YORBA LINDA : Crime Information Reward Idea Junked

Mayor Gene Wisner has scrapped a proposal to have the city offer a $20,000 reward for information concerning two recent brutal attacks by suspected Asian gang members.

Wisner had asked the City Council in October to consider offering the reward in hopes of helping to prevent similar crimes in the city, which has one of the lowest crime rates in Orange County.

In September, a band of Asian teen-agers stormed into a home, tied up five members of a Chinese family and pistol-whipped the mother before fleeing with jewelry. Suspects in the attack were never identified.

On Nov. 7, three armed youths broke into the home of a Yorba Linda physician, tied up his 14-year-old daughter and bound and pistol-whipped his wife before escaping with an undetermined amount of cash, jewelry and other personal belongings.

More than 200 of these “home invasion” robberies have been reported in California since 1988, and the perpetrators and the victims are nearly always of Asian heritage.

After that attack, Wisner met with City Manager Arthur C. Simonian and Brea Police Chief Donald L. Forkus to discuss the reward proposal. They convinced him that it “would create more problems than it would solve,” he said.

City staff has said that such a reward would put the city in a position of judging which types of crimes are serious enough to merit offering a reward. Instead, city officials recommended that information be directed to the “We Tip” hot line, which offers up to $1,000 for crime information. The council on Tuesday also asked staff to broadcast the hot line number, (800) 472-7766, on the city’s public access cable channel.

Wisner had argued that informants would be unwilling to “put their lives on the line” for just $1,000, but he agreed that the council should not be put in the position of arbitrarily offering rewards.