Santa Ana Drug Sweep Nets 200 People, 36 Cars : Drug Scene Closes In on a Street and Its People

Jose Luis Rodriguez sits on the dirty concrete steps of a Santa Ana apartment building, sometimes glancing at a dogeared Mexican comic book, but mostly just hanging out.

It is slow but steady, this waiting, this scoping, this taking it all in.

“Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of drugs here,” Rodriguez says, almost drawls. “A lot of it. Usually starts around 7 in the morning and just keeps going.”

Rodriguez doesn’t live here, on this part of Walnut Street between Pacific Avenue and Bristol Street pockmarked with litter and graffiti, but he knows it well. He and scores of others, some friends, some just faces, mingle with the Latino residents almost daily. They can tell you who lives where and who knows what.

As Rodriguez talks, squinting up at a visitor from his stairway vantage point, his friend, John Manuel Silva, runs up to a red pickup truck with its engine idling in the middle of the street.

Nothing unusual, happens all the time. But then there is a break in the seemingly endless routine.

Santa Ana Police Officer Tony Duran jumps out of nowhere to grab Silva. He twists his hands behind his back and frisks him while holding him steady

against a wall.

“He threw it in the bushes! He threw it in the bushes!” Victor Gonzalez, at 11 years old already used to the drill, tells a visitor.

But no one pays much attention. Those things, Duran explains, usually take care of themselves.

“By now, somebody else will have picked it up,” Duran says of the missing “dime bag,” a $10 bag of marijuana. “This is just a cat-and-mouse game. You’ve got to be quicker than them.”

This time, Duran lost and Silva walked. No drugs were found, and Silva, 21, says he’s done nothing wrong.

“So you just run up to trucks and say, ‘What do you want?’ ” Duran taunts Silva. “Why do you do that, John? Why do you do that, John?”

Venting Frustration

But Duran’s just venting frustration. Silva, who says he has been arrested on drug charges before, bows his head without answering.

“I know him,” Duran says of Silva. “He’ll be back.”

Despite what the Santa Ana Police Department calls its Operation Customer Service, a newly enacted zero tolerance policy for drug buyers and sellers, residents and regulars of this part of Walnut Street say they don’t believe the area will be cleaned up anytime soon.

They say that it is just a matter of days before those arrested in a weekend sweep here are back in the neighborhood, buying and selling as usual.

Rodriguez, 23, adds that some of his friends arrested over the weekend, found to be in the country illegally, were deported to Tijuana.

“Yeah, but they’re already back,” he says with a grin. “After a little while, they’ll be back around here.”

Not far from where Rodriguez spoke, housewife Maria del Refugio Gutierrez, spoke from behind a wrought iron fence with a neighbor.

“The thing that gets me is that everybody thinks that just because we live here, we are like them,” she says with a sweeping motion of her arm that takes in the entire street.

“You’re afraid to go to the store, to go out, to do anything,” she adds. “And the police, they seem to be ignorant. They’ll come, make a few arrests and then, Wham! Soon as they leave, things just start breaking out.”

Manuel Silva, 31, no relation to John, stands holding his 10-month-old daughter, Eva, as Gutierrez goes on. He nods. He knows what she is talking about because he has lived it as well.

“We feel in danger here,” he says of himself, his wife and three children. “You walk outside, and they (the drug dealers) will give you a look, like we’re going to turn them in. But we can’t do anything because we live here.

“If I were alone, I could go up to them and say, ‘You know what? I don’t like you to sit on top of my car.’ But then the next thing you know, they’ll steal your radio, or your tire. It’s better that I stay quiet. We are all afraid.”

Rosa Tiscareno, who lives in a ground-floor apartment with her daughter, two grandchildren and great-grandson, says that she has told the drug dealers not to litter the area with their discarded needles and bottles.

“But they pay no attention to me,” she says. “The kids come by and they pick these things up.”

Standing in the apartment doorway, one need only glance to the side to see one of the dirty plastic syringes of which Tiscareno spoke.

Juana Tiscareno says that her 3-year-old nephew, Jesus Tiscareno, asked her the other day what coca , the Spanish slang word for cocaine, meant.

“Then he started saying that he wanted it,” she says.

Housewife Maria Castro, 33, says that after eight years in the apartment complex she and her husband and three children will soon be moving elsewhere.

“By the grace of God and because of all my husband’s sacrifices, his long hours of work, we can leave,” she says. “And I would hope that others, too, may be able to leave.”

Castro, like the other parents of children who seem to be peering out from windows, doors and alleyways everywhere, says that what concerns her most about Walnut Street is the bad influence on her children.

“The other day, I was walking back here with her,” Castro says as she glances at her 8-year-old daughter, Silvia. “And there we see one of them, shooting up, right here! Right here!

“They are here at all hours. There are all types. Latins, blacks, and I hope I don’t offend you, even (white) Americans.”

But Castro suddenly lowers her voice as a young Latino man walks a few feet from where she spoke in the alley behind the apartment building.

“He’s one of them,” she whispers to a visitor.

No, Castro says, she hasn’t taken her concerns to police.

“The police see everything. They know what is going on,” she says. “This is a barrio. We live here. We have to face it, face them, everyday.”

But the concerns of people like Castro are bringing some changes.

After residents complained to the building owner about drug users shooting up in the laundry room and occasionally running into apartments when police come, Johnny Song, of J & J Welding Co. was measuring the building Monday for a new wrought iron fence.