Neighborhood Patrol : Personal Touch Is Key to Anaheim Police Plan for Safe Streets

The first time officers Tim Wylie and Karen Schroepfer saw an outdoor card game on Sabina Street, they thought it was a harmless way for some laborers to relax after work.

But after a few weeks of watching the area up close as part of the Anaheim Police Department’s new Community Action Policing team, the two officers realized that some card parties actually were ploys to conceal drug transactions.

“The card games and the drinking are fronts,” Schroepfer said recently as she broke up one such congregation, dispersing the crowd and emptying beer bottles. “This is where the contacts are made. A guy walks up to the table like he’s part of the game and a (drug) deal is made.”

Whether it’s breaking up clandestine narcotics operations or knocking on residents’ doors to ask them about the problems in their neighborhoods, Anaheim police are trying a personal and concentrated approach of policing the city’s 10 worst crime areas.

“I like it,” said Leopoldo Gonzalez, a nine-year resident of Sabina Street. “We really need their help.”

Gonzalez watched from his yard as Wylie and Schroepfer detained a convicted drug user who they suspected was trying to buy drugs.

“I’m glad the police are making an effort to come around here more,” said the 37-year-old father of two. “There’s a lot of drinking, drugs and fighting around here. It’s very unsafe.”

For years, similar programs have been used by other departments in the county with varying degrees of success.

“It’s a very vogue form of policing right now,” said James Lasley, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Cal State Fullerton who helped the Los Angeles Police Department form a community policing program called Operation Cul-de-Sac. “It’s the wave of the future . . . it can be very effective.”

Anaheim’s $360,000, two-year program is staffed by four patrol officers, a sergeant and a lieutenant. It is modeled after a successful pilot program in the Jeffrey-Lynne area, west of Disneyland, earlier this year which incorporated several city departments, including code enforcement, community services and other sections within the Police Department.

The unit uses foot, bike and vehicle patrols to comb through certain parts of the city to make the police presence known to residents as well as miscreants.

After breaking up the card game, Wylie and Schroepfer continued to walk around the predominantly Latino neighborhood, greeting residents and asking them if anybody was out to sell drogas .

Schroepfer, who was followed around by several barefoot children as she walked toward an alley on Sabina Street, found a discarded hypodermic needle lying on the ground near some trash cans.

“This is why parents around here are afraid to let their children out,” she said as she picked up the needle and threw it away.

A short distance away, she stopped and questioned a suspected drunk who had just urinated in an alley in a spot where it appeared others had done the same. Using a neighborhood teen-ager to translate in Spanish, she told the man to go home or face being arrested.

He left.

Throughout the night, the officers walked and drove through Sabina, Rose and Bush streets, stopping suspected gang members, drug dealers and users and beer drinkers.

“Instead of going from one call to another across the city like regular patrol officers, we’re afforded the opportunity to really take the time and talk with the people,” Wylie said. “It goes a long way toward getting them to trust us.”

Developing a good relationship with the business owners, community groups and residents will determine the success of the program, according to Lt. Ray Welch and Sgt. Mike Hannah, the two men who run the month-old unit.

Once residents begin to trust the officers, they will be more likely to call the police when problems develop, they said.

“We want to go from crisis management to a long-range proactive service,” Welch said. “We need to educate them on the system so they can use us to help them better.”

The trust the officers are seeking may be tough to develop because of cultural and language barriers, Welch and Hannah admit. All four officers in the unit have some knowledge of Spanish, but only one is fluent.

One recent weekend night, Wylie and Schroepfer went door to door with the other two officers in the unit, Hank Fantes and Fred Pittington, and did some plain old handshaking with residents and listened to their concerns.

“Many of the families told us they don’t let their children go outside to play or want their wives to go by the stores themselves” because of drug dealers and gang members loitering in the neighborhood, Pittington said.

After talking with the residents, Pittington said he felt “a certain indignation and outrage” at their plight that he did not get while “working regular patrol.”

“You simply don’t have that same reaction, the same feelings, because you can’t allow yourself the time to do that,” he said. “I think we’re finally talking to people and finding some way to get a link across between the Police Department and the citizens that just wasn’t here before.”

In the Jeffrey-Lynne pilot program, crime dropped significantly as police made 230 arrests for such offenses as drug possession, drunkenness and urinating in public. The police are hoping to see the same results in the new target areas.

Crime in Jeffrey-Lynne has increased somewhat since the program was stopped, but not to the level it was before the community policing began, police officials said. No comparative statistics were available.

In the current program, which is paid for solely with narcotics asset seizures, the target areas were identified after months of studies, which looked at a number of factors, including the number of emergency calls made in certain neighborhoods and the number of reported crimes. Welch also looked at similar programs throughout the nation.

Anaheim Police Chief Joseph T. Molloy said the program should work, but results will not occur overnight. “I think we can have an impact in all (10) of the (target) areas,” he said.

The concept of community policing is an old idea that “got lost somewhere” when officers became more mobilized and more demands were made on their time, Molloy said.

“We kind of lost touch,” he said. “We’re revisiting these programs. . . . We want to show the people they can take control of their neighborhoods.”