Police on Alert, but ’91 Begins Peacefully : Van Nuys: Death threats by gang members were on officers’ minds as the deadliest year in the community’s history came to a close.

Despite a blue moon and death threats by gang members against police officers, 1990 rolled quietly into 1991 in Van Nuys, ending peacefully the area’s deadliest year ever.

Monday turned out to be no worse than many nights on the job--maybe even a little quieter than most--to officers who patrolled the 30 square miles of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys Division. To be sure, it was the most staid New Year’s Eve in recent memory.

“It was surprisingly calm,” said Sgt. Tim Day of the Special Enforcement Group as the night ended. “I’ve never seen it this calm.” Day’s unit oversees the division’s gang and drug details.

Day said the quiet was especially surprising considering there were 40 homicides in the division during 1990, a third more than in 1989 and more than double the number in 1988.

Only days earlier, three suspected members of the Barrio Van Nuys gang were arrested in connection with an alleged plot to kill “two or three” police officers on New Year’s Eve in retaliation for recent crackdowns on the gang’s activity in the neighborhoods around Van Nuys and Victory boulevards.

In raids Saturday, police arrested Sergio Camarena and Cesar Reveles, both 18, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. Also arrested was Hector Aleman, 18, on suspicion of possession of a sawed-off shotgun.

Camarena and Reveles were being held without bail, but Aleman was free on $1,000 bail posted Sunday night. Several officers reported seeing him on the streets Monday night and telling him to go home or he would be arrested again.

Marked patrol cars regularly cruise past the Delano Street apartment house rumored to be the place where the officers were to be killed. People identified by police as gang members crowded onto a small patch of grass outside the building until early Tuesday, but no shots were fired.

The youths, busy with New Year’s festivities, paid little attention to passing patrol cars.

“If we’re going to get sniped, this is it,” Day said as he drove past the building at the corner of Delano and Cedros Avenue.

Officers on patrol said they took the threats seriously, but added that they are part of the job. Day said threats against individual officers are not uncommon, but he added that last week’s alleged plot was handled more seriously than some other threats because it targeted the division as a whole.

The alleged plot did not appear to intimidate officers as they patrolled the streets, although they were advised to exercise caution in going about their duties.

The number of units on duty was nearly doubled to 27 to handle the traditional New Year’s mayhem. But while patrol officers kept busy with routine calls, Day and other officers in the gang suppression unit found little to do except stop some of the regulars in the neighborhoods.

The new year began with Day frisking four suspected gang members that he saw walking behind the Van Nuys station. He said routinely stopping gang members in the neighborhood makes the presence of the police known.

“We are putting as much pressure on them as we can,” he said.

Officers also searched two houses, one for drugs, another for an assault suspect, but came up empty-handed.

Earlier in the evening, Day passed a group of four teen-agers standing outside a Calvert Street apartment complex and said flatly, “This is the gang that wants to kill us.”

The four watched Day’s patrol car with a chilling glare, squinting against the police spotlight, keeping their hands dug deep in their pockets.

Last week’s death threats did not seem to faze residents in the area. Most are Latino immigrants living in crowded apartments and have become grudgingly accustomed to the high crime rate in the area.

Much of the social life in the neighborhoods is outside and mariachi music drifted through open doors into the cold night, where people mingled to welcome the new year.

As midnight neared, officers sought cover to avoid getting caught in a lethal rain of bullets fired in celebration of the new year. But the rain turned out to be little more than a drizzle.

Police chased the sporadic “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” of gunfire from street to street, but with little luck.

On Blythe Street, a crime-ridden strip of crowded apartment buildings barricaded by police to curtail drive-by drug sales, officers said a storm of gunfire broke the relative quiet of the night. No injuries from stray bullets were reported.

Day said he was confounded by the calm, not knowing whether to attribute it to the ban on ammunition sales in the last week or increased public awareness of the dangers of stray bullets.

Perhaps it was the fact that Monday’s skies were illuminated by a blue moon, which astrologers believe makes people act more erratically. A blue moon is a full moon that occurs twice in the same month. But the phenomenon happens only about once every 32 months.

Astrologers maintain that it is the added gravitational pull of a full moon that causes people to act strangely during a blue moon. And in Van Nuys on New Year’s Eve, the calm was indeed strange.