Home Front : Grass-Roots Effort Brings Police Facility to Serve Chinatown

As a new police substation in Chinatown formally opens today, reports of crime in the area seem to have taken a sudden drop.

But that is not because a 10-year grass-roots quest for the first community-financed police facility in the city has finally been attained.

Crime is down because some Chinese-Americans don’t want to report bad news just as the Chinese New Year begins. That’s bad luck.

So the phone was quiet this week at the $1-million Chinatown Community Police Service Center at 823 N. Hill St. and no one seemed to care.

“We made it,” grinned Fay Gee, one of a group who struggled against financial obstacles and bureaucratic hurdles to help get the 3,400-square-foot structure built.

The two-story building is one of at least six satellite offices used by the Los Angeles Police Department, including those in Koreatown and Boyle Heights. But it is the only one designed and built by citizens, who are still raising money to help pay for the costs.

The effort started 10 years ago, when the Chinese-American community rented two rooms above a bakery and paid for the services of a translator to help police take crime reports.

“People from mainland China and Southeast Asia have a language barrier and they don’t feel comfortable going to the police,” said C.K. Chung, the center’s translator, who speaks Cantonese and Mandarin dialects.

On Wednesday, however, no one was calling about abandoned cars, burglaries of motor vehicles or robberies, which are among the most commonly reported crimes in the community of 13,800. Many Chinese believe events taking place as the New Year begins foretell whether good fortune will come, the bespectacled 60-year-old Chung noted, “so they don’t want to file a crime report.”

The day before, the first day of about two weeks of celebrations for the beginning of the Year of the Monkey, Chung said he only received half a dozen calls complaining about firecrackers that reveling youngsters were setting off all over Chinatown.

Two of the LAPD patrol officers who drop in periodically at the center--open between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday--took the reports seriously because firecrackers are dangerous and generally illegal.

Officer John Cronshaw, a burly 25-year veteran who has patrolled Chinatown for years and is known as “Big John,” set off to find the youths with Officer Yin Leung, a native of Hong Kong who grew up in Los Angeles. Leung, 33, said he attended movies in Chinatown as a youth, and decided to become a police officer when he saw gang members harassing older patrons “and there was no one to stop them.”

The police substation almost didn’t happen, said attorney David Woo, as he dropped by to complete plans for the formal opening. Community members raised $400,000 as a down payment on the land, which is next to the Chinese Methodist Church, but fund raising stalled as city officials debated whether to contribute.

“A sign we had out front saying this was ‘Coming Soon’ was a local joke,” Woo said.

But, noted Cronshaw, “they were just like bulldogs, they kept at it,” much the same way past Chinatown groups fought for a library and senior citizen housing.

About two years ago, the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency provided $681,000 in grants and loans, and construction began. The community must raise $119,000 within a year to satisfy one loan, Woo said, and hopes to raise more for items such as new furniture. The substation still uses the wooden desks, chairs, and even a sofa with legs propped up by telephone books, from the old office above the bakery.

“I wonder what the Year of the Monkey will mean,” Woo said to Gee.

“The monkey means you’re always jumping around, from one thing to the next thing,” Gee replied.

“The next thing” could be a long-delayed cultural center for Chinatown, Woo said. “That’s foundered. But a lot of people once said that about us.”