In regards to Captain Tom Martin of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department advocating that Malibu homeowners take the law into their own hands, I’ll quote a more notorious lawman: the captain in “Cool Hand Luke.” “What we have here is failure to communicate.”
According to your story last week, Captain Martin encourages Malibu homeowners to threaten citizen arrests against beachgoers who allegedly trespass on their sand. Martin does not base his suggestion on the law as it’s practiced in Malibu. According to Martin, no Malibu beachgoer has had a citizen arrest complaint per a private sand dispute pressed against him or her in five years. Martin advocates using the citizen arrest threat as a bluff; i.e., the fear of arrest will cause a law-abiding citizen to flee from property that could very well be public sand.
What Martin fails to communicate is his concept of the word “indemnification.” If a Malibu homeowner who wants to get a sunbather off land that is public, he should understand that, under civil law, citizen arrests are in no way a free pass to harass. Example: Let’s say a very proper non-beach property owner sits on a piece of public sand and is confronted by an imposing, aggressive private security guard and one of Martin’s deputies, much like Coastal Commission Sara Wan was a few weeks ago. Let’s say at the urging of Martin’s deputy, a beach property owner starts bluffing the innocent beachgoer with a threat of a citizen’s arrest. Let’s say Mr. Property Owner gets his bluff called.
Happens all the time. Some guy who thinks he’s got the lawmen in the bag doesn’t scare someone who knows the law. To save face, Mr. Property Owner then has Mr. Innocent dragged off the sand, thrown in a squad car, and written up with a bonus misdemeanor citation. Mr. Innocent later finds a great lawyer, sues the property owner and the deep-pocket Sheriff’s Dept. for false imprisonment, emotional duress, etc., and gets a nice settlement. Of course, maybe Captain Martin is a very rich man who doesn’t mind paying the legal damages of those who take his advice.
As an L.A. County taxpayer, I wish Martin would encourage his deputies to cite the private security guards who illegally ride their all-terrain vehicles on public sand rather than encourage Malibu homeowners to practice empty threats against beachgoers, an action that could lead to bogus, and costly, citizen arrests.
Ross Johnson