Excerpted from The Sacramento Bee
By Tim Herrera
February 29, 1996

Jim Cooper lives in Laguna. He's a typical father. He loves talking about his two daughters, ages 5 years and 20 months. He's quick to laugh and swap stories about child-rearing experience, both humorous and hair-raising.

Cooper likes to discuss the educational system and schools. He can't wait for the cold and clammy weather to break because he's trying to get ready for coaching his older daughters T-ball team. He knows you can't get good practices in when all the parks in Elk Grove and Laguna areas are soggy with rainwater.

Cooper is quick to flash a smile and offer a handshake. If you bumped in him at Raley's or Buckthorn's, you could probably banter about every subject imaginable.

But a few things set Jim Cooper apart from most. First, he's big. Really big. Like NFL linebacker-sized big.

He prefers that you call him "Jim" or "Coop." If you meet a guy that big, you call him whatever he prefers.

Second, he runs with a rough crowd. But it's for work and not for pleasure.

Cooper is a sergeant with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department. His main job for the most of his 11 years with the department has been battling gangs and narcotics. Cooper spearheads the Violence Reduction Unit. Over the past year, the unit has been responsible for taking 211 illegal guns away from gang member s and other bad guys and getting those weapons off Sacramento County streets.

Coop refers to most of the criminal types that he meets as "knuckleheads." It's an all-encompassing label that he believes fits law-breakers the best.

A lot of the people Cooper has crossed paths with on the job are people who live in a broken home, he said, if they have a place to call "home" at all. Most of them are teenagers ripe for recruitment into the gangster lifestyle – if they aren't the ones already doing the recruiting.

I had a chance to ride with Sgt. Cooper last week while reporting on the violence-reduction team for the KCRA-TV news story. While we discussed the unit's crime-fighting success, he said he wanted people living in the Elk Grove-Laguna area – people he considers his friends and neighbors – to realize that they are not immune to the gang infestation or the drug epidemic.

The median home prices in Laguna and Elk Grove may be a little higher compared with other areas. The neighborhood parks are well kept and covered with colorful and still fairly new playground equipment. However, Cooper said he sees crime creeping upward in the Laguna area of Sacramento County and that others must be on the lookout for it, too.

"Laguna is getting big on vehicle burglaries at nighttime," Cooper said. "Gangsters are breaking in to cars big time!"

Cooper also said while the gang presence seems nonexistent to many Elk Grove-area residents, people need to open their eyes and look a little deeper. Gangs are attractive to kids who don't think they belong anywhere else, kids who feel unwanted, kids who think they cannot connect with their families. They find surrogate kin in gangs.

"The knuckleheads from the South area are coming down to the Laguna area and dragging all their business with them," Cooper said. "Some families that are moving there to get their kids out of the gangs are having the gangs follow them."

That's something we all need to that in about. Words we need to digest.

During my ride with Cooper, we got in to a high-speed chase with a driver and passenger in a '65 Mustang. They refused to pull over when the sergeant flashed his red lights.

Cooper tailed the Mustang for about five miles. The driver raced through countless stop signs and intersections. Both cars weaved around traffic, as other vehicles pulled over to allow Cooper to continue his pursuit.

The sergeant sounded like a play-by-play announcer as he barked into the handset of his two-way radio to let other cops know in which direction he was heading.

I got bounced around in the back seat like a little kid on a Disneyland ride. When the two suspects finally pulled over, Cooper already had his handgun pulled and aimed with a half-dozen sheriffs deputies and Sacramento police officer backing him up.

Cooper convincingly cuffed and politely questioned the two men, who happened to have some open containers of beer and several cellular phones that allegedly didn't belong to them.

While watching Cooper, I thought: "not a bad guy to have for a neighbor – or t-ball coach."