Balboa Park Under Siege : Assaults, Drug Deals and Burglaries on Rise in Home of San Diego Zoo

When Teri Poteet wants to see some action, she doesn’t turn on the television or go to the movies. All she has to do is gaze out the window of her second-floor apartment, which overlooks the twisting trees and idyllic terrain of Balboa Park.

“I see drug deals constantly,” said Poteet, resident manager of the 30-unit apartment building at 6th Avenue and Elm Street. “Gary (her fiance) and I, we watch it like we watch TV.”

Muggings. Panhandlers. Car burglaries. The scenes from Poteet’s window depict yet another criminal assault--some would argue takeover--on this city’s civic jewel, a 1,200-acre park filled with ornate buildings, wild canyons and lazy rolling acres of tended lawns and shrubs just north of downtown.

Statistically, crime is declining in Balboa Park, best known as home for the world-famous San Diego Zoo. Police Department statistics show that index crimes--murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assaults and property crimes--have decreased since 1984, when they peaked at 1,187 incidents.

By comparison, there were only 434 index crimes reported between January and August of this year.

Yet those numbers don’t reflect some of the rising paranoia underscored by a recent crime wave, which since Sept. 27 has resulted in at least 10 robberies and five assaults in the park’s extreme southwest corner.

Zoo officials report no crime increase in their 3,000-car parking lot, which is patrolled by a private security force. Police say the most assaults, drug deals and burglaries are concentrated on the park’s western border of 6th Avenue, where downtown high-rises give way to the apartments, medical offices and boutiques of a trendy neighborhood called Hillcrest.

Apartment managers say the crime is making their turnovers escalate; one apartment complex resorted to hiring a security guard to watch over tenants’ cars on the street.

Medical offices have erected security fences to keep derelicts from sleeping, urinating and defecating on their steps. Office workers have stopped eating their lunch in the park. Street gutters around and through the park are constantly littered with auto glass, evidence of the car burglaries plaguing the area.

“Crime is escalating--dangerous crime is escalating--and we are very concerned about the kinds of people who are frequenting and living in Balboa Park today,” said San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen.

Prompted by the recent crime wave, Burgreen twice this month has announced major police sweeps into Balboa Park. The first concentrated about 15 extra uniformed and undercover officers along Marston Point, a scenic view point in the park’s extreme southwest corner. Their aim was to catch a band of perhaps 30 illegal aliens preying on cars and park visitors.

The second was a monthlong blitz throughout the rest of the park, a plan that pulled still another 30 officers from citywide tactical squads. Following that, the department intends to add a second permanent patrol unit to the park, and will open a “storefront” community office in the park.

Past police crackdowns in the park have been successful--for a time. But even Burgreen has acknowledged that when the extra officers are pulled out, crime comes back.

Part of the cat-and-mouse game for police is destroying illegal camps, which can be found in the canyons. On a recent Monday evening, Pickett and two other police officers raided a hovel that was built out of blankets and crates propped against a tree branch.

The officers found no one home.

“They heard us coming,” remarked Officer Dan Albright, poking around the mats of newspapers and other junk that formed the hovel’s floor. “They know we know about this.”

Before leaving, the officers confiscated items that could be used as weapons: a pair of scissors, a box cutter, a kitchen knife with black electrical tape wrapped around its handle.

Albright and his partner, Ray Clark, also found two other common items in transient life--hypodermic syringes.

“We can tear this thing all the way to the ground, and tomorrow it will be up again,” said Albright, walking back up the hill to his car and the glow of civilization from the apartment buildings along 6th Avenue.

Along with tearing down the camps, the primary police weapon is movement. Making the bands of homeless--Pickett estimated there are 150 permanent residents in the park--pick up their bedrolls and move along is the preferred solution to low-grade trouble.

Illegal Aliens Blamed

Yet Pickett and the other officers blame illegal aliens, not transients, for the recent increase in crime along the western edge of the park.

“Transients a lot of time get a bad rap,” Pickett said. “A lot of the crime is caused by the aliens. Or there are a lot of crooks who claim to be transients and use that as a cover.”

In the past, crime has attracted little attention because the homeless and drug dealers in the park were the main victims, Pickett said. But now there is an uproar because muggers are bothering office workers and middle-class visitors to the park, he said.

So far, there has been no discernible impact on tourism, according to the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau, which says that this summer, 23% of tourists interviewed said they visited the park, up from 21% from the summer of 1987. They noted that there has been little widespread publicity about park crimes this summer.

Looking for Handouts

People living and working on the western edge of Balboa Park have long coexisted peacefully with the transients, who congregate on the lawns or line up at favorite spots on 6th Avenue for handouts from relief agency vans.

But something has happened over the last six to nine months.

Officials of nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church say they had to call the police about six months ago to roust the 30 to 40 transients who have routinely bedded down outside. Church sextons were so busy cleaning up the trash and fixing up the garden that they had no time for their other duties.

“What happened was that over a period of a couple of years, we got a rougher crowd in and started having property damage and, of course, urine and defecation on the property,” said Rev. M. A. Collins, assistant to the dean at St. Paul’s.

Still Considered Safe

Collins, however, said the trouble at the church and a car burglary haven’t changed his mind that Balboa Park is a safe place, especially contrasted with other urban areas.

“I’ve lived in . . . Pasadena,” Collins said. “My home (was) burglarized. . . . If you’re asking me if San Diego and the park is safer than Pasadena, I’d say yes.”

A block south, transients were creating such a mess at the offices of dermatologist R. B. Pappenfort that he was forced last year to erect a security fence around the low-slung building he has owned for 33 years, said office manager Joan Taylor. Still, the staff finds empty wallets on the roof and in the hedges.

Safer by Day

Taylor said she tries to schedule the older patients to come in before 3:30 p.m. so there’s no chance they will leave the office during twilight. Office workers are afraid to sit in the park to eat lunch because of the constant drug deals and growing aggressiveness of panhandlers, she added.

“They (panhandlers) are bolder,” Taylor said. “They’ll come right up to you and give you a hard time. They don’t take no for an answer. They say, ‘Come on. You’ve got some money.’ ”

A few blocks farther south, at 6th and Elm Street, Teri Poteet and the tenants in the 30-unit apartment complex have been bedeviled by a rash of car burglaries. When economic considerations forced her to cut the guard’s hours to four a night, the “car thieves figured it out very quickly. They would wait for him to leave, then they would break into the cars.”

Meanwhile, the tenants became fed up and began giving notice, causing the apartment’s vacancy rate to jump from 2% to 30%, said Michael McGinness, director of property for the Berkeley syndicate that owns the building.

Trouble by Night

Outside of Poteet’s second-floor window, there have been troubling scenes, like people running down the street at night, dressed in dark clothes and carrying things such as television sets and large garbage bags. Then there is the man in the maroon Trans Am who parks illegally during lunch hour to sell drugs to office workers and transients in the park.

And there’s the group of about 15 Latino men that Poteet, 26, believes is the same band of illegal aliens that have eluded police on Marston Point. Poteet said she watches them gather almost every day in the shade of a big tree.

Two or three weeks ago, Poteet said, she saw the whole gang surround a young man who was sunning himself at the park. They took his camera and radio.

The crime that sticks in her mind, however, was the gang rape that occurred about a month ago along the western edge of the park. Police caught three of the suspects, illegal aliens who just a week before had been deported to Mexico.

“Now, when I look at this little gang here, I can’t help but think about it because she was about my age,” said Poteet, who added that she wants to quit her job by the end of the year.

“It just gives me the heebie-jeebies.”