Latinos Wary of INS Role in Plan to End Holiday Gunfire

Santa Ana, Jan. 1. As dawn breaks, Police Lt. David Salazar, the New Year’s Eve watch commander, writes a memo describing the events of that riotous, final night of 1986:

“It has been a steady barrage of gunfire since 10 p.m. and has built to crescendo at midnight. There is no possible way to count the incidents, and our phone system is breaking down with the number of complaints. We have bullet damage to roofs, mobile homes, vehicles and one report of a woman and child injured while sleeping in their bed. . . .

“We got so busy I ordered that we would not respond to shots-fired calls unless there was someone injured.”

Paramedics would not enter some streets, where people were reported injured by gunfire, without police escorts, Salazar wrote to his superiors. One officer barricaded herself in an apartment building laundry room until help arrived. An elderly woman was watching television when a bullet came through the roof of her mobile home and lodged in her leg. Police responding to the shooting of the mother and child had to retreat from a hostile crowd.

“It was like a war zone,” said Margaret J. Gilmore, a 40-year Santa Ana resident who spent much of New Year’s Eve huddled under her dining room table, afraid that one of the bullets would whiz through her roof. “I would really just like to go away on the holidays, but I think it’s just terrible that you have to leave your own house.”

Random gunfire on holidays and weekends in Santa Ana has become a “new plague” that has caused “property damage, physical injury, everything short of death,” interim Police Chief Eugene B. Hansen said.

This year, before someone does get killed, police hope to stop it. Two weeks ago, the Santa Ana City Council approved a program in concept that calls for a massive educational campaign, targeted at the Latino community, as well as increased enforcement by squads of specially trained officers on the worst holidays: Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Fourth of July, Cinco de Mayo and Mexican Independence Day (Sept. 16).

But the plan to turn illegal aliens arrested for gun possession over to the U.S Immigration and Naturalization Service has caused some concern in the Latino community.

Some residents can remember revelers firing guns many years ago. But most agree that the problem has become acute in the last four or five years--a period in which large numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans have immigrated illegally to the United States and settled in Santa Ana.

“How bad was it? Are you kidding? It was like Korea,” said Robert Evans about last New Year’s Eve. A central Santa Ana resident and block captain with the Police Department’s community policing program, Evans collected about 30 bullets and shells during a walk around his neighborhood after the holiday.

The Police Department’s Hispanic affairs officer, Jose Vargas, attributes some of the gunfire to immigrants from rural areas who have not adjusted to urban life. But others in the Police Department say that many who shoot off guns in celebration might also use them to commit violent crimes.

“Whether it is a cultural tradition or not, they’ve got to recognize the consequences,” said Santa Ana City Council member John Acosta, who along with Councilman Miguel Pulido helped police formulate the program.

Police hope that bilingual flyers, public service announcements on Spanish-language television and videotapes shown at schools and neighborhood meetings will alert residents to the dangers of firing guns in urban areas--and to the danger of getting caught.

While firing a weapon within the city limits is only a misdemeanor, the mere possession of a gun by an illegal alien is a violation of federal law. As part of the enforcement program, Santa Ana police will turn over to federal immigration and firearms authorities those suspects they believe to be illegal aliens for prosecution on the felony charge and possible deportation.

But anyone, not just illegal aliens, caught by the special police unit while firing a gun will have an unpleasant holiday.

About 20 officers dressed in full body armor, will patrol areas where gunfire is expected to be heavy and “will take prisoners where it can be safely done so by both the officers and the neighborhood,” Hansen told the City Council when he presented the program at a recent meeting.

“The likelihood of getting into a firefight with a drunk who has a firearm is intense,” he said. “We will be using certain tactics that are somewhat unconventional, as far as using high-intensity lighting . . . (and) illuminating the entire area that we will be saturating.”

Unusual Cooperation

The announced plan to turn illegal aliens over to the INS is an unusual, if not unprecedented, example of cooperation between Santa Ana police and the INS, and it has met with some resistance.

Since former Police Chief Raymond C. Davis (who retired Friday) announced in 1983 that Santa Ana police would not assist immigration authorities on sweeps of street corners and neighborhoods, the two agencies often have been at odds.

They did work together, however, during the Police Department’s widely publicized 1985 program dubbed SWAT HYPES, acronyms for “Special Weapons and Tactics” and “High Yield Police Enmforcement Services.” The program was aimed at reducing street crime and drug trafficking. Because police statistics showed that a high percentage of those arrested for both activities were illegal aliens, immigration agents accompanied police officers as they raided crime-ridden bars and drug houses, making hundreds of arrests and apprehending scores of illegal aliens.

Details of the new cooperative effort are still being worked out, Santa Ana Police Lt. Robert Chavez said, including the important question of whether INS agents and immigration agents will ride together in patrol cars.

Latino community leaders--echoing one of the key arguments behind Davis’ original policy of non-cooperation with the INS--say that any visible cooperation between the two agencies will sow distrust of the police among illegal aliens, who will be even more reluctant to report crimes.

One concern of Latinos has been that INS agents might arrest any undocumented person who happens to be present when a gun is fired. During SWAT HYPES, illegal aliens found in a house where drugs were being sold were arrested. But Mike Flynn, INS investigations supervisor in Orange County, said, “That is not the plan at all. . . . There will be no attempt to make apprehensions beyond those people who were using firearms.”

Concerns About Policy

Still, the program’s announcement, coming at the same time as Davis’ departure, has caused some concern among Latinos that the city’s aloof stance toward the INS--and possibly even its policy on street sweeps--might change.

“This is a slight crack in the policy,” said Sam Romero, a longtime community activist in one of the city’s oldest Latino neighborhoods, Barrio Logan. “I’m really bothered by the shooting, too . . . but I worry about seeing an INS officer; the general public quickly becomes wary of the police.”

Davis had earned the confidence of the Latino community, and while Hansen has so far given no indication of making an about-face in policy, Latinos are anxious to see just what direction he, and whoever is named chief later this year, will take, Romero said.

Neither Hansen nor Davis would be interviewed. Chavez, however, said the program represents “a slight lean to the right in regard to operations (with the INS) . . . but no change in our policy. . . . We have always worked with the INS regarding criminal cases. . . . We do not, and still will not participate in sweeps with the INS.”

Councilman Acosta agreed that the city was not likely to abandon its hands-off policy regarding INS sweeps. But, Acosta said, “a change in tone is in order. . . . I look for an improvement in the relationship (between Santa Ana and the INS).”

Mayor Dan Young, who said that Davis supported the new program to stop holiday gunplay, said that the council has not discussed taking a new tack toward the INS with a new police administration. But he left open the possibility for change in the near future. “Any change in our cooperation or lack thereof with the INS is something the new chief will have to take a look at in conjunction with the city manager and the City Council,” Young said.

And in a reply to one angry resident, who wrote an 11-page letter to the mayor outlining his concerns with the city’s illegal alien population, Young wrote that illegal aliens are “the most potent and difficult issue we face today in our city. . . . Times are changing rapidly . . . and accompanying these changes will be changes in our current policy.”

Times staff writer Nancy Wride contributed to this story.