Los Angeles residents who had escaped six days of violent civil unrest in their city sat along the full length of Thousand Oaks Boulevard in July 1965.

The timing tested the young Thousand Oaks Police Department: At midnight on July 1, 1965, nine months after the City of Thousand Oaks was incorporated, the Highway Patrol transferred its duties in the city to the TOPD.

“Little did we know we would inherit the Watts Riot,” said Dennis Gillette, among the 10 deputies and two sergeants who formed the inaugural police department.

“I pulled over a car one night, midnight, speeding down the 101,” Gillette said. “All four doors opened at once and four young men jumped out and started running back toward my patrol car. We had a deciding moment right then.”

Gillette said the men were scared and wanted to tell him they were good guys.

“(They were) four youth out of the central city running toward (my) patrol car when there’s a full-blown riot going on right over the hill,” he said. “I, in the most authoritative voice I could muster, got them to stop and then they talked. They were trying times. But that stands out. I remember that so vividly.”

The surviving officers from that time remember a peaceful city.

The first police station in the city opened in a tiny room at the back of the fire station on Avenida de Los Arboles in 1961, then moved to a house across the street about two years later before finding a permanent spot on Olsen Road.

Officers went to work wearing ties and Stetson hats.

“Municipal policing at that time was a relatively new concept,” Gillette said. “The city of Lakewood in Los Angeles County was the genesis of contract law enforcement for municipal policing, and we followed suit.”

Of the original police force, Gillette knows of three surviving members: Jim Koontz, George Conahey and Bill Frick, who left the sheriff’s department to join the Highway Patrol and moved out of the Conejo Valley.

The small group laid the groundwork for a strong department, said Gillette, a former mayor and police chief of Thousand Oaks who moved to Spokane, Wash., last year to be closer to a daughter and his grandchildren.

“Thousand Oaks Liquor was a place where you could pull in, get a soda, use the restroom and use the telephone,” he said. “It wasn’t uncommon to see a sheriff’s unit behind the store, and you could also go in there and just listen. You talked to interesting folks in the community that knew what was going on. We had exceptional rapport with the community. We had great rapport with the young people.”

Early years

In his early years in the department, Koontz went to school during the day and patrolled the streets at night, stopping crimes in progress.

“You were proud to find a burglary before a call came in for the burglary,” Koontz said.

“Businesses didn’t report it until morning. (But) most of what we responded to had already happened. At the time we were the only law enforcement around. We got the first call,” he said.

Gillette said that the “scariest and worst of all” were calls related to domestic disturbances and suicides. He remembered responding to a report that a 4-year-old girl had fallen from the second story of a house on Gainsborough Road.

“She wasn’t breathing,” he said. “The mother was cradling the little girl. I managed to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation very carefully because she was so small and got her breathing.”

Conahey once answered a call reporting a father fighting with his teenage son.

“I took the kid down,” Conahey said. “He was a well-known little jerk. I had him on the floor, and he bit me on the leg.”

The officers made sacrifices. Officers worked long hours when duties were shared among few people.

Koontz recalled occasional daylong shifts.

“I’d get called out on holidays and weekends. I’d be gone for almost 24 hours without even talking to my family when there weren’t as many officers as there are now,” Koontz said.

Officers adopted a strict work ethic, Gillette said.

“If you picked up a case and your shift ended, it didn’t end,” he said. “You turned your city patrol car over to somebody, but you’d keep working. That’s the way it was done then.”

Officers also had to endure patrol cars without air conditioning.

“We drove around in the heat,” Gillette said. “George Conahey was sitting outside City Hall one day perspiring in the 100-degree temperature. Glenn Kendall, the city manager, said, ‘Why don’t you roll your windows up and turn the air on?’ And George told him they didn’t have any air. That was immediately his task to make sure that the cars the city bought would have air conditioning.”

Low crime rate

The city had a low crime rate then as it does now. Burglaries and thefts were the most common crimes.

“All the years I worked out here that was one of the things you took pride in, the low crime rate. The people in the community probably get the most credit for that,” Koontz said.

Gillette also credited the residents with helping to create a safe city.

“We had exceptional cooperation from the community,” he said. “The community has always insisted on a strong, law-abiding, honest community. They’ve insisted on personnel that would respond to them and provide exceptional service.”

Koontz said he was proud of his work and of the sheriff’s department.

“When you went to other places people were so envious of us, both the department and the way it was run,” Koontz said.

Gillette said that being a member of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department “was always a point of significant pride.”

“Wherever you went, it had an exceptional reputation for integrity, honesty, service,” Gillette said. “We were blessed with very knowledgeable, very confident sheriffs that insisted on that kind of service, quality and officers. That’s still the case today.”

 

MEN IN BLUE—Dennis Gillette, Jim Koontz and George Conahey reminisce about their days working for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department in Thousand Oaks during the 1960s.