Sheriff's STAR camp canceled

The popular Los Angeles County Sheriff's STAR (Success Through Awareness and Resistance) Camp, which has been an annual event in Agoura Hills for the past five years, has been canceled this summer due to deputy shortages, according to L.A. County Sheriff's Lt. Roy Levario.

The news caught the community off guard.

"There are many disappointed kids and their parents in this community," said Fariba and Rajan Samtani of Agoura Hills.

In a letter to Lost Hills Sheriff's Station Capt.Tom Martin, the couple wrote, "Both our daughters, ages 11 and 9, have thoroughly enjoyed attending the camp for the last two years and were looking forward to the experience this summer. . . .The people in charge need to know how good this camp is for the community."

The camp introduces children to many important activities of law enforcement and other social services departments that contribute toward the safety and welfare of the community, officials said.

Like the STAR program itself, which was founded in 1985 to teach schoolchildren in grades four to seven how to build life skills and stay away from drugs and gangs, the STAR camp is a crime prevention tool that many people feel is important to the community.

"It's a tremendous program, there's no doubt about that," Levario said. "But how do we balance that against the needs of the community in terms of safety issues out there, getting deputies to patrol the streets, to work in jails and to work the courts."

The need for deputies on the street is more pressing, Levario said. "We're down a lot of deputies, more than 1,000 across the board. We have some tremendous shortages in the field, in our field operations, in custody, in our jails and in our courts."

Levario said the sheriff's department loses 400 to 500 deputies each year to retirement, injuries, transfers and other reasons.

"We can't bring in enough bodies through the recruitment process and through the academy process to fill those vacancies in a reasonable time period," Levario said.

"We used to have an 8,000deputy department. We're a little less than that now, and our needs in terms of the department and our communities, they're not shrinking, they're growing. We need more police officers in the field, not less," said Levario.

"We have a lot of people out there who express an interest in law enforcement, but for a variety of different reasons, they don't qualify," he said.

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department has to go through thousands of applicants to hire just one deputy, according to Levario.

"This year, we're probably on course to get about 300 to 400 people for the academy," Levario said. "And again, we lose 400 to 500 deputies a year."

STAR camp requires nearly 10 deputies to run the camp and supervise the 700 or so children who participate, he said.

As of now, the STAR program's commitment is to keep the available deputies primarily in the classroom.

"Anything we do over and above that is great, but we have to balance what we absolutely need to do, and we need to be in the classroom teaching," Levario said.

While the camp has been canceled for this year, Levario believes it will be revived in the future, but exactly when he couldn't say.