Santa Ana Targeting Gunfire on New Year’s : Public safety: Officials mount annual program to discourage shooting into the air. Last year, a Costa Mesa boy was injured by falling bullets.

Police are hoping that the popping of Champagne corks on New Year’s Eve will not be drowned out by the sounds of gunfire.

This year, as they have for the past several years, Santa Ana officials and police have mounted a publicity campaign before the holiday, urging residents to keep their guns holstered. Officials have also assigned extra police to handle the fallout from raining bullets.

“Generally speaking, on New Year’s Eve (the sound of gunfire) is kind of sporadic throughout the night,” said Sgt. Art Echternacht. “Then at midnight it sounds just like a war zone. . . . We’ve heard anything from .22 (-caliber rifles) to major assault rifles and fully automatic rifles.”

When those bullets come down, people can be wounded and property destroyed. Last year, 10-year-old Sergio Granados of Costa Mesa was injured when he was struck in the hand and thigh by falling bullets while celebrating in Santa Ana with his family.

“It seems as though every New Year we go through this problem,” said Mayor Daniel H. Young. The firing has become a traditional way to celebrate in the city. “It is extremely frightening for residents and myself.”

In anticipation of New Year’s celebrations, Santa Ana police and city officials have distributed about 10,000 flyers and posters, in both English and Spanish, to liquor stores, gun shops and other places, asking residents to end the bloody tradition of firing weapons in the air to celebrate the new year.

The poster depicts a woman and child within the cross hairs of a rifle scope with the message “Don’t Shoot” across the top. “Shooting a gun in the air is just as dangerous as shooting at someone you love,” the poster states.

In Los Angeles, officials there have gone one step further.

In 1988, Los Angeles became the first city in the nation to ban the sale of ammunition at retail gun shops the week preceding the new year, the Fourth of July and Christmas. The first New Year’s Day of the ban resulted in a 43% decrease in the number of shootings, 73 arrests and no deaths.

Santa Ana officials hope that their education campaign will produce a similar decrease.

“Every year we worry about it, and every year we try to educate people,” Young said.

And nearly every year since at least 1986 the reports of gunfire on New Year’s Eve in Santa Ana alone have surpassed 200, according to police statistics.

Last year on New Year’s Eve Santa Ana police received 235 reports of gunfire from residents, Echternacht said. In 1989, there were 110 reports of gunfire, and in 1988, 240.

“Over the last number of years we have kind of plotted on a pin map the area of the most frequent calls,” he said. “Basically (bullets originate from) just the center core of our city.”

Authorities believe that most of the shootings originate in Latino neighborhoods, where some Mexican immigrants still ring in the new year with gun blasts the way they did in rural Mexico.

“They don’t understand that they (can’t fire guns) in the city,” said Young. “That is why a lot of this has been an educational campaign.”

A celebratory blast from a gun constitutes a felony, carrying a maximum of one year in jail, but authorities acknowledge that it is difficult to catch the shooters.

Police have been joined by some church officials in Latino communities who are trying to get the message out to their members that the gunfire on New Year’s Eve compounds problems in neighborhoods affected by gunfire the other 364 days of the year.

Said Lawrence J. Baird of the Catholic Diocese of Orange: “In a time when we read incredibly bloody accounts of death throughout our cities and, unfortunately, in the Latino neighborhoods caused by guns, it certainly is not an appropriate way to celebrate the New Year.”