Modern-Day Vigilantes Take Back the Neighborhoods

Orange County has some neighborhoods that make the proverbial “Mean Streets” look like Lollipop Lane. Kids walking to school seeing drug deals go down on street corners. People going to sleep at night to the lullaby of semiautomatic weapons fire.

Even neighborhoods not considered high-crime venues have to buy their sense of security by building walls and erecting wrought-iron security gates. Some hire private guards. We’ve got everything but moats to keep us safe.

Our society is scared to death of crime, and who can blame it?

In just the last several days, three men posing as sheriff’s deputies terrorized and robbed a Placentia family; a Santa Ana man was killed and his wife critically wounded in a midnight shooting in their back yard; and Anaheim police openly worry that street gangs may escalate their turf wars.

We have a collective awareness that the police can’t stop these violent acts. For the most part, they arrive on the scene only after they’re called and are reduced to investigating crimes, not preventing them. We say we’d like more police on patrol to prevent crime, but nobody wants to pay for them.

It’s enough to lead you to look up moat-builders in the Yellow Pages.

Do we have to surrender our neighborhoods? Must they be rezoned from residential to uninhabitable because of crime?

Richard Neely, a West Virginia State Supreme Court justice, thinks not. He doesn’t profess to know much about Orange County, but in his 1990 book, “Take Back Your Neighborhood,” he argues that private citizens with a stake in their neighborhoods can deter street crime.

“This is modern-day vigilantism,” Neely wrote. “It is not old-fashioned hang-’em-high cowboy justice, not newfangled tear-’em-to-pieces- in-the-streets revolutionary Islamic justice and not standard American Ku Klux Klan put-my-white-sheet- on-again terrorism.” Rather, Neely envisions an unarmed citizen foot-patrol force with the efficiency and professionalism that’s remindful of volunteer fire departments.

The idea has taken something of a hold in Orange County. Residents in the Willard area of Santa Ana openly took on the crime problem last year and have won some victories. In Anaheim, a neighborhood group began walk-throughs in Pearson Park to dissuade drug sales that had become commonplace. A leader of that effort says some headway has been made, although sales continue. She also said her group has met with another Anaheim group that has “neighborhood watch walks,” in an effort to win their area back from drug-dealers.

Amin David, an Anaheim businessman and president of Los Amigos of Orange County, a community advocacy group, generally supports the idea of civilian patrols.

Los Amigos is considering providing a year’s rent for some members of a Christian biker group from the local Set Free Christian Fellowship church. The idea, David said, would be to have them “strategically housed” in the high-crime Jeffrey-Lynne area of Anaheim, “where their presence around there would do wonders and would be with the idea they would serve the community by walking around, by driving on their motorcycles. They’re awesome-looking, except they’re not offenders,” David said.

Perhaps in the 21st Century, crime will have gotten so bad that every neighborhood will have its own private police force.

In the meantime, the citizens fighting these lonely battles to save their streets are among the unsung heroes of Orange County. These law-abiding, working people face potential danger like most of us will never know and are rewarded by stereotypes of themselves as ne’er-do-wells because of the neighborhoods in which they live.

While others among us point the finger at Santa Ana or Anaheim, they will do well to remember that not everyone can afford to move to neighborhoods behind iron gates and brick walls. Or, that being economically strapped shouldn’t consign a family to living in stalags of crime.

Author Neely said in a telephone interview that citizen patrols have worked in other cities. The battle can be won, he said, if enough people in a neighborhood agree on what standards of behavior they want and if the neighborhood isn’t too far gone already.

Given that, I asked one of the leaders in the Pearson Park project how she felt about the ongoing battle with the drug dealers in the park.

“I think sometimes you feel it’s winnable,” she said. “And sometimes you feel overmatched.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.