A Night with Mammoth Lakes PD: What a Ride-Along Taught Me

Last Saturday night, I rode along with the Mammoth Lakes Police Department. I wanted to see, firsthand, what our officers actually deal with on a given shift. Not the stereotype, not the politics, just the job. A few hours in a patrol car taught me more than any council meeting could. Here's what stood out, along with some factchecking on the bigger issues that came up.

Staffing and Retention: The Housing Connection Is Real

One of the first things I heard from officers was that MLPD struggles to keep people here long-term, and that housing is a huge part of why.

That's not just anecdotal. MLPD is funded for 19 sworn officer positions, but the department has been running with far fewer, around 12 active sworn members in recent months, a staffing level actually below what the department had when the Town incorporated back in 1984. In the past year alone, MLPD lost seven officers: two to retirement, two to Inyo County, one to Bishop PD, one to Mono County, and one who resigned during training.

The Town knows housing is a factor and has leaned hard into recruitment incentives to compete: a $25,000 signing bonus, up to $5,000 in relocation reimbursement, and up to six months of housing in a Town-sponsored condo for new lateral officers, on top of longevity pay and other benefits. It's a real, documented response to a real problem: officers, like everyone else here, need somewhere to live, and that's proven to be one of the toughest parts of building a stable force.

Responding vs. Preventing

Officers were candid that being short-staffed shifts their whole posture, from proactive community policing toward reactive, call-to-call response. That's the quiet cost of understaffing: it's not just slower response times, it's less time for the kind of visible, relationship-building policing that actually prevents crime before it happens.

Flock Cameras: More Limited (and More Complicated) Than People Think

We talked a lot about Flock. Here's where I want to clarify something for the public, because I got a few details mixed up in my own head before I checked them.

Mammoth Lakes does have Flock Safety technology, and it includes two genuinely different tools:

• Falcon cameras — these are real automatic license plate readers (ALPR). The Town has about 10 fixed ALPR cameras around town, plus additional units added more recently.

• Raven sensors — these are separate audio-based gunshot detection devices, installed as part of an expansion partnering the Town, the school district, Mono County Office of Education, Cerro Coso, and Mammoth Hospital, creating a monitored perimeter around our schools and hospital.

The ALPR cameras and the gunshot sensors are both part of the same Flock system, but they're distinct tools doing different jobs.

On the "how fast" question: one of the officers told me the system has about a seven-minute delay in practice. That's worth sitting with, because it doesn't match Flock's own marketing, which claims Raven detects gunshots in under a minute (60 seconds or less). Real-world performance and manufacturer claims are two different things, and it's worth noting that gunshot-detection systems generally (Flock's Raven included) have faced real scrutiny elsewhere, with cities like Champaign, Illinois and San Jose finding real-world accuracy rates well below what's advertised. Whatever the true number is here in Mammoth, it's a fair question to keep asking MLPD and Flock directly.

As for the ALPR side: after seeing the system myself, I came away thinking that what police can actually access and search for is far more limited than what a lot of people assume. Officers are a lot more restricted in their own search capabilities from what I originally assumed. It doesn't do facial recognition, and every officer search is logged and auditable. I understand the tool's usefulness for solving crimes, and I also understand residents' privacy concerns. Those aren't mutually exclusive positions. Where I think the conversation needs to go deeper (and this is bigger than MLPD or the Town) is the question of data sharing: how Flock's broader network handles and potentially shares license plate data across jurisdictions and vendors. That's a policy question well beyond our town limits, but it's the part of this debate that concerns me most.

Whatever Happened to the School Resource Officer?

This got me thinking about MLPD's history with our schools. The department used to have a dedicated School Resource Officer (SRO). A sworn officer assigned specifically to the schools, building relationships with students and staff so that problems could be caught early. It's a position MLPD has filled in the past. Given the current staffing shortage, it's fair to ask: is a camera/sound-based detection system, really a substitute for an officer who knows the kids by name? That's a real trade-off worth discussing as a community.

Jurisdiction Gets Blurry at the Edges

We spent some time cruising through Shady Rest Campground, where we talked to the campground host who told us they almost never see Forest Service presence out there anymore. That tracks with what's been happening regionally: federal staffing and funding cuts have hit the Mono/Inyo National Forest hard. The forest typically hires around 50 seasonal workers each year for trail maintenance, bathroom upkeep, and visitor contact. This past year, it hired none. The Town of Mammoth Lakes actually stepped in, hiring its own recreation technicians and trail crews to cover some of that lost work, and Mammoth's mayor joined other Sierra-region officials in pressing Congress to restore federal forest funding.

Because Mammoth Lakes' town boundaries border national forest land directly, this isn't an abstract federal issue, it lands on MLPD's desk. When Forest Service presence thins out, calls that arguably belong to federal land managers end up routed to local police instead.

The same pattern shows up with wildlife calls. Bear encounters are technically the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's responsibility, not MLPD's. But Fish and Wildlife's game warden corps is chronically understaffed statewide. California has one of the worst warden-to-resident ratios in the country, and the department has publicly acknowledged it only has the staff to handle a fraction of its overall duties. I couldn't confirm an exact number of wardens covering Mono and Inyo counties specifically, but the statewide numbers alone show how thin that agency is stretched…which helps explain why so many bear calls end up in MLPD's lap by default, even when it's not technically their job.

Measure L: What Voters Approved vs. Where the Money Is Going

Measure L is worth understanding on its own. One of the officers actually brought it up during the ride-along, and when I looked into it myself afterward, everything they told me checked out. Mammoth Lakes voters approved it in November 2024. It raised the Town's Transient Occupancy Tax (the tax paid by hotel and short-term rental guests, not by residents) by 2%, with ballot language describing a broad set of purposes: affordable workforce housing through the Town's "Housing Now!" program, public safety, disaster preparedness, road repair, recreation, and snow removal.

Because it was structured as a general tax, the Town Council has legal discretion over how the revenue is actually spent. The ballot language wasn't a binding earmark. And in practice: the Town's FY2025/26 budget was the first to include Measure L revenue, and that budget dedicates those dollars exclusively to housing, expected to bring in about $3.8 million that year. So the "100% to housing" concern is accurate as a description of how the money has been allocated so far. Public safety and roads weren't funded through this particular revenue stream, even though they were named as eligible uses when voters approved it.

My Takeaway

MLPD officers are doing real, difficult work with a staff that's stretched thin, jurisdiction lines that don't match public expectations, and technology that's more nuanced, and more limited, than most residents realize. I asked officers directly what they need, and while I'm not going to share those specifics here (that's a conversation for the department and the Town, not a headline) I'll say this: what I heard were reasonable asks from people who are proud to serve this community and too often go overlooked for it. If I'm fortunate enough to be elected, I hope to be someone at the table who keeps listening and advocating for them.

Mammoth Lakes is a small town with big-town problems: tourism-scale visitation, complicated federal and state jurisdiction overlaps, and a housing crisis that touches every single person trying to build a life here, including the people we ask to keep it safe.

Thanks MLPD, we appreciate all you do!

-Lakota