It’s about 6 a.m. and Deputy Justin Barba and the South Orange County Homeless Outreach Team are responding to a report of suspicious person in Mission Viejo.

He finds a resident walking her dog but nothing else. Up on the ridge, the coast is clear.

It might look like an episode of “Cops,” but there’s no TV in this reality. These are the people doing the job that few even know exists. They serve both society and the forgotten members of it as part of their job.

“It’s a lot to deal with because we have to help, we have to enforce," Barba said.

The H.O.T. team, as they’re called, move to a dry creek bed off the 5 Freeway near the border of Mission Viejo and Laguna Niguel. It’s hard to imagine that anything is here, but the team enters a world filled with disguarded items.

The deputies know the way in, and it's filled with flat screen TVs, stolen tools, and pieces of bikes. The deputies say the people that the people who live here knew they were coming. Going into areas like this is part of the job. The outreach team spends the majority of their team entering areas like this, offering people experiencing homelessness a chance to get back into society by offering them resources and helping to get find a bed in local shelters.

According to a 2017 University of California, Irvine, study, the vast majority of the nearly 5,000 people experiencing homelessness in Orange County have lived here for over 10 years.

“They point out, 'I used to live on that street over there. And I lived there for 20 years,' or 'I raised a family there,' and now they’re just by themselves. There is that deep connection, and I understand it. But to me, it’s a balance and weighment of okay, that’s gone,” says Barba.

Back at the station, Miro Salva can’t hold back the tears as she tells the officers about her daughter kicking her and Salva's young son out of her home. If  not for Chaney, Salva wouldn’t know where to turn. She’s staying at a shelter now and has a job interview coming up.

“Unfortunately I have had situations in the past where we’ve had the police at our home through domestic violence and what not, so it left me feeling a little uneasy with cops, and luckily Deputy Chaney has made me change my mind about that. There are cops that care,” she says.

The calls will keep coming in and people will always be homeless, but all five deputies on this team chose this role - They’re here to enforce the laws, but equally to help get people back on their feet.

“That whole thing of showing someone who truly needed help and appreciates it,  that’s what I do this for,” Barba says.