Since We’re Neighbors . . . Neighborly Welcome : 200 Residents Attend La Colonia’s Police Station Opening

After the dignitaries had gone away, taking with them the fanfare that surrounds any grand opening, one of Oxnard’s toughest neighborhoods began to settle in with its newest neighbor: a police station.

About 200 La Colonia residents were on hand Wednesday morning to celebrate the opening of the storefront station at 211 N. Grant Ave.

And for the rest of the day, Officer Rafael Nieves greeted a steady parade of visitors to the defunct market, which now holds four desks, four phones and an American flag tacked to a bulletin board.

Neighbors called the station El Comandancia --the neighborhood command.

“A lot of people have the impression that because we live in La Colonia, we are all drug addicts, and that is not so,” longtime resident Fernando Minjares told Nieves over coffee and Mexican sweet bread.

“There are a lot of intelligent people in this community,” Minjares added, “and we are all for this police station.”

Women pushed strollers past the storefront station, peeking in to see who was inside. Young men on bicycles cruised by and wondered the same thing.

“This is the new police station?” asked one of two boys who rode their bicycles to the station’s doorstep. “This is pretty good.”

Neighborhood residents--young and old, poor and not so poor--turned out to support the new police station, tucked into an area of La Colonia known for the drug deals that have plagued the working-class community.

In the three square blocks surrounding the new station, police last year arrested 416 suspected drug dealers. That was more than 20% of the drug arrests made citywide.

Police sealed off the area Wednesday morning, allowing schoolchildren and city officials to gather in the street and honor those who brought the barrio station to life.

“Today we are here to open your police station,” Police Chief Harold Hurtt told a cheering crowd. “It will belong to the community, to the ones who work here and who live here.”

Gloria Perez brought her 7-year-old daughter, Araceli, down the street to celebrate the grand opening.

“I like this idea very much,” Perez said. “There have been a lot of drug sales and other crimes in the area.”

On Wednesday, two women wearing business suits and jogging shoes bounded into the station at noon and told Nieves they had never felt safer during their lunchtime walks.

But even though residents and police say that dope dealing and related crimes have been noticeably reduced since the City Council agreed last month to open the storefront, the problems are far from gone.

Residents only needed to see the construction workers in the adjacent La Paloma Loncheria to be reminded of that. Arsonists torched the tiny cafe after its owners, Fulgencio and Consuelo Camberos, donated rent-free space for the storefront station.

The Camberoses said it will be at least a week before they can reopen.

And although fewer drug dealers are running the streets in La Colonia, police officers know that many still hole up in nearby pool halls and bars, waiting to make sales.

“I arrested a junkie the other day who complained it had taken him three hours to score,” Nieves told the three other officers who will staff the station between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. seven days a week.

At 10 a.m., the group got its first citizen’s complaint from a woman wanting an abandoned car removed from her neighborhood. An hour later, a woman drove from El Rio to the station to have officers sign off a traffic ticket she got for not having taillights.

In the afternoon, Nieves and Officer John Neitzel walked through an area where dope dealers used to cluster on street corners.

All they found was a red Cadillac driven by a recovering drug addict who admitted shooting heroin into his veins once in a while. A search of his car found no drugs. The man, who had tattoos on his arms and neck, was set free.

“If he’s here, it’s because he’s scoring dope,” said Nieves, less than a half-block from the new station. “We didn’t find anything on him this time, but for guys like him, it’s only a matter of time.”