Simi Valley: The Land That Crime Forgot

It’s 10 a.m. when the call comes in: A boy is shooting a BB gun out his second-floor bedroom window. Simi Valley Police Officer John Haffart shifts his black-and-white into gear and rolls to the scene.

Once there, Haffart chats with the boy’s mother inside the family’s suburban tract home. Ten minutes later, he emerges, a smile on his face. Mission accomplished.

The boy was told not to shoot his BB gun out the window again, and his mother promised to keep a closer eye on him.

Just another day in the life of a cop in one of America’s most crime-free cities.

For a Simi Valley police officer, professional satisfaction comes not from the adrenaline rush of high-speed chases and drive-by shootings but more often from helping resolve neighborhood disputes and other minor offenses.

“If you’re looking to arrest bad guys 90% of the time, this isn’t the place for you,” said Simi Valley Officer Richard Widdington, who transferred to the department three years ago from the Los Angeles Police Department.

A spot on the Simi Valley police force has long been coveted by experienced cops seeking refuge from larger and more demanding agencies throughout Southern California.

Widdington transferred to Simi Valley after 6 1/2 years with the LAPD. He hadn’t thought about leaving until a friend told him about a department that enjoyed wide community support, competitive salaries, modern equipment and a type of police work far different from the grueling big city.

“In the beginning, the slower pace took a lot of getting used to,” Widdington said. “But you have more time to spend with individual people. You get to know people on a one-to-one basis. Here we have the time and the size to take care of problems in a sufficient manner.”

About half the department’s 140 sworn police officers transferred from other agencies, while the remainder arrived as rookies straight from the police academy, although the ratio changes every year, said Chief Mark Layhew, a 28-year veteran of the force.

The Ventura County suburb is also home to many police officers, sheriff’s deputies and FBI agents who work throughout the region. According to 2000 census figures, 1,357 residents, or 2% of those over the age of 16 who are employed, work in law enforcement-related fields, including firefighting and protective services.

This may be another reason Simi Valley and its neighbor, Thousand Oaks, have consistently ranked among the safest cities in the nation, according to FBI and U.S. census data.

Layhew, who runs his department on a $21-million annual budget, said there were three key ingredients to creating and maintaining a safe city: a proactive police department, a supportive municipal government and cooperative residents. If just one of these elements is missing, the system will not work, he said.

In fact, an alert resident was responsible for helping officers capture two Moorpark gang members who allegedly robbed two people at knifepoint Friday night, police said.

The unidentified resident saw the suspects acting suspiciously at a local park and followed them, calling police on his cell phone. Within seconds, officers swooped into an area near Los Angeles and Orchid avenues and made the arrests.

Augusto Chapa, 20, and Adolfo Troncoso, 19, were being held on suspicion of robbing two men in separate locations and beating one of them. A third suspect remains at large.

“If you aren’t responsive, you aren’t going to get community members to pick up the phone and call,” Layhew said. “My philosophy is, we’re in the customer service business and the service we are providing is public safety.”

Although felony assaults jumped nearly 13% in 2002, and thefts by about 6%, the crime rate in Simi Valley remained among the lowest in the department’s history. A crime rate is a ratio of population to crimes reported by police agencies to the FBI in seven categories -- homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft and auto theft.

Police reported 1,776 serious crimes last year, down from a peak of 3,556 in 1992. The rate of criminal offenses in Simi Valley last year was about 15 per thousand residents, compared with 22 per thousand for all of Ventura County.

The California crime rate was about 39 offenses per thousand residents and the U.S. was nearly 42 per thousand.

There were no homicides in Simi Valley last year, but there were seven rapes and 26 robberies.

The most frequent crime that occurs in town is malicious mischief, which runs the gamut from breaking a neighbor’s lawn sprinkler to pushing over a mailbox. Last year, there were 1,634 such incidents of misdemeanor vandalism.

But as Layhew acknowledges, police cannot take all the credit for the low crime rate. The city’s socioeconomic status -- the median household income is $70,000 and a quarter of the population is college-educated -- also plays a part, experts say.

“Police departments rarely have much to do with a crime rate,” said Paul Jesilow, a professor in the department of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. “There’s tons of evidence that shows police don’t have that kind of impact. Changes in the economics of society, whether it’s going up or down, does more to drive the crime rate. The police can do things, but it has much more to do with improving the community in the long run.”

Indeed, with such a low crime rate, Simi Valley police often find themselves dealing more with quality-of-life issues.

“We do a lot of counseling, explaining laws and rules and expectations,” said Officer Steven Shorts, a former Los Angeles park ranger who transferred to the department two years ago.

“We might get a call from someone saying their 3-month-old kid is trying to get to sleep and the neighbors are playing their music too loud. Ninety-eight percent of the time, there’s never a problem. We all love it. We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

During a Friday night shift in July, Shorts responded to two calls in three hours: firecrackers set off in a city park and a car with a flat tire stranded in the middle of Cochran Avenue. In addition, he took a police report at the station from a 16-year-old girl who was punched in the eye the previous night by another girl at the local bowling alley.

He was lucky. He didn’t have to respond to a call heard over the police radio from a woman threatening to cut down a neighbor’s basketball net.

“We really haven’t had to use the police too much,” said Mark Phillips, a 23-year resident of Simi Valley and father of the girl with the shiner. “They’re doing something right because there’s not too much going on here. It’s boring.”

Besides barroom brawls, many of the calls received on weekend nights involve domestic disputes, but not so much the violent kind, said senior dispatcher Carol Kinney. They run more along the lines of couples fighting over whose turn it is to take the dog for a walk.

The department receives about 100 calls a day, and seven out of 10 are usually taken care of over the telephone by a dispatcher sitting at headquarters on Alamo Street, Kinney said. The response time for an emergency call averages 3.7 minutes and for a nonemergency 12.4 minutes. Simi Valley residents say they appreciate the quick reaction.

“If you ever have a problem, all you have to do is make a call and they’re here,” said Ken Martin, a former deputy with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department who has lived in Simi Valley for 22 years.

But for all its success at community policing, the Simi Valley Police Department was criticized for being slow to handle a major crime that occurred in its own backyard.

It took authorities five years to capture a serial rapist responsible for a dozen sexual assaults in Simi Valley between 1996 and 2001.

Vincent Sanchez, a Simi Valley construction worker, was eventually arrested by the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department after his roommates turned him in, but not before he raped and killed 20-year-old Megan Barroso, a student at Moorpark College.

For five years Sanchez slipped into the homes of young women and sexually assaulted them at knifepoint. Some he raped in their beds. Others he kidnapped and raped elsewhere.

The series of sex crimes frustrated Simi Valley police. Rewards were offered, Simi Valley police detectives consulted an FBI profiler and officers collected saliva samples from men they arrested in hopes of finding a DNA match to evidence recovered from rape victims.

The police chief at the time, Randy Adams, now the chief in Glendale, said that Sanchez never came to their attention because he had never been convicted of a sex crime before and forced to provide a DNA sample.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Adams said after Sanchez was arrested. “It seems like it would be easy to find somebody, but a criminal doesn’t walk around with a sign saying, ‘I’m a serial murderer.’ ”

Layhew said he doesn’t worry that his officers and 13 detectives will lose their edge, noting that they recently captured two suspects on the Ronald Reagan Freeway who were wanted for bank robbery.

Said Layhew, “Crime still comes up with sufficient frequency that we don’t lose our skills.”