Crime Rising After Falling for Decade : Law enforcement: Sharp increases have occurred in nearly every part of Ventura County, regardless of poverty or wealth.

Through the crackle of his police scanner, truck driver Bob Kennedy tracks crime in his middle-class Camarillo neighborhood.

Yet he was surprised last summer when his daughter caught a stranger opening their garage and when a thief stole a friend’s locked car in broad daylight.

“I used to have a lock on my garage door, but I never locked it,” said Kennedy, who has lived in the same modest house across from the Pleasant Valley School District office for 17 years. “Now I do.”

A few miles away in south Oxnard, 22-year resident Tip Trent has become all too familiar with a more violent aspect of local crime. Trent lives in a freshly painted house 200 yards from Ventura County’s meanest street, Cuesta Del Mar Drive, near Ormond Beach.

Five teen-age thugs kicked Trent’s 18-year-old mentally handicapped son off his bike last month just to let him know he was not welcome, Trent said.

“Everything’s changed,” Trent said. “The kids think they own the streets. It’s gangs. That’s the difference. And it seems like it’s changed real quick. It’s like nobody was watching and it just happened.”

In Kennedy’s Camarillo and in Trent’s Oxnard, something frightening is going on. Over the past two years, thefts and burglaries are up 65% in Camarillo and robberies and assaults are up 94% in Oxnard.

Reported serious crime has surged 17.3% countywide since 1989. And Ventura County, still one of the nation’s safest urban areas, has reversed a trend that saw crime drop for a decade even as 140,000 new residents arrived.

Sharp increases have occurred in nearly every part of the county, regardless of poverty or wealth. Only tiny Fillmore, successful in its anti-gang efforts, has seen a drop. The county registered 30,000 serious crimes in 1991, up 4,419 in two years.

Police are grasping for explanations and solutions. They are not confident about either. But they say gangs, drugs and thieves who enter the area from outside the county are increasing problems and that controlling all three must be part of the solution.

“Sometimes we feel like we’re just hanging on,” said Undersheriff Larry Carpenter, whose department patrols about half the county. “We’re like the little Dutch Boy with a finger in the dike, trying to stop the flood.”

Law enforcement analysts say Camarillo and the affluent East County increasingly have been hit by Los Angeles County thieves who sweep north on freeways, searching for late-model cars and unprotected residences and businesses.

The percentage of County Jail inmates from Los Angeles County has increased 60% in two years, the Sheriff Department reports. Two Van Nuys gang members arrested in December are suspected of committing more than 600 car burglaries in 1991.

And in the West County, hit hardest by violent crime, officials say they are trying to decide what to do about young criminals who run in gangs and hurt people with little thought of the consequences.

Oxnard police say they have identified 1,200 gang members, associates and wannabes--an extraordinary number since the Police Department only acknowledged a gang problem in 1989.

Most Oxnard gang members are home-grown. But police say some Los Angeles gang members have moved here to escape the indiscriminate violence of the inner city and brought some of it with them instead.

“These guys hang out here, drink their beers, sniff their paint and wait for some new victim to come by,” Patrolman Jim O’Brien said recently after questioning two teen-agers who sat on a knoll in an Oxnard park as the sun set.

Not far from that park, a youth who denied gang membership said he was not concerned about recent crime increases in his neighborhood.

“It don’t bother me because I know the people who are doing the crimes,” said James Gaston, 21, of Oxnard. “There ain’t nothing to do but to hang out with your friends and get on each other’s nerves, and crimes are the first thing that cross your mind.”

End of Tranquillity

It wasn’t long ago that Ventura County police were counting their blessings.

Although bordered by the turmoil of Los Angeles County, with nearly twice as many crimes per person, Ventura County’s new commuter neighborhoods and old farming communities were an enclave of tranquillity.

Ventura County crime was kept low by circumstance and public policy.

There were few high-crime pockets of poverty because of steep housing prices. Most newly arrived residents were professionals who flocked to the white-collar planned communities of the East County. And tens of thousands of Mexican immigrants came here to work. With few exceptions, both groups settled comfortably into the area.

Just as important, police say, Ventura County earned its reputation of being hard on criminals.

Working in unison, police pioneered programs that identified repeat criminals, prosecutors offered few plea-bargains and judges handed down some of the stiffest sentences in the state.

For 11 consecutive years Ventura County had the lowest crime rate of any non-rural county in California. For a half-dozen years it was the safest urban county in the 13-state region that the FBI defines as the West.

Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley still ranked as the nation’s two safest cities with populations of at least 100,000 in 1991 after relatively low 6% and 8% increases, respectively, for the year, the FBI reported in April.

But local police say Ventura County posted a 13% increase in serious crime last year, and that might knock it from its top ranking in the West when the FBI issues its complete report in August.

Overall, the county had 43.7 serious crimes per 1,000 residents last year, up from 38.2 in 1989. In contrast, California as a whole had about 67 crimes per 1,000 residents in 1991 and the nation had about 59 crimes per 1,000 overall.

Included in those totals are the eight categories used by the FBI for its annual Uniform Crime Reports: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assaults, burglary, theft, auto theft and arson.

Ventura County crime is up sharply in every category since 1989, when the crime rate reached its lowest level since the early 1970s.

Murders have doubled and violent crime is up 36% countywide in two years. Led by surges in auto theft and burglary, property offenses have increased 15%.

“We’re still very low compared with other folks in the (policing) business,” said Carpenter, whose deputies patrol Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Moorpark, Ojai and Fillmore.

But as Carpenter looks back on the 1980s--the decade he calls the “hero years” for local police--the undersheriff can’t help but think that something has been lost.

The morale of his deputies was devastated by the Rodney G. King police beating in Los Angeles last year, Carpenter said, and now crime is rising quickly. The county never had a drive-by shooting until a few years ago, but such violent assaults are fairly common today, he said.

“Either this is just a phase we’re going through, or there will have to be a total program approach that attempts to control it,” Carpenter said. “And we’ll either win or we’ll lose.”

Families, churches, schools and government must all work together to try to correct the social problems and loss of values that lead to crime, he said. Police departments “can hang on, but somebody else has to try to fix the (basic) problem,” he said.

To Patrolman O’Brien, 33, a veteran of 12 years of patrol on the streets of Port Hueneme and Oxnard, the problem comes down to this:

“Narcotics. And people don’t have any sense of morality these days. They don’t care about anything except getting property and hurting people. They hang out in alleys and do their graffiti. They steal kids’ bikes and hit the farm workers and the drunks. With all the media attention on gangs, everything’s kind of blossomed up here. They’ve gotten to be real brazen.”

Camarillo: Theft Fear

Rising crime means something different depending on where you live in Ventura County.

In most neighborhoods in a majority of cities, crime is still a stolen car, a burgled home or the quick late-night snatch by a thief from a broken liquor store window. Property might not be as secure as it once was, but it’s safe to walk the street at night.

That’s the way things still are in Bob Kennedy’s Camarillo.

The trucker said he doesn’t feel physically threatened. But he now not only locks his garage but has begun securing the steering wheels of his late-model cars with a metal locking bar.

He’s noticed many drivers in his neighborhood just looking around, Kennedy said, and he thinks Los Angeles thieves have come to town for new opportunities.

“There’s some money up here, and I think they’re thinking we’re not so suspecting,” he said.

A survey of Kennedy’s street one recent afternoon showed that the thieves might be right. The doors of many garages were open and unattended--a nightmare for crime fighters and Neighborhood Watch groups.

One resident, a retired sheriff’s deputy whose garage door was open, said, “If it was a high-crime area, I would be concerned. But my neighbors and I look out for each other. We’ve been here for over 25 years.”

But in his neighborhood--west of Lewis Road and north of the Ventura Freeway--crime of all types increased from 101 offenses in 1990 to 174 last year, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

“It’s a typical sprawling residential neighborhood and it reflects the increase we had last year,” Sheriff’s Cmdr. Ray Abbott said.

Serious crime in Camarillo is up from 1,093 offenses to 1,728 in two years, largely because of huge increases in burglaries and thefts. Violent crimes increased slightly, from 98 offenses to 103.

Garage thefts are popular because they are easy and quick, Sgt. Keith Lazz said. “We had one guy coming here who was just hitting open garages for tools or whatever while people were inside eating,” he said.

Local teen-agers also do their share of auto thefts and burglaries, authorities said. Ramon Espinosa, another neighbor of Kennedy’s, said he knows several youngsters living in rented houses a few blocks away who dress as gang members and have stolen property on his street.

“They don’t mean any harm, but they’re going to take what you’ve got,” Espinosa said. “The parents don’t want their kids doing what they’re doing, but it’s all they can do to make a living.”

The emerging trend in Camarillo, however, is not theft by local youths, but crimes involving freeway bandits from Los Angeles County.

“There was just a bunch of them from L.A. County last year,” Sheriff’s Detective Miguel Colon said. “Everyone knows that Ventura County is tough on criminals, but they think it’s worth the risk. They say L.A. is too heavily patrolled and they’re always being hassled. And they say it’s easy-pickings over here.”

A Chatsworth man, suspected of 18 sophisticated business burglaries, pleaded guilty this year to nine break-ins and was sentenced to four years in prison, the detective said.

Colon also figures that two Van Nuys gang members had broken into more than 600 cars in Camarillo, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Oxnard in the seven months before their arrests in December.

The two men--a bullet-scarred 27-year-old former Salvadoran rebel and an 18-year-old Mexican immigrant--broke into seven cars in Camarillo the night Colon arrested them and nine cars two nights earlier. Both pleaded guilty and received six-year prison sentences, Colon said.

“They took anything,” he said. “They broke into one car to take soccer balls. They’d jack a car up and just take the tires.”

In a report to the Board of Supervisors this year, Sheriff John Gillespie warned of increasingly sophisticated and violent inmates in county jails. And he said the number of inmates from Los Angeles County was up nearly two-thirds in two years. The total was 92 inmates, about 8% of those in county lockups.

“In my travels throughout the county, I have noted that one of the greatest concerns of our citizens is that the level of crime experienced in Los Angeles will some day infest Ventura County,” Gillespie said.

So far this year, the rate of felony thefts is down about a third in Camarillo, perhaps because several prolific thieves have been caught, Sgt. Lazz said.

But Undersheriff Carpenter said he considers out-of-county criminals a problem that is not going away and is partly responsible for Thousand Oaks’ increase from 55 robberies two years ago to 78 in 1991.

Among the sheriff’s best weapons against East County thieves has been an intense analysis of crime patterns that allows teams of investigators to stake out specific streets, shopping centers and parking lots at certain times of day and wait for repeat criminals to return, Carpenter said.

Simi Valley has used the same strategy in an effort to combat a 30% increase in auto theft since 1989.

“We’re suffering from our proximity to L.A.,” Chief Lindsey P. Miller said. “There are gangs that specialize in stealing cars and taking them to chop shops for the purpose of parting them out.”

And when the thieves can’t steal the car and strip it for parts, they will smash a window and take what is inside, Miller said.

Simi Valley has had better luck controlling burglaries, which are down sharply in recent years. Miller attributes that to an aging of the city’s population, meaning fewer residents are in their crime-prone years. It is also important that fewer residents now commute to Los Angeles for work.

“It’s not a ghost town anymore during the day,” he said. “They go home at lunchtime.”

Moorpark, though retaining a crime rate half the county average, has nonetheless been hit by a 64% increase in auto burglaries and thefts. Yet violent crime and residential and business burglaries are down.

Camarillo and the three East County cities still have four of the five lowest crime rates in the county. Fillmore, the county’s current anti-crime success story, is the other.

Fillmore is a town of just 12,400 residents, so there are few strangers to police.

But it was not the social pressures of small-town life that cut Fillmore crimes each of the past two years, Sheriff’s Lt. Dick Purnell said earlier this year.

“We had a gang crackdown last year,” he said. “Dozens were arrested.”

Gang-driven violent crimes such as aggravated assaults have dropped 19% and thefts and burglaries are also down slightly.

Together, Fillmore’s schools and churches also have formed a communitywide youth task force designed to steer youngsters away from gangs. Churches offer mountain retreats and a junior high school matches students possessing positive attitudes with those who might be turned off more easily.

In 1990, Santa Paula could brag of similar successes, having cut the soaring crime rate of 1989 by 3.5% after jailing a number of gang leaders and focusing anew on drug-related offenses.

But Santa Paula crime was up 12.7% in 1991, and the city’s crime rate is second in the county behind Oxnard.

Oxnard: The Prototype

It is Oxnard, the county’s largest city and among its poorest, that police often mention when discussing crime trends. It’s the only local city with a crime rate equal to the California average.

Just 21% of the county’s residents live within its boundaries, but 31% of the county’s property crime and 46% of its violent crime took place there in 1991.

And statistics show that Oxnard accounted for 43% of all new crimes countywide over the past two years, including 83% of all rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults.

Officials from Camarillo and Ventura have long pointed to crossover crooks from Oxnard as a source of some of their crime problems.

Ventura’s crime rate jumped in 1991, increasing by 10% even though violent crime remained well below the county average. The trend was much the same in bucolic Ojai, the county’s smallest city: little violence, but much more theft.

In Port Hueneme, which is bordered by Oxnard on three sides, crime is up 45% in two years, mostly because property offenses rose from 540 to 808.

“There are more and more people around us,” Chief Robert A. Anderson said. “As the whole west end of the county grows, we’re going to see more people, more targets and more criminal activity.”

Ventura Police Capt. Pat Rooney said he is struck not so much by what is happening in Oxnard, but by the gradual transformation of Ventura County as a whole.

“I think the bottom line is that the cities of Ventura County are taking on the big-city composure, starting to have some of the problems that have to do with population and higher density,” Rooney said.

In years past, for example, police could point to a single neighborhood as the county’s chief source of narcotics. “Now it’s in all the cities,” Rooney said.

Oxnard officials do not minimize their problems.

New Chief Harold Hurtt, who takes office tomorrow, said the city’s explosion of crime may force tough decisions on a community already struggling to close a large budget deficit.

“It may just be at a point where we’re going to have to look at not providing some (other) services, just to make the city safe,” Hurtt said. “It may get down to the question: Are we willing to accept this level of criminal activity and what does in mean for the long term?”

To respond effectively, however, requires an understanding of just what is going wrong in the first place.

And neither newly appointed Hurtt nor former Chief Robert P. Owens say they know precisely what has caused the biggest increase in crime in the city’s history.

Although still learning about Oxnard, Hurtt said his inclination is to insert community-based policing--”the only hope for policing in this country”--into Oxnard’s toughest neighborhoods.

Permanent police storefronts could help bring order to the city’s most lawless neighborhoods, though staffing them would pull officers out of their black-and-whites, he said.

Hurtt said he intends to move quickly to send a message to Los Angeles gang members who might think crime is easier in Oxnard. He hopes to gradually phase out Sunday night cruising on Saviers Boulevard, which he says is a problem because of gang confrontations.

And Hurtt, the former assistant police chief in Phoenix, said he is “looking to provide avenues for kids to get out of gangs--an alternative.” Schools and recreation and social services must be part of the answer, he said.

Owens said he sees the symptoms of escalating crime--drugs, guns and gang members--more than ever before. But he is not sure what caused the change or what more should be done about it.

In response to street drug sales, the department recently mounted a seven-officer bicycle patrol. A new computer system allows officers to quickly retrieve information on gang members, their friends and family and the cars they tend to drive.

Oxnard police continue to use two proven strategies--the aggressive prosecution of young repeat criminals and the targeting of high crime for extra enforcement.

But Owens said he believes that budget problems have undercut Oxnard and Ventura County’s vaunted ability to be tough on criminals.

To avoid costly booking fees imposed by the county, Oxnard and other cities now ticket and release thousands of misdemeanor suspects yearly who would otherwise have gone to jail. “That has made the fact that somebody is arrested a less significant event,” Owens said.

Likewise, the district attorney’s office no longer has enough lawyers to prosecute thousands of minor crimes it once aggressively pursued, he said.

Since the late 1980s, Owens said, Oxnard police have been seeing a tough new breed of hardened youth who rob and steal with impunity.

“What causes that, I haven’t a clue,” he said. “There was evidence of the same trend in the late 1970s, but the gangbangers grew out of it. Now we have another generation.”

A surge in the trafficking of crack cocaine has also occurred, Owens said. And, in a new twist, illegal immigrants--usually victims of crime--now control a large share of the drug business in impoverished La Colonia, he said. Many of the newcomers are more city-wise than their predecessors from rural villages, officials say.

Of the department’s 13,000 arrests last year, perhaps 75% were linked to drugs in one way or another, crime analyst David Keith said.

What that means on the street level, Patrolman O’Brien said, is a lot more danger. “When I started, they’d duke it out, now they shoot it out. Everybody has a weapon.”

BROKEN DREAMS: An Oxnard neighborhood is in trouble again. B6

County Crime Trends, 1980-91 CRIME OVERALL Decreased: 3.8%, 1980-89 Increased: 17.3%, 1990-91 Current: 30,000 serious violent and property crimes in 1991. CONTEXT: County still has one of the lowest crime rates in U.S. Crimes per 1,000 residents: 1980: 50.3 1989: 38.2 1991: 43.7 VIOLENT CRIME Increased: 4.2%, 1980-89 Increased: 35.9%, 1990-91 Current: 3,601 murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults in 1991. CONTEXT: Oxnard has 46% of county’s total and accounted for 83% of increase in 1990-91. Crimes per 1,000 residents: 1980: 4.8 1989: 4.0 1991: 5.2 PROPERTY CRIME Decreased: 4.7%, 1980-89 Increased: 15.1%, 1990-91 Current: 26,399 burglaries, thefts and arsons in 1991. CONTEXT: Camarillo’s 63% increase in 1990-91 was greatest, but crime rate remains low. Crimes per 1,000 residents: 1980: 45.4 1989: 34.3 1991: 38.4

County Crime: A Sharp Increase Since 1989

Aggravated City Year Homicide Rape Robbery Assault Camarillo 1989 0 9 34 55 1991 0 12 23 68 Fillmore 1989 1 2 3 58 1991 1 3 5 43 Moorpark 1989 1 6 6 95 1991 1 2 14 72 Ojai 1989 0 2 1 10 1991 1 3 6 12 Oxnard 1989 6 51 320 490 1991 8 74 518 1,055 Port 1989 0 7 13 97 Hueneme 1991 0 4 37 124 Santa 1989 1 1 48 86 Paula 1991 2 10 59 81 Simi 1989 5 11 66 181 Valley 1991 6 13 65 189 Thousand 1989 2 19 55 167 Oaks 1991 1 19 78 185 Ventura 1989 2 35 120 275 1991 8 41 146 225 Countywide 1989 20 175 702 1,740 1991 39 215 976 2,295

Crimes per Total 1,000 City Year Burglary Theft Auto Theft Arson Crimes people Camarillo 1989 221 679 76 19 1,093 20.9 1991 487 938 188 12 1,728 31.1 Fillmore 1989 110 206 20 10 410 34.2 1991 120 190 28 1 391 31.5 Moorpark 1989 155 186 45 10 504 19.8 1991 147 305 47 10 598 22.8 Ojai 1989 61 178 24 3 279 36.6 1991 79 208 30 6 345 44.5 Oxnard 1989 1,835 4,484 758 31 7,975 56.1 1991 2,125 5,047 981 51 9,859 67.3 Port 1989 146 338 54 2 670 33.0 Hueneme 1991 262 461 82 3 973 48.9 Santa 1989 370 851 81 5 1,443 57.6 Paula 1991 441 828 127 13 1,561 60.4 Simi 1989 859 1,625 348 39 3,134 31.3 Valley 1991 742 1,947 453 27 3,442 33.8 Thousand 1989 865 1,546 298 46 2,998 28.7 Oaks 1991 982 1,725 333 55 3,378 31.7 Ventura 1989 1,223 2,957 329 43 4,984 53.8 1991 1,274 3,401 472 41 5,608 59.4 Countywide 1989 6,385 14,039 2,267 240 25,581 38.2 1991 7,323 15,894 2,928 254 30,000 43.7