ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : The Death of Officer De La Rosa

At 43, veteran Officer Tommy De La Rosa of the Fullerton Police Department was working in top form. Then in a flicker of gunfire during a drug sting operation last week, his life ended. This week, with his family and the law-enforcement community, Orange County mourns.

De La Rosa had worked several years in undercover narcotics, and had been honored by the Orange County Latino Peace Officers Assn. last year as “Officer of the Year.” He was so committed to the cause that he spent time off visiting city parks, where he urged youngsters to stay in school and to avoid the ugly drug world of errant elders.

The death of a police officer in the line of duty is a shock for any community, and in Orange County, where countless automobile bumper stickers plead the case for a drug-free environment, the first shooting death of a police officer in the war on drugs carries grim significance. Orange County has proudly joined local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies in the cause. The realization that death stalks the good and the bad with equal uncertainty brings home to all the terrible injustice and absurdity of the drug culture.

Over the period of time that De La Rosa worked undercover, the Regional Narcotics Suppression Program in the county was hailed by the FBI as one of the most effective in the nation. A cruel irony is that the better an officer like De La Rosa gets as that kind of cooperative effort takes shape and direction, and the more experience and contacts he has to dive deep into the nether world, the more he is at risk.

This is what law-enforcement officers across the nation have been lamenting. Some of their best and the brightest have fallen in a war they are not winning. National statistics underline the problem: The number of police officers killed on drug-related duty in any given year doubled in 1988 from the 1972 total, according to a study done by the Washington-based Crime Control Institute.

In the senseless slaughter of drug-related violence, De La Rosa was another of the good to die at high tide. Thousands of officers turned out for his funeral, but it was fitting, too, that so many civilians paused by the side of the road in 102-degree heat to reflect on the perils of police work in an area where life is cheap.