On Wednesday that training was on display at
“We are not a lifeguard service,”
Basic law enforcement standards training doesn’t require potential police to swim, so don’t call members of the BCSO’s beach precinct basic.
Beach precinct deputies have been specially chosen because of their affinity for the water, Maj. Tommy Ford said. They are former Navy divers, the sons of lifeguards, and ex-lifeguards themselves.
They are all trained in water rescue, so they’re certified to save people in swimming pools. But this is surf rescue training.
It’s one thing to save someone from drowning in a swimming pool; someone with the right equipment can do that without getting wet, said Carol Wagner of the
The training they do a couple times a week is to familiarize the deputies with their equipment and develop a sort of comfort in dangerous surf conditions. Deputy Odis Lansford called it “a respect short of fear.”
The deputies also practice swimming against the current to build their stamina and endurance.
“It’s physically exhausting to do the rescue itself,” said Nagy, who has performed dozens of rescues. “You’ve got to get out here and get exhausted on your own to get used to that feeling, knowing that you’ve got to keep going.”
Deputies in the beach precinct know these waters like the back of their hands, said Lt. David Baldwin, and they wear swim trunks underneath their uniforms. They can spot rip currents, in part because they know where rip currents tend to form and because they’ve been doing what they do for as long as they have.
Even though most or all of the deputies on the beach have performed a surf rescue, only a handful are certified by the USLA. It’s not uncommon for a deputy to get into trouble during a rescue. It’s happened at least once this year already.
“It’s a very dangerous assignment for them,” Ford said. “It’s very important that we give them the proper training and the proper tools.”
The deputies of the beach precinct, as Nagy and others have said, are still police. They still have to patrol the streets, deal with car crashes, medical emergencies, criminals, victims.
They try to deploy a couple deputies as near the sand as possible to respond to water calls, but that means deputies in other areas have to scramble to keep up with their responsibilities,
Deputy Ray Maulbeck recently retired from the BCSO before returning. During his retirement he worked as a lifeguard at the beach’s only lifeguard station near the city pier with Daniel Shelley. Now he’s a cop again, but he’s leading the surf rescue training.
“Basically, we all have to do the work of 20 lifeguards in a — this six miles of beaches, we’re all we have out here,” Maulbeck said. “So … these guys have to be cops and then all of a sudden respond at a moments notice and be surf rescue, so we try to train in accordance with the USLA lifeguard association techniques.”
The spot where they trained Wednesday was chosen because of its tendency to generate the kind of nasty rips that get swimmers in trouble. Those rips come in handy for rescuers, who use the currents to pull them out to distressed swimmers quickly.
Shelley, aka Safety Dan, is a lifeguard, not a cop, but he joined the deputies for training Wednesday. The work of a lifeguard is more about preventing people from entering into dangerous situations than rescuing people. But if there aren’t any lifeguards it’s best to have trained rescuers, he said.
“This stuff is a start to having safer beaches, you know?” Shelley said.