Police Believe Rash of Crimes Unrelated

The head of a police task force investigating a series of assaults in San Diego said Monday there is no link between a group of attacks in North Park and Hillcrest and those that took place in the Midway area.

“We’re convinced that the two sets of attacks have nothing to do with each other,” said Capt. Winston Yetta, who is overseeing the task force. “The suspects are not similar in description at all.”

Since the task force was formed Dec. 16 after a string of 35 assaults and robberies in Hillcrest and North Park, the law enforcement group has made 27 felony arrests. But only eight have been for crimes involving armed robbery and assaults with deadly weapons.

Of the eight, four suspects were arrested for street robberies in the Midway area involving Navy personnel. Only four had to do with violent crime in Hillcrest and North Park. The other 19 were for miscellaneous infractions, such as drug possession and outstanding felony warrants.

Lt. Tom Giaquinto, who reports to Yetta, said that, although the task force has made few arrests for assaults and robberies in the areas it was assigned to patrol, police have reduced overall crime there.

At the same time, Giaquinto acknowledged that crime in any part of the city would be reduced by such a large police presence, and that nobody had yet been taken into custody who might be responsible for a large part of the attacks.

“What we’re finding is that we have a large number of people who have been victimized by all kinds of suspects,” he said. “Even when someone says the suspect is black, we’re getting a variety of descriptions. One description is a person 6-foot-7. Another is 5-foot-3. We can’t even say that there’s a series out there because there’s no pattern.”

The task force was originally established to battle a “wilding” spree that police said involved unprovoked attacks by blacks on whites in Hillcrest and North Park. After examining the series more closely, authorities found that whites were attacking whites as well and that some of the victims were gay.

In assessing the nature of the 27 arrests, detectives said no clear pattern has emerged.

In the latest instance, on Saturday, a 38-year-old black man was booked for allegedly beating a white man on University Avenue in Hillcrest. Four of the felony arrests involved black Navy men attacking military personnel, some of whom were white and some of whom were Latino.

The first two felony arrests by the task force involved an apparent “gay-bashing” incident in which the victim said he was threatened with a gun, punched, and robbed of his wallet and watch. Both suspects and the victim were white. Although police say the men yelled anti-gay slurs, one of the suspects has said that he, too, is gay.

Most of the task force arrests had nothing to do with assaults but occurred as police were patrolling North Park and Hillcrest. Six of the arrests, for example, involved auto thefts.

Originally, Yetta and Giaquinto said, task force members believed that groups of two or three men were committing many of the crimes. Now, however, they are not so sure.

To compound the problem, task force officials say they have had trouble getting victims to identify suspects police strongly believe have committed one or more assaults or robberies.

“It’s been real difficult,” Giaquinto said. “We can’t charge someone if a victim doesn’t want to be involved.”