Anaheim Prefers Happy Face to ‘Wanted’ Poster

We all remember “Jaws,” the mid-’70s blockbuster about the great white shark that attacked unsuspecting swimmers off the New England coast.

The mechanical fish got all the attention in the movie, but remember the story line? The locals didn’t want to tell the tourists about the killer shark for fear it would dampen the resort business.

Because of the information blackout, business held steady--both for the merchants and the shark.

Update to Anaheim in the summer of 1991 and here we go again, with life imitating art.

Anaheim police announced last week that they had caught three suspects wanted in a string of at least 19 motel stickups stretching back several weeks. The robberies were characterized by violence that, in one case, included the rape of an 18-year-old woman in her room as three friends were tied up with rope.

The first the public heard of the reign of terror was last week. Police, who said they had been working day and night leading up to the arrests, explained that they withheld reports of the crime wave because it might have hampered the investigation.

The chief also said that tourists don’t keep up with the news while vacationing, so publicity probably wouldn’t have helped anyway.

That is a thesis perhaps best presented to the woman who was raped, inasmuch as the attack on her occurred weeks after the spree began.

Would she have been more attentive had she known a string of break-ins had occurred? Police even acknowledged that the intruders often gained entry because the tourists left their rooms unlocked. Is it presuming too much to think that people would have taken extra precautions if they’d been alerted to the robberies?

And, yes, there’s a tiny element I’ve delayed mentioning that you probably already deduced: the crimes all occurred in the area around Disneyland.

The police would never admit they are protecting either Disneyland or the merchants around the park by clamming up about the crime spree.

Police Chief Joseph T. Molloy even said publicity might have had the effect of “scaring these individuals off,” meaning the criminals.

I thought it was the Police Department’s job to scare criminals off.

I don’t want to be glib about this. I can understand the cops’ desire to nail the guys who committed the crimes. But if it meant keeping helpful information from the public, and possibly preventing future crimes, you’ve got to look past the words and question the motivation.

The police said, in effect, that they were doing what was best for the public. I went out to motel row around Disneyland on Friday and asked tourists if they would have preferred to know. I asked several groups and their reply was unanimous.

“I would have wanted to know,” said Kathleen Aste of Escondido, who hadn’t heard about the recent spree. “As it is, I asked for the top floor of our motel so the bad guys can’t get us.” The police owed the public information about the crimes, she said, “so we can make informed decisions about what to do. It’s not like we’re a bunch of little kids that wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Rhonda Gonzales and Mark Rios were vacationing from the San Jose area. “I’d want to know,” Gonzales said. “If you saw any suspicious people, you could let the police know. It might have been a lead for them. It might have helped them out.”

Gary Yuhas and Dean Kosmick, along with Yuhas’ two young sons, were visiting from Canada. They said police are naive if they think tourists don’t already know about the potential dangers of Southern California. Telling them about a crime wave wouldn’t scare people, they said.

Yuhas conceded the police’s point about wanting to lure the robbers into a trap, but said, “The public has a right to know, and I know that’s a complication for the police, but the protection of the public comes first.”

As for me, I don’t expect Anaheim police to cruise down Katella with a bullhorn, saying, “Attention all tourists! Beware of robbers, muggers and thieves!”

I also realize that Disneyland generates a lot of revenue for Anaheim and that it’s bad for business to tell people about crime.

But the public is much smarter than the cops think. Alerting them to a crime wave doesn’t mean they’ll cancel a vacation or stay in Fullerton. “That type of information isn’t panic information. It’s awareness information,” said Teresa Perkins, vacationing with her family from Philadelphia.

I don’t know if there’s some conspiracy of silence when it comes to Disneyland, or if Anaheim police independently decided to keep a lid on the information.

It’s not enough for them to now say, “Hey, we caught ‘em, didn’t we?”

Yes, they caught them, but the bad guys could just have easily left the area after the first few hits. Let’s give police credit for making the arrests, while also saying they were lucky the robbers hung around to accommodate them.

No, once this developed into a spree, the police had only one obligation--to tell everybody to watch out for the sharks lurking in the waters around The Happiest Place on Earth.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.