Officer Joe and Sidekick Use Comedy to Bust Crime

When Santa Monica Police Officer Joe Analco goes to work, his partner is the department’s most colorful character.

She is green and yellow and red--”the color of a traffic light,” Analco points out. She rides a police motorcycle and has her own safety-tip column in a local monthly paper.

His partner is a 5-year-old Amazon parrot named Nacho. Their mission: to stop crime before it can happen by educating--and entertaining--the public. They’ve performed and passed out safety tips in shows from San Bernardino to San Diego.

“Hello, boys and girls, I’m Officer Joe!” Analco, who has the physique of a teddy bear, called out cheerily to a recent preschool class at the Mar Vista Recreation Center. “What’s a ‘stranger’?” he challenged, punctuating “stranger” with a growl. The 14-year veteran of the Police Department crouched down to the children. “Do you think they’re all men, like me?. . .Are all strangers mean?”

Teddy Bear Physique

Nacho, who has a 120-word vocabulary, was prompted by sunflower seeds and Analco’s hand signals to squawk “Hello” and “Nacho.” The class chortled. She clucked like a chicken, purred like a kitten and whistled the first few bars of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“What if you found trash outside? Where would you put it? In the trash can,” Analco said. With claws and beak, the 8-inch parrot deftly picked up a wad of paper and plopped it into a Nacho-sized garbage can. Then she dropped to the ground and rolled over, demonstrating what to do when clothes catch fire.

In the 25-minute, action-packed show, Nacho also rode a toy police motorcycle and car with flashing lights and whining sirens. The kids learned 911, the magic number to call “if you need the ambulance or paramedics,” if a fire starts or “if you’re baking cookies with your grandmother and she says she doesn’t feel too good and needs help.”

“Paramedic” may not have sunk in, but Nacho certainly did. “I liked the bird. I liked the motorcycle,” Devon Quinn, 4, declared. David Marsh agreed: “I liked the parrot’s motorcycle and car.”

When the children sang the “ABC” song in appreciation, Nacho crooned along, good-naturedly but off-tune, although “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” is reportedly more her taste.

Other police departments have similar safety programs, sans parrots. The Los Angeles Police Department has radio-controlled Casey the Car. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has a ventriloquist.

Santa Monica’s “Officer Joe” program, as it is now commonly called, started 16 years ago with Dick Barry, a police officer who performed magic tricks and raised and trained Nacho. When Barry retired nearly three years ago, Analco, who had done everything from patrols to investigations to desk jobs in the department, applied for the position. He had to win over a panel of school principals and PTA leaders. He has since won awards from local PTA, Jaycees and law enforcement associations.

As for Nacho, she and Analco hit it off immediately. “She came right to me,” Analco says. She now lives with Analco in Ventura and commutes to work with him.

Analco, 38, grew up in Santa Monica and says he was a “high-risk student” who “got thrown out of John Adams (Junior High School) for fighting. I grew up with about 25 kids--most of them are dead now, from drugs, alcohol. Some died in prison.”

Joined Marines

After a teacher and a police officer “thumped me” and “put me in my place,” Analco at age 17 “became convinced that I wasn’t the man I was supposed to be.” He joined the Marine Corps and served for four years, including a stint in Vietnam, where he “grew up in 18 months.”

Analco said he agrees with Whitney Houston’s lyrics: “I believe the children are our future.”

“Kids need a role model . . . and I want to develop a positive working relationship (between police and kids), not a negative relationship.”

A busy day for him might entail two classes at a high school to discuss drugs and gangs, a show with Nacho for the Girl Scouts, and a presentation on earthquake preparedness with Shaky the Robot and Muppet-type puppets activated by assistant Tim Milliman.

On other days, there’s writing or shooting a segment of “On the Go With Officer Joe,” which airs periodically on Channel 30. There are also talks at retirement homes about safety on the streets and con games.

The job seems a natural one for Analco, who is the father of five children ranging in age from 17 months to 17 years. “My expressions and the way to talk to (the children) is from being a parent and learning from my mistakes.

‘The Hard Shield’

“People ask me, ‘How many children do you have?’ I say, “9,300, because I count the whole (Santa Monica-Malibu Unified) school district,” Analco says with a chuckle.

Analco, who still works overtime on patrols “to keep the edge,” says his experiences as Officer Joe pierce “the hard shield we put around us as police officers.”

There was the fourth-grader who came up to Ernie, a puppet carrying booze in a bag who is caught by Officer Joe. “How do you feel when your dad yells at you a lot and drinks and throws things around?” she asked.

And there was one of Analco’s first shows, before a group of retarded children. “I wanted to quit. . . . It was Christmas time. One boy was crying, and I thought, ‘Great, I’ve scared him, now what do I do?’ But he stood up, crying, and said ‘911.’ ” His mother told Analco it was the first time the boy had ever spoken up in the group.

“This is what it’s for, not to feed my ego, but for these kids. . . . Kids are sincerely honest and really do love you for what you’re doing for them.”

The Mister Rogers of the Police Department says he loves his work. “Even on a bad day, I have to put my best foot forward. Everybody else sees me as a happy-go-lucky, let’s-do-it kind of guy.”

So he puts on a happy face, packs Nacho, and it’s off to another session of “Hey, boys and girls, I’m Officer Joe!”