Santa Ana Police Get Up Close and Personal : New Approach to Law Enforcement Scraps ‘Aloofness’ for Community Involvement

It was Wednesday. Santa Ana Police Sgt. Bill Scheer and Officer Ron Moreno were working the day watch on foot patrol, strolling along a tree-lined residential street near the city’s downtown.

There wasn’t much going on, but, said Scheer, in foot patrol there often isn’t very much of what the traditional street cop would call action. Actually, that’s the point.

The style of policing in Santa Ana--where officers routinely rub elbows with citizens and work intensively at crime prevention and community relations--could not be further from the detached aloofness that brought fame to the Los Angeles Police Department in TV’s “Dragnet” and has, in some ways, defined the LAPD’s public image since.

But though Scheer and Moreno are competent at such traditional street-cop diversions as jamming junkies and busting bad guys, they are an integral part of a new approach to policing that has brought the Santa Ana Police Department a reputation as the nation’s most progressive and innovative local law enforcement agency.

‘Thin Blue Line’

Alternately called “community-oriented” or “problem-oriented” policing, this philosophy essentially dismisses the traditional police concept that there is a “thin blue line”--the police department--operating as a third-party force trying to separate good and evil.

Scrapped in this approach are traditional beliefs that a police officer’s only friend is another officer and that a police life, when threatened, has some special, extra value above and beyond any other threatened life.

In community-oriented law enforcement--directed in Santa Ana by Police Chief Ray Davis--the tenets of policing are changed.

The police department becomes an agency whose mission is determined by what the community wants from its police. Police priorities mirror community priorities. The thin blue line is erased.

There aren’t many truly new ideas in policing--foot patrol, for instance, existed long before the automobile--but community-oriented law enforcement moves ahead by turning back to some concepts abandoned when officers stopped pounding the beat and started driving it. Foot, horse and bike patrols are part of this, but so are storefront community centers and the growing use of paraprofessional civilian police service officers to take over such duties as traffic-accident investigation and some criminal investigation, freeing the more expensive, fully sworn police officers to concentrate on crime priorities set by the community.

Book Spotlights Leaders

Departments that have adopted this new attitude become a part of what UC Berkeley criminologist and police expert Jerome Skolnick has dubbed “The New Blue Line,” the title of his new book. Published a few weeks ago by the Free Press division of Macmillan Inc., the book spotlights six leaders in this new trend of law enforcement. Skolnick’s brightest example: Santa Ana.

Skolnick’s is only the latest of a handful of books and articles in professional publications in the last five years that have begun to identify what is happening.

Actually, say Skolnick and other experts in this new type of law enforcement, Santa Ana heads a consensus list of exceptional police departments that includes Oakland, San Jose, Houston, Denver, Detroit, Flint, Mich., Newport News, Va., Baltimore County, Md., Madison, Wis. and Newark, N.J.

This list does not include the LAPD, which, experts in this emerging police philosophy agree, pioneered some of the concepts on which community-oriented policing relies, but lost its momentum as a national example of police innovation perhaps as long as a decade ago. The management of LAPD takes sharp issue with such criticism.

West Called Progressive

Police departments perceived as exceptionally progressive by this cross section of authors also transcends a traditional split in style that divides policing in the West from the way the profession is practiced in other parts of the country. Western departments--particularly California agencies--have been generally free of the graft and corruption that pervades many Midwestern and Eastern departments.

Price to Pay

But the hygiene is achieved at a price, said George Hart, Oakland’s police chief. Western departments, said Skolnick and Hart, have a reputation for being coldly detached from their duties, cultivating the image of seasoned professionals who require little in the way of assistance from the citizens they protect.

Hart still talks about a visit paid to Oakland around 1974 by a team of New York police officers who spent six months looking at the way Oakland and other Western departments operated. Hart said the New Yorkers left impressed with the skilled, procedure-oriented agencies they had seen. “But they said that having seen it, they weren’t at all sure they wanted it for themselves,” Hart said.

“I said, ‘Why?’ And they said, ‘You’re all very good. You do a good, efficient job, but you all stand back from people. You’re all very aloof.’ They said we seemed to be telling people, ‘Don’t touch me. I’m the pro.’ The next day (after the New Yorkers had left), we assembled, a bunch of us, because we obviously had to listen to what they said. They were very good people. And we concluded, in short order, that they were entirely correct. We had to do something about that.”

Santa Ana’s New Look

The transformation in Santa Ana has embodied much of the same philosophical evolution.

It is this transformation that had led Scheer and Moreno to the quiet, tree-lined streets. They were attired in the standard summer foot patrol uniform of dark-blue walking shorts, dark-blue polo shirt with “POLICE” in large white letters across the back, running shoes, radio, night stick, gun and handcuffs.

On a corner, the two officers stopped to chat for a few minutes with a couple of older women. The conversation followed a familiar line. They talked about neighborhood crime prevention. The women laced their gratitude that foot officers were in the area with observations like, “It used to be so lovely here” and, “You can’t trust people anymore because you have new people who move into the neighborhood.”

But there would come an equally anticipated payoff. The two women told Scheer and Moreno about a nearby vacant house that was for sale. One woman said she had heard people inside the morning before. Scaling a fence and peering through the windows, Scheer and Moreno would take careful note of which windows in the house were open and which doors unlocked.

In a few hours or a couple of days they would recheck it, looking for signs of the abnormal--a state that cannot be detected if an officer does not know what normal is to begin with--suspecting the house might become a drop-off point for daytime house burglars wanting to hide stolen property or a haven for drug abusers.

Scheer and Moreno said they expected to pick up information like that after they got to the neighborhood, parked their unmarked patrol car and started walking their carefully mapped-out route. The two officers are part of an intricate structure that has divided Santa Ana--which in terms of population, area and the size of its police force of 308 sworn officers is roughly equivalent to one LAPD division--into eight districts, each served by its own police team. (Los Angeles has 3.1 million residents; Santa Ana, 224,000.)

Using a crime-incidence data base, an officer charged with monitoring such things had identified a portion of the neighborhood Scheer and Moreno had decided to work heavily for at least four weeks. The problem: five daytime residential burglaries over a couple of weeks, signaling the possible start of a trend.

Driving around before getting down to pounding the pavement, Scheer glanced occasionally at some handwritten work sheets on the seat next to him. Often, he took note of vehicles like a brown Datsun pickup parked in a driveway. Preparation for this Wednesday had already alerted him that the Datsun might belong to a burglary suspect.

The two foot patrol officers had the luxury of being able to devote this much attention to what other police agencies might call a small-time problem because of Santa Ana’s unique structure. Forty-two percent of the Police Department’s employees are civilians--the largest proportion of any urban U.S. police agency, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based agency that helps police chiefs solve the special problems of urban policing.

(Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates is the only chief of a city of 150,000 residents or more who has declined to join the forum. Gates, according to former Newport News Chief Darrel Stephens, who heads the group, has said Gates has philosophical differences with the organization that preclude his becoming a part of it. Stephens said Gates has never spelled out those differences and Gates was not available to discuss them.)

Comparisons Are Difficult

The extent to which police innovation changes the incidence of crime or the success in solving crimes remains unknown. According to the New York-based Police Foundation, comparisons of police agencies to establish comparative effectiveness simply cannot be made. That is because, a foundation spokesman said, police departments are like the localities that employ them--so different that deciding whether one is better than another in terms of effectiveness is essentially impossible.

Crime rates and clearance rates, the percentage of crimes said to have been solved, don’t offer a meaningful comparison, according to the foundation, Skolnick and other police experts. Skolnick said such intangibles as crime prevention and the effect of a police department on a community’s fear of crime and sense of collective security make ranking police departments even more difficult.

“The concept of police innovation is difficult to define,” said Stephens. “The nation’s police departments are local organizations governed by policies from local city councils and state laws. Because of that, they develop differently, even though they provide most of the same basic services.

“We went through some years in law enforcement where, through the automobile and a number of other things, there has been a kind of pulling apart from the police department and the community the department serves. Some of the more progressive and innovative organizations are reorienting themselves toward being responsive to community needs and developing stronger relationships with (their) communities, including neighborhood and business people.”

Greater Extremes

Perceptions of how to accomplish these goals differ markedly, said Stephens, and perhaps nowhere has the concept been taken to greater extremes than in Santa Ana.

Central to the Santa Ana approach are 50 police service representatives who wear regular blue uniforms minus the gun and night stick. They are not sworn officers and they earn several thousand dollars a year less than their gun-toting colleagues.

The PSOs, as they are called, have taken over such duties as manning front desks at police installations, taking routine reports of minor crimes, investigating all traffic accidents in the city, conducting most crime-scene technical investigations, running the communications center, acting as detectives in investigations of certain nonviolent crimes like bad-check writing, and working on a daily basis with community groups.

By contrast, the LAPD, which pioneered not just the concept of civilianization of the force but the team approach Santa Ana has refined, is only 30% civilianized. Attempts to increase that proportion have been futile and promise to remain so, according to Los Angeles Asst. Chief David Dotson.

More than in most complex organizations, said Skolnick in an interview in Berkeley, police departments acquire their sense of direction and philosophy from their chiefs. Skolnick’s new book identifies the six agencies--Santa Ana, Oakland, Houston, Denver, Detroit and Newark, N.J.--as exceptionally progressive and innovative. All have undergone sweeping reform in the last 10 to 15 years, either by appointment of a new chief from outside the department or promotion of someone from within who was not associated with the previous power structure.

This, alone, may be an issue largely responsible for Los Angeles’ inability to make any of these experts’ lists of top police departments today. The LAPD has no history of seeking outside leadership, and the result, said Skolnick and Hart, is a department that established itself as the originator of dozens of progressive police concepts but stopped dead in its tracks about 10 years ago, about the time Gates was named chief.

LAPD Rankled

“I think the situation (in LAPD now) represents the kind of imagery of the old style of macho policing,” said Skolnick. “They have a different style (from today’s progressive departments). They seem to say, ‘We don’t need that stuff. We don’t need change. We’re happy the way we are.’ ”

The comments seemed to rankle top LAPD commanders, including Dotson. “I don’t think we have stagnated in the last 10 years,” Dotson said. “You have to understand that innovation is within the context that there are now a whole lot of new ideas in the world. We pioneered many of the concepts under discussion (in Skolnick’s book).”

But Dotson said that at least some of the major innovations that the LAPD originated have been scaled back or eliminated as a result of pressures imposed on city finances beginning in the early 1970s and magnified by passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. Effectively gone, said Dotson, is a once-promising experiment with team policing--dividing the city into areas where low-level police supervisors can initiate their own innovative responses to local problems.

“We got to the point that we couldn’t afford the benefits of team policing because we couldn’t make sure it was working to the benefit of the people,” Dotson said. “But (our) responsiveness to the community has suffered.”

In 1973, Santa Ana decided to go outside its existing power structure amid concern among businessmen and residents that the Santa Ana Police Department had become little more than an inherently racist agency inclined, as Skolnick and co-author David Bayley said in their new book, to do little more than “kick ass and take names.”

Relations between the police and minority groups in Santa Ana were almost nonexistent and, even then, it was becoming clear that Santa Ana would eventually become what it is today: a city with a predominantly Hispanic population that serves as the seat of one of the most politically conservative counties in the United States.

To defuse the crisis, city leaders hired Davis, who was chief of police in Walnut Creek near San Francisco but had broken into law enforcement in Fullerton. Skolnick describes Davis’ appearance this way: “Seated behind a desk in short-sleeve shirt, tattoos showing on his forearms, he seems type-cast to play a redneck Southern sheriff.”

Runs a Tight Ship

But what Santa Ana got was not what the packaging might suggest. Davis turned out to be an enlightened law enforcement philosopher who runs a tight ship.

“There are many people who don’t agree with my philosophies about community involvement and our responsibilities to service the entire population, particularly the majority community, which happens to be Hispanic,” said Davis. “They (even some of his own officers) don’t like to hear me say ‘This is a Hispanic city and you people better wake up to it.’

“If you’re the Police Department in Salt Lake City, you are going to have a Mormon flavor to your service. I don’t care what anybody says. If you’re in the Bible Belt in the South, you cannot turn your eyes to topless dancers.

“But the police chief has to make the commitment to the community to do something. He has to place himself in harm’s way. He has to be willing to take some risks. The chief is not there to serve his troops (the police officers themselves). He has to convince the troops that they are here to serve the community. A lot of them don’t like it.”

This approach has been responsible for the greatest amount of press Davis has received--occasioned by his unyielding refusal to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service sweeps for illegal aliens. “To some extent, we do things that cause police officers to turn over in their graves,” Davis said. “Here we are making block captains (in a police neighborhood protection program) of people who are here illegally.

“We do not endorse people breaking the laws on our border. It’s a national disgrace, but once they get here, we have the problem and we have to deal with it. They are trying to evolve into a new life and they have as many fears in their apartment complexes as I do and they are entitled to the same kind of service.

“There are some people in the Hispanic community who don’t like us, but there is no police department of our size and cultural mix that has better support from the community than we do. (That) is because (of the attitudes) of many of our officers and, in some cases, despite some of the officers. We have a percentage of the thin-blue-line mentality. These are people who go out on their shift thinking they’re going to be assassinated and that the only friend they have is another policeman. It’s terrible.”

Significant Political Risk

Though Davis said he thinks it is inappropriate for a police chief to harbor ambitions for elective political office, he, Skolnick and George Hart, Oakland’s chief, agreed a chief must be prepared to take significant political risk in order to achieve whatever goals he perceives appropriate in a community.

Davis describes with some amusement a City Council meeting several years ago when he brazenly packed a spectator area with about 200 block captains. The objective: to force the city to initiate a system of user fees and other revenue sources as an alternative to massive police cutbacks shortly before passage of Proposition 13.

“They (City Council members) knew what I was doing. I had to take the position that that (city revenues) is your problem, buddy. And this (law enforcement and crime prevention) are mine.”

“All of this is part of the paradox of Ray Davis,” said Skolnick. “He is the police chief of the capital city of the most conservative county in the world. Why do you have the most progressive police chief in the country in such a county? It’s a very interesting question.

“Why they got him, I’m not so sure. How he manages is that he heads this progressive program and it saves the city money.”

Skolnick said he was working on an article for a professional journal when he first heard about Davis and, when he got to know more about Santa Ana, decided that not just that department but the entire drift in policing toward greater reliance on communities warranted a far more extensive approach.

“The one thing police departments are around to do--and everybody has to accept this--is they are there to protect property and persons and, therefore, they (police departments) must be very Establishment groups,” Skolnick said. “But one thing that (progressive) police departments have discovered, in Santa Ana, Oakland and elsewhere, is that they can lose some of their simple-minded prejudices.

“In Oakland, for instance, they (street officers) honestly discovered that the black community wants police protection. They don’t want their purses snatched or their houses burglarized. In this process, minority group members are the kind of people police come to genuinely see as human beings.”

Viewed With Suspicion

That grasping such a concept is seen as innovative, is as much a measure of the traditionalism that pervades police work, said Skolnick and Herman Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin professor of law and leading police observer who originated the term “problem-oriented policing.” Goldstein said police work is a profession in which any change or pressure to rely on citizens is generally viewed with suspicion by police officers and, all too often, their chiefs.

In the handful of cities venturing into community-oriented or problem-oriented police philosophy, however, said Goldstein, change is acquiring some momentum. “I think the most significant thing going on today in the field is the type of experiments described in (Skolnick’s book),” Goldstein said in a telephone interview from Madison, Wis.

“These experiments are essentially efforts that are being tried in the light of departments having found that what police have done in the past has been extremely limited in its value. What this variety of new approaches has in common is that most of them depend on developing new lines (of communication and identification) with the community.”

In some cities, said Hart, one of the key missions of the police is to try to beat down the reputations acquired by cities like Oakland, Newark and Detroit as being unacceptably and unavoidably dangerous. For Oakland, in particular, said Hart, the big problem has been “the perception of crime . . . the reputation of crime . . . the belief among too many people that if you go out on the streets of Oakland, you are in imminent danger because the person standing next to you, probably black, will kill you. It’s not true.

“But there are some cities in the U.S. that have that reputation and we’re one of them. And that’s too damned bad.”

In Oakland, the tone of policing is dictated by a detailed memorandum drafted by Hart nearly a decade ago that defines an amorphous concept the chief calls “beat health.” It holds that a patrol officer is responsible for far more of the general welfare of the territory to which he is assigned than simply responding to radio calls in a cruiser.

“Certainly the workload of modern policing precludes a return to the ‘old days,’ ” notes a training memorandum to which every Oakland officer is required to adhere. “But it is possible to recapture some of the desirable attributes. By doing so, the police can again become close to the community they serve.

“Many of the activities which come under the heading of beat health were performed as a manner of course when patrolmen knew the residents of their beats. The fact that beat health activities atrophied when the patrol car became a necessity is perhaps natural--something which happened so slowly over a long period of time as not to have been noticed.

A Lot of ‘Small Things’

“Nevertheless, the results have become unmistakably clear throughout the nation and the necessity of remedying the damage is obvious and compelling. Beat health involves what appears to be an endless number of small things.”

Oakland officers are counseled to read weekly newspapers in the neighborhoods they patrol. They are directed to read bulletin boards at community centers, acquaint themselves with the addresses of doctors’ offices, refer to other city agencies such problems as trash-strewn lots or sidewalks ankle deep in broken glass and get out of their cars to break away tree branches that may be obstructing a traffic signal. All of this, the concept holds, is important to establishing a working link between the police and the community.

“We had gotten off into doing other things,” Hart said in an interview in his office at Oakland police headquarters. “We needed to just do what we knew how to do and to know what the community tells us they need and want.

“They want cops who they can see. They want timely response. They want police officers in the neighborhoods attending to beat problems. They want police officers who will wonder and try to find out why that window has been broken out.”