ANAHEIM : Foot Patrol Offers New Perspective

Police Officer Harald Martin says a cop needs more than a sharp eye to function in the city’s crime- and poverty-plagued Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood.

A cop also needs empathy and patience, Martin says, to work in this urban ghetto nestled behind Disneyland.

“The Police Department can band-aid any problem,” Martin said on a recent afternoon walk through the neighborhood. “Whereas if you change the neighborhood from the inside, you can correct it.”

Martin is something of a one-man show, patrolling on foot through the tiny, overcrowded neighborhood where just over 100 large apartment buildings are crammed onto four small streets and up to a dozen people can be found living in nearly any one-room apartment.

Under a two-year state grant totaling $225,000, plus $32,500 from the city, Martin and code enforcement officer Roger Bennion have been hired to patrol the neighborhood full time.

It is a neighborhood in which the aroma of home-style Latin cooking fills the air, bringing a cozy calm to the poor, dirty streets.

Martin is a little bit of everything that it takes to work in this neighborhood: He’s part social worker, part counselor, part code enforcer, part officer. In his book, a good cop isn’t one who arrests every lawbreaker he sees, but one who can teach the minor offenders how to act lawfully.

“This is a different approach,” he said. “It isn’t police work, because police work, in the long run, doesn’t cut the mustard.”

Last October, a pilot six-month program combined the efforts of daily police foot patrols, code enforcement officers and community services personnel and succeeded in greatly reducing crime and improving the area.

A community center was established in one of the apartment buildings, offering social services ranging from low-income cooking classes to recreation for the hundreds of children who have no yard to play in after school.

But when the funding was gone and police patrols ended last April, many of the problems they had chased away returned. Gang graffiti again covered walls, bottle shards littered streets, and drug dealing resumed, as did fights and gunshots.

But the six-month experiment had been so successful, while it lasted, that it became the model for the Community Action Policing Team, a similar citywide task force now in operation. It also won new funding to continue the officers’ work in Jeffrey-Lynne.

When Martin took a recent tour of about 20 of the apartment buildings, he found that just a few of the landlords had finished correcting such problems as corroded bathrooms, faulty plumbing and cockroach infestation.

Residents like Angie Raudales, 17, a mother of two who has seen the neighborhood’s transitions, are doubtful that Martin and Bennion can overcome the problems.

Still, the idea of an officer on full-time patrol is reassuring, she said.

“He’ll know the faces. He’ll know what’s going on. It worked in the beginning; maybe it will work again,” she said.

One recent afternoon, Martin came across a typical sight on the neighborhood streets: a group of men sitting outside in the shade enjoying a beer after work.

“ No cerveza aqui ,” Martin told them. They didn’t budge much, but when he said that there would be about a $100 fine if they were cited, they scooped up their drinks and headed into an apartment.

Martin said he realizes that men like these are hot and tired after a day’s work and that they would rather drink beer outside than in a dingy, stuffy apartment cramped with other people who live there. So he doesn’t cite them but warns them, remembering their faces in case there is a next time.

That same afternoon, he found two young men drinking beer in an alley behind a shed known as a former drug hangout. Tiny papers that once held heroin and cut-off soda cans used for heating the drug still littered the ground.

Martin asked the men if they were residents of the nearby apartment complex, and both said they were, even though their driver’s licenses said otherwise. Although he didn’t cite them for drinking beer in the alley, Martin took their names for his own record.

“It’s going to be the people who are going to have to do all the work,” he said. “Once they see there are changes being made, I think I can get them to buy into the idea that they can make a difference too.”