As part of their job, the police department volunteers — average age, 67 — patrol neighborhoods, tag abandoned vehicles, have vehicles towed, deliver mail, set up traffic control, provide assistance during accidents and do whatever they can to prevent patrol officers from spending time away from crime.

“We try not to bother them too much,” Drube says.

Sometimes, however, when there’s trouble, when someone resists having a vehicle cited or towed, the volunteers ask police for help.

“The cavalry does come,” Drube says.

As his radio crackles, Drube hears one of his colleagues, Larry Seaward, call for a tow truck.

“Looks like he got it,” Drube says.

Seaward was sent to the farthest perimeter of the agency’s range to have a fiberglass boat towed. It had for months been parked illegally on a trailer in a north Coeur d’Alene street.

Abandoned boats on trailers are especially loathsome because hull numbers are difficult to find and tow companies hate storing boats that take up space and must be sold at auction.

When they’re old and have little value, getting rid of them is onerous.

“We don’t exactly tow the gems of the city,” Seaward said. “We’re just one step above the Dumpster.”

In addition, owners of out-of-state boats and trailers — the one Seaward was sent after has an Oregon plate — are difficult to track.

“They don’t have their information updated. Their systems are often down,” and it sometimes takes months just to get the name of a former owner, much less the latest one, Seaward says.

Seaward, a part-time employee of the city, has been operating the COP program for a decade, rounding up volunteers, training them in the computer system, the paperwork, how to document and handle confrontation. Volunteers learn to properly use dispatch services and communication via the radio in their cars and on their belts, how to tag, tow and cite vehicles, and how to be friendly, too.

It takes many weeks of training before a COP volunteer is allowed to trundle down Coeur d’Alene’s streets in a city-owned car with the Citizens On Patrol emblem on the doors.

Training newcomers is what Seaward does most when he isn’t patrolling, or keeping his volunteers on task.

Recruitment is also on his to-do list. Last year at this time, 18 volunteers worked the streets under the COP banner.

“I’m down to 11 now,” Seaward says.

Volunteers, who average five hours per week, logged 3,220 hours in 2019. Seaward expects a shortage of 700 hours this year.

“That’s a huge hit,” he said.

Captain Lee Brainard said the work of the volunteers, such as tagging and removing abandoned vehicles to allow snow plows to clear city streets, is critical. Because patrol officers must prioritize calls for service, tagging abandoned vehicles lands at the bottom of their daily duties.

“It’s work that citizens rely on the police department to complete,” Brainard said. “But because it’s less critical, officers invest less time in it.”

Patrol officers dispatched to accidents or crimes in progress, engaged in follow-up investigations, crime deterrence or traffic stops may focus on non-moving violations, but usually the work falls on the volunteers.

“It’s hard to quantify their contribution,” Brainard said. “They are really invaluable.”

And it’s time consuming because each vehicle visited is first given a warning. The yellow paper is placed on the side view mirror. The car is visited again, and if it’s still there — and before it’s ticketed for removal — the officer must make an attempt to contact the owner. Volunteers must visit the car or truck one more time to document whether it’s still there.

“For every one of these, to open up the database and do the paperwork, takes a half hour,” Seaward said.

Over the last few weeks — since the city was covered in snow — volunteers visited more than 150 vehicles in Coeur d’Alene.

Much of the group’s attrition is age-related.

“If someone has hip or knee surgery they can’t get in and out of a car,” Seaward said.

Volunteers might also be snowbirds who head south in the colder months.

Others are trained and hit the streets only to learn the confrontation and angry encounters with residents — which are rare, but exist, Drube says — are the game changer.

They don’t like it.

“I tell them, if they don’t like conflict, they might instead consider volunteering at a soup kitchen,” Seaward says.

The program accounted last year for getting almost 500 abandoned vehicles off Coeur d’Alene streets.

Seaward remembers a boat on a trailer that had been parked in a neighborhood for so long, nobody knew who it owned it, but residents had filled it with dirt and started a garden.

“Apparently it had been there for years, but nobody had ever called us about it,” he said.

The volunteers in COP don’t go looking for vehicles, but instead respond to calls.

“We don’t go trolling,” Drube said.

Seaward thinks if the program had eight or 10 more volunteers clocking a few hours a week, it could be at full force.

“We would be doing what we should be doing,” he said.

For every 10 people who sign up, however, only two make it through the training and background checks to join the COP force, he said.

For the ones who stay — Drube has been part of the program for four years — the volunteer work fills a void that only sense of community service can fill.

“They get enjoyment out of it, and they know they are helping,” Seaward says. “In this case, they are helping the community.”