Poway’s new Sheriff’s Lt. Colin Hebeler is ready to work with City Council , residents, businesses and schools on safety issues.
One of his goals is to identify vulnerabilities and ensure facilities are secure to prevent criminal intrusions, property damage or interruptions to local operations, said Hebeler, who started working at the Poway station on April 4.
“I’m very excited to work with the station and the community,” said Hebeler, noting that the station has nearly 50 deputies and five professional staff. “We have a lot of great deputies here. They’re ionate about ensuring the safety of Poway residents and are trying to improve law enforcement. They want to be the best for our city. I’m very honored to work with them and represent them.”
He replaces Lt. Gavin Lanning, who transferred to the ASTREA helicopter unit as a specially trained pilot.
Hebeler will help oversee the Poway station with Capt. Claudia Delgado and will occasionally fill in for her at City Council meetings. The Ramona resident could also the Ramona Sheriff’s substation as needed if there are any large-scale emergencies or absences by Ramona’s Lt. Alejandro “Alex” Navarro, he said.
He said he requested the transfer to Poway from the Sheriff’s Communications Center in Kearny Mesa because he had a good experience working in Poway as a detective a decade ago.
“I enjoy the city and residents of Poway,” he said. “It’s a really family-oriented community. I wanted to come back to the community and make Poway as safe as possible.”
The San Diego native has had multiple assignments throughout San Diego County. He graduated from San Diego State University with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice in 2007. After he was hired by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, he completed his training at the Law Enforcement Regional Academy at Miramar Community College in July 2008.
His first job as a deputy was at the Santee Sheriff’s Station where he patrolled Santee, Lakeside and unincorporated El Cajon through 2013.
“They were three very different communities to work with,” he said. “It was a great experience. I had a lot of great people who I worked with there. It was a little busy though. I enjoyed every bit of it, learning as much as I could there.”
From there, Hebeler went to the Sheriff’s Analysis Driven Law Enforcement (SADLE) team, which used an intelligence-led policing philosophy, he said.
“We would target high-crime areas and try to identify prolific offenders and reduce crime,” he said. “We would travel from Sheriff’s jurisdictions and combine projects with other cities such as Escondido, El Cajon and La Mesa.”
When that job ended in 2017, Hebeler was a detective for a short time in Poway and then transferred to the Sheriff’s north coastal station that covered Encinitas, Solana Beach, Del Mar and Rancho Santa Fe. He was a detective at the Encinitas station through 2019, he said.
Once he was promoted to sergeant in 2019, he worked at the Ramona Sheriff’s substation for more than two years until 2022.
“In Ramona, I was the patrol sergeant so I supervised a team of deputies who were in the patrol function,” he said.
Afterward, he transferred to the Lakeside station where he supervised detectives, the Crime Suppression team, and professional staff as a detective sergeant through 2023.
“I oversaw a lot of people there and got to see a lot of the behind-the-scenes work and a lot of the istrative functions that help run the Sheriff’s office,” he said.
Next he worked with an infrastructure security group involved in emergency planning run by the Sheriff’s Emergency Services Division. The unit includes the ASTREA aerial to regional enforcement agencies and SWAT special weapons assault teams.
In that role, Hebeler said he was involved in search-and-rescue missions, including a February 2024 helicopter crash in the Kitchen Creek area. On that assignment he drove the search-and-rescue team as close to the crash site as possible and the team hiked to the crash site, he said.
“That was a unique experience,” he said. “The search-and-rescue team are some of the greatest people in the world. They volunteer their time, sometimes in the middle of the night, and they leave their day jobs to help out the community. It was very rewarding to get to work with them.”
In January this year, Hebeler was promoted to lieutenant and briefly worked at the Communications Center before transferring to the Poway station.
Hebeler said his experiences working in most of the communities and cities in the Sheriff’s jurisdiction and partnering with a variety of agencies, communities and residents will be an asset in Poway. He said he expects to continue the proactive work of emergency planning and protection that has already started.
“All we can do is prepare, work together and try to mitigate any large-scale emergencies whether they are natural disasters or man-made disasters,” he said. “Preparation is key to ensuring minimal loss of property or injury.”
