20-Man Police Team Does a Cleanup Job in Gaslamp Quarter

San Diego police Officer Christopher J. Ball plays a purposeful game as he walks his beat in the Gaslamp Quarter at night. It’s called “I See You Before You See Me.”

His head swivels. His neck cranes. His ever-moving eyes are two blocks down the street, darting over the good to settle knowingly upon the bad and ugly. Just now, he fixes his gaze momentarily on a young woman walking toward him wearing jeans and a worried look.

“That, uh, man in the green coat over there says he’s getting ready to have an epileptic seizure,” says the woman, pointing across 4th Avenue to a stained, supine transient on a bus bench.

Ball, already heading toward the bench, has seen the man--many times before.

There is the smell of cheap wine.

“Blah, blah, blah,” the man slobbers, holding out a pill-filled prescription bottle, which Ball casually examines and then returns. Ball asks the man if he’d like to visit “Detox,” the Volunteers of America Alcohol Service Center on Island Street.

“No, not really,” the man says quite clearly. He stands, smoothes his rumpled clothes and wanders away.

“So much for epileptic seizures,” Ball remarks as the man goes in search of another bus bench.

So it goes these days and nights in center city San Diego, where the Police Department on Feb. 16 deployed a special, round-the-clock tactical team of about 20 officers. Their job: primarily to combat “nuisance” crimes--public drunkenness, blocking sidewalks, vulgarity and the like.

Concentrating efforts between Kettner Boulevard, 5th Avenue and C and E streets, the high profile force already has had a profound effect on an ambitious business district that has traditionally suffered from an image of seediness and danger, officials believe.

Police commanders report that more than 3,100 arrests and citations have been logged there since mid-February. After sundown, the area abounds with officers on foot, in police cruisers, aboard horses and on zippy, motorized dirt bikes.

“There were hardly any arrests around there before this,” noted Central Division Capt. Winston Yetta. “People might think there are more of us than there are.”

City Councilman Uvaldo Martinez, whose district includes the downtown area, said preliminary statistics provided him by the Police Department show that center city robberies and assaults have declined 50% since the task force hit the streets.

“They feel they’ve also reduced the public drunkenness issue by 90%,” Martinez said. “If their figures are on point, I’m very, very happy. We have a long way to go, but this certainly is encouraging.”

Public drunkenness, along with the question of what to do with homeless transients who live downtown, has long been a sensitive issue in San Diego. Police, however, insist that the recently deployed tactical force is not intended to dislodge the area’s visible population of those who are down on their luck.

“We’re not attacking transients,” Yetta said. “It’s not the intent of this plan to address the homeless population--unless these individuals are involved in criminal activity.”

Yetta said officers have been specifically told that they are not to take action against anyone other than established troublemakers or people committing a crime.

“It’s not illegal to smell bad and need a bath,” said Lt. Roy Blackledge, the tactical force’s direct supervisor. “We’re not targeting any groups of people or any businesses. All we’re trying to do is target crime so that you can take your wife downtown to enjoy the theaters and restaurants and not worry about somebody giving you trouble.

“We want to change the public’s perception of the area. It’s probably one of the safest center areas of any big city in the country, but it has . . . well, an image problem.”

Police commanders in recent years have claimed that by regularly deploying walking teams of officers, they were able at least to keep crime rates in check in the downtown area. But when it was decided last year that the situation could be improved, Yetta drafted a 25-page tactical action plan for patroling center city.

The plan was based on the axiom that when law-abiding citizens vacate an urban area, criminals move in, Yetta said. Conversely, when law-abiders frequent an urban setting, criminals--who usually need privacy to carry out their illicit activities--tend to drift away.

“The bad element always goes to where its support system is,” Yetta said. “If you take away the environment, the bad will go away and the good will come in.”

Art Skolnik, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Council, is banking on just that. Few have scrutinized the activities of the police tactical squad more closely. Few are more laudatory of it.

“I would say from my observations that prostitution is almost completely gone from the district and pimping along with it,” Skolnik said. “Sidewalk behavior among undesirables has improved 100% because the police are no longer allowing groups to stand around on the sidewalk looking for a ‘connection.’ The police presence in general has been a very, very positive thing.”

One aspect of Yetta’s plan was to improve cooperation between downtown merchants and the police “so that when we eventually leave the area we will have a ‘maintenance force’ in place.”

At the Police Department’s behest, Gaslamp merchants in recent weeks began placing beige and blue “No Loitering” placards in the window of their businesses.

It was then discovered that the Municipal Code listed on the signs pertained only to loitering near military or strategically important facilities. Not to worry, beat officers said. They stopped writing citations for loitering and began issuing tickets for “blocking the sidewalk” and “illegal lodging.”

Skolnik said he doubts that innocent transients have been victimized in what some have described as an attempt to sweep the great unwashed from downtown San Diego.

“Those people who are homeless and who obey the law and aren’t intimidated by crowds are going to stay,” Skolnik predicted. “And that won’t be a problem. In Manhattan, when you look at a thousand people on the street, you don’t focus on the less attractive. I’m assuming that when Horton Plaza opens up, you’ll have thousands of new shoppers and diners in downtown San Diego and they’ll come south of Broadway in masses. The less attractive aren’t going to be nearly as visible.”

Nor, eventually, will the police.

Yetta said that when the center city area has been “cleaned up” satisfactorily, perhaps by late summer, the tactical force may begin concentrating its efforts in Balboa Park or other areas of San Diego.

In the meantime, Chris Ball will continue pounding his beat in the Gaslamp, issuing tickets for minor crimes while deterring those who would attempt the not-so-minor.

“You’ve got some characters down here,” said Ball, his head swiveling. “Some of them you don’t have to worry about. Some of them you do.”