ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : A Question of Trust

The Orange Police Department’s new efforts to rebuild trust in the El Modena area of the city are certainly welcome. That was the site of a controversial immigration raid a year ago that resulted in the deportation of 200 of the neighborhood’s residents. But the community policing campaign is also a little late.

The department has assigned two patrol officers to walk the neighborhood around the Villa Santiago apartments (formerly Orange Park Villas), the focus of the raid, which took place in the early morning hours of Sept. 18, 1991.

Police Chief John Robertson deserves credit for acknowledging that police have “grown apart from (our) community because we have become ‘incident-driven.’ ”

The foot patrol is one good way of trying to assure residents in this high-crime area that police are there not to harass them but to help them. But there is an irony in this because the Police Department helped make residents more fearful of police through its questionable participation in the infamous immigration raid.

Though the city initially denied it had a role in the U.S. Border Patrol’s action, that proved not to be the case. According to Border Patrol memos obtained by The Times through the federal Freedom of Information Act a few months later, the city not only requested the raid but its Police Department helped plan it and assisted in its execution.

It didn’t help that, in at least one instance, city inspectors assisted Border Patrol officers in getting into an apartment after the door was slammed in Border Patrol officers’ faces. Although not illegal, this form of entry was in violation of the immigration agency’s own policy and resulted in retraining of immigration officers about what is and is not allowed during a raid of this type.

The ensuing wariness among residents after the raid has made policing more difficult in a neighborhood that desperately needs aid in controlling crime. The foot patrol should help. But it would have been far easier if the damage to community relations hadn’t occurred in the first place.