Police Try Getting to Root of Problems : Law enforcement: A new emphasis on community relations encourages residents to act in tandem with officers. The results are mixed.

In the eight years that he patrolled Sun Valley, Officer Richard Burrow would often be summoned to a shabby old motel, a drug hangout on Sunland Boulevard, by fights, gunshots and complaints from neighbors.

Time and again Burrow would roll up to the graffiti-covered building, sometimes twice a week. He would step through the trash and arrest trespassers too drug-dazed to know where they were.

All that changed a year ago. Burrow was made a full-time leader of community policing in the San Fernando Valley, and he used a new strategy on the motel.

He had it destroyed.

“If you want to eliminate a problem, you have to go to the source,” he says. “That building was the source in that neighborhood.”

Burrow met with local residents and took their complaints and records on the place to city inspectors and City Council aides. After the building was declared a public nuisance, its utilities were cut off. The motel was boarded up and fenced. The city informed the absentee owner that he must raze the structure or the city would do it at his expense. In August it went.

The motel’s destruction presents one face of community policing, now 16 months old in the Valley. The effort, consisting of designated police officers’ working with a newly formed network of hundreds of residents, is aimed at producing a major change in day-to-day police interaction with the public.

Community policing efforts are being conducted elsewhere in Los Angeles, but the Valley program is the longest-running and the biggest. It contains many aspects of a plan for initiating a citywide community policing program unveiled last week by Police Chief Willie L. Williams.

Deputy Police Chief Mark A. Kroeker, who ordered the Valleywide experiment to start in June, 1991, says he is pleased so far. The year and a half has brought a “massive shift” in the attitude of officers and their method of policing in the Valley, he says.

While statistics show crime continues to increase in the Valley, Kroeker is bouyed because they also show that the rate of increase is declining.

From the public’s viewpoint it has clearly been only a beginning. A Times poll found that community policing is not widely known to the public. Three-quarters of those polled were unaware of community-based policing. Only 14% said a community-based policing program was active in their neighborhood.

Still, officers and residents involved give the program favorable marks. And ride-alongs and interviews with about half of the 31 supervising officers make it clear that their work has changed profoundly.

On a given day, Burrow and his fellow senior lead officers might be writing community newsletters and busting drug dealers, chasing gang members out of one park and playing softball with them in another, and, increasingly, getting action from various city departments.

Most significantly, they say, they have organized citizens to watch for trouble.

For example:

* In the northwest Valley, citizen snoopers watch hot spots and radio tips to officers waiting in squad cars. One night they spy on the dim corners of an apartment complex at Bryant Street and Vanalden Avenue in Northridge. From vacant units they peer out hoping to videotape drug deals. On another night they sit on rooftops in North Hills recording the license numbers of suspected drug buyers. “We see the same cars going by again and again,” volunteer Brenda Shaw says. Heavy on retirees, the police-organized Volunteer Surveillance Team has about 50 members and is at least partly mobilized about once a week.

* During the riots after the Rodney G. King beating, a police officer and a citizen liaison visit Korean merchants. Arsonists are reportedly marking Korean stores as fire-bombing targets. They tell the storekeepers what symbols to look for. No such bombings occur. Elsewhere, a Pacoima officer persuades gang members, with whom she has been working, to protect shops on Van Nuys Boulevard.

* A few blocks south of Cal State Northridge, schoolchildren are organized into a Junior Neighborhood Watch. They do not go on patrol, but they do keep an eye out for graffiti and hold monthly meetings with Officer Sally Barnes. The group has a mailing list of 150. Chris Gayton, 12, says Barnes taught him the truth about gangs. “They’re nothing but trouble,” he says. “They should all be dumped in the trash.”

* In Pacoima, residents of one street, encouraged by senior lead officer Stephany Payne, fight crime with floodlights. The streets look “like Las Vegas,” one resident says. It works. Gangs that have been using the street as a party room depart.

Senior lead officers are one rank below sergeant. Before last year they did community relations work two days a month. Kroeker’s innovation was to make the duty full time, lay out a plan for community policing and order the recruitment of hundreds of citizen liaisons, whom he officially welcomed last fall in the CSUN football stadium.

The Valley’s 31 senior leads oversee nine patrol officers apiece. Each senior leadworks in an area of about 35,000 residents. Kroeker has ordered lead officers to be visible. They are to attend Neighborhood Watch meetings, start programs and walk beats in business districts.

They are supposed to attack problem spots that breed complaints and crimes. Their arsenal includes calling on city agencies for code enforcement.

Kroeker said traditional policing means answering calls, making arrests and moving on, like Burrow’s trips to the motel. He compared it to swatting mosquitoes but ignoring the swamp. “Our focus now is on draining the swamps,” he says.

Kroeker says his plan grew out of discussions with Valley senior lead officers, patrol captains and City Council members. Details came from law enforcement experts, who say community policing is so much in vogue that more than 400 U.S. cities claim to be doing it.

Actual practices vary widely, says criminologist Robert Trojanowicz, director of the National Center for Community Policing at Michigan State University.

In a perfect program, he says, the police force would embrace the philosophy at all levels. Residents, political leaders and social agencies would be involved. The police force would actively use the media to tell the public about its activities.

“There is no one city that meets all of the criteria,” he says. But he puts several on a list of leaders.

He cites Portland, Ore., for having a five-year plan; Seattle, for strong police-community involvement; Aurora, Colo., for teaching the idea during academy training; and Reno for department-wide change.

Last year, after the Valley program started, the Los Angeles City Council ordered pilot community-policing programs around the rest of the city. Then came the riots of spring. “It stagnated and then sort of went away,” Sgt. Len Hundshamer, one of the coordinators, says of community policing.

Some non-Valley divisions are still doing programs on their own, however, and Los Angeles seems to be firmly on the bandwagon. Williams installed community policing in Philadelphia when he was police commissioner and says he is committed to a decentralized L.A. version.

After meeting with Kroeker and the 31 senior lead officers, the new chief came away declaring himself “very pleased with what is going on in the Valley.”

Officer Pete Weinzerl never goes far without his black book.

It is not a traffic citation book but a pad of tear-out forms requesting city action. The forms can begin municipal procedures such as towing away abandoned cars and closing public nuisances.

Weinzerl is the senior lead for what officers call the Rock--the hilly Sunland-Tujunga area. Wielding his black book, he knocks down abandoned houses, clears junkyards and fixes street lights.

Meanwhile, he estimates that he has made only 20 arrests in the past year, one-twelfth of his old norm. Instead of confronting criminals, he tips off city inspectors and rallies homeowner groups.

One day a week he sits in City Councilman Joel Wachs’ Foothill Boulevard office. There, residents have easy access to him.

He spends evenings at Neighborhood Watch meetings. Many mornings, he investigates problems phoned in from his growing network of activists.

Today he is driving on the Rock, checking a yard whose neighbors have complained of junk.

“In the old days we would never attack the source of a problem,” Weinzerl says. “We would just put a Band-Aid on it by making an arrest. And we would just keep coming out and coming out and making arrests. Now we go for the root of the problem.”

Yes, the yard is full of junk. Weinzerl makes a note to contact a city inspector. “We’ll get this cleaned up,” he says.

“Before, when I was a plain police officer, I didn’t know any of this stuff--the zoning and codes,” says Nancy Reeves, a lead officer in North Hollywood.

Since then she has used city enforcement to run suspected drug dealers out of a house where months of arrests had failed.

“It’s been a whole education,” she says. “But you can see it working.”

The police have always sought city

enforcement on occasion. But Valley senior leads’ requests have nearly tripled in a year, says Sharon Perry, a city inspector.

Perry handles requests from three of the five Valley police divisions. She often tours properties with officers. She says 25 structures in her area have fallen victim to community policing in a year, up from 10 or fewer a year earlier.

The main business of community policing is Neighborhood Watch, a well-worn idea, two decades old in Los Angeles. The basic idea of community policing is not new, just new for now with a fresh title.

Community policing by another name was team policing, initiated by Chief Ed Davis in the early 1970s. Teams of patrol officers, detectives and supervisors were assigned to neighborhoods to meet all police needs from Neighborhood Watch to murder investigations. The plan fell victim to economics. It was heavy on supervision and needed more personnel. Old-timers say it also lacked support from the ranks.

Kroeker ordered senior lead officers to make Neighborhood Watch bigger and better. Most of their time is spent tending the groups of volunteers, and activities are both traditional and innovative.

Officer Rick Gibby, in the northwest Valley, had a program to combat car theft. He showed residents how to install “kill switches” that keep thieves from starting cars without keys.

Officer Stephanie Tisdale, a senior lead in Reseda, gets residents of drug-plagued neighborhoods to write down license numbers of suspicious cars. Then she writes to the registered owners, warning them that their cars were seen in drug transactions. She even invites them to call for a talk.

“Out of 300 letters sent, I got two calls,” she says of one round of correspondence. “But I didn’t see many repeat offenders coming around the area.”

Officer John Girard has organized a network of residents to be his eyes and ears. Made up largely of apartment residents and operators of small businesses, they call about problems such as drug dealing, graffiti and vandalism. They tell him about the movements of drug dealers and feuds between gang members. As he tours North Hills, Girard’s pager is beeping constantly.

“I used to receive radio calls,” he says. “Now people just call me direct when they want to tell me what’s going on.”

The officers are spread thin, limiting their impact. By the department’s own count, fewer than 2% of Valley residents are officially enrolled in Neighborhood Watch, 17,000 of the Valley’s 1 million-plus residents.

There is no official pre-community-policing count, but Kroeker says he thinks the number has gone up sharply.

Among the 17,000 are 2,000 hard-core activists. These are the block captains and community representatives recruited to be direct liaisons to the police.

“Without any reservation, I can say citizen involvement has exploded,” Kroeker says. “Over the last year and a half, a modest estimate is that there has been a 50% to 75% increase in the involvement of the community. I would measure that by the number of people as well as how much time they are spending on these programs.”

Councilwoman Joy Picus says, “Not everybody knows it’s out there, but where programs are, people are aware that something is happening that is different. Most of them are aware that something is different on the block because crime is down.”

For many of those investing time, the payoff is a feeling that they have better control of their neighborhoods. They like having a direct line to a responsive police department. They like the clout that comes from being organized.

“When one person from our group calls, it’s one voice with 50 or 60 echoes behind it,” a member of Canoga Park Business Watch says.

Becky Leveque of Porter Ranch is a believer. Her house was broken into twice last year. With a senior lead officer, she formed a Neighborhood Watch program that attracted about 500 residents to its first meeting. She says police now tell her that crime in their neighborhood has dropped dramatically.

“For the first time, we have neighbors coming together,” Leveque says.

In Reseda, Tisdale has developed a “predator list” of repeat offenders who make a living off crime. She gives the list and booking photos of the criminals to patrol officers and Neighborhood Watch block captains.

Community policing is not supposed to stop at the 31 senior lead officers. Each of them is supposed to spread the word in the department, starting with the officers under them.

Police officials say this is happening. It is not unusual to see officers from rookies to captains at Neighborhood Watch meetings.

Officer Mario Rivas, a graveyard shift rookie, attends a North Hollywood meeting on his own time to meet his clients among the citizenry. He says the department seems to be at the dawn of a new era.

Veteran Officer Rich Groller says community-based policing has renewed his enthusiasm for the job.

“I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, and no one ever asked me what I thought until last year,” says Groller, who assists a senior lead officer in Van Nuys.

Senior lead officers say results can be slow because they are overworked. A need for more officers is a common theme.

In the Valley, only the Van Nuys Division has extra patrol officers for community policing, five to assist the senior leads. In the West Valley station, all seven senior lead officers share one office and one phone. Officers who want to serve refreshments at Community Watch meetings must buy them with their own money.

In the ranks, glad-handing the public does not appeal to everyone. Some officers scorn the soft approach to police work.

Ronald Bergmann, the West Valley Division patrol captain, preaches community policing to his officers but not all are believers.

“I keep telling the troops that there is a train coming down the tracks, and you either jump on board or you are going to get run over,” he says. “There are still some officers sitting on the tracks.”

“I’m afraid they’ll make a community relations outfit out of the LAPD, not a law enforcement agency,” says Gene Smith of Northridge, a police officer for 25 years who now owns an ice cream parlor. He is a self-described member of the Old Guard.

In the rank and file, patrol officers’ duties have not changed, but they are supposed to think about problem solving and community relations. One example of community-mindedness is the resolve of more than 100 Foothill Division patrol officers to learn Spanish on their own time. Another is the habit in the ranks, now widespread, of sending notes about neighborhood problems to the senior leads.

Kroeker says attitudes are changing slowly. That is largely because the manpower shortage gives patrol officers little time for community work, he says.

“The next wave of emphasis is going to be on all the officers out there,” he says.

The experts agree with him about the need for top-to-bottom change.

“If you expect these 31 officers to do it all, it is doomed to failure,” says Trojanowicz, the Michigan criminologist. “Community policing is a philosophy that has to permeate the entire department.”

Predictably, enthusiasm among the citizen participants is high.

“We feel empowered,” says Lilian Salin, a community representative in Studio City, a Neighborhood Watch veteran. “This is a wonderful thing. It gives a better sense of safety to the community.”

On the other hand, Joe Sanchez, another community representative, does not feel the Police Department is giving community-based policing its full support.

Sanchez, a former gang member who now works as a youth coordinator in San Fernando, says he has considered quitting his duties as a community representative because police officers in the Foothill Division do not return his calls or provide him with such information as neighborhood crime statistics.

“They have given me no support whatsoever,” he says.

Furthermore, not all Valley residents are gung-ho joiners.

Weinzerl says it is hard to interest residents of low-crime neighborhoods, who tend to be complacent. And those who live where crime is high are often a discouraged group, he says.

In parts of North Hills it has taken senior lead officer Girard months to establish functioning Neighborhood Watch groups. Most residents are apartment dwellers who feel little connection to the community.

In Pacoima, Officer Payne sought to tap the longtime residents of high-crime areas.

“Instead of a whole block, you may have a few people,” she says. “But they can be just as effective.”

Several community leaders and heads of organizations voice positive opinions on the effort, though few know it in detail.

“I think there has been progress made,” says Jose DeSosa, a Valley resident and state NAACP president. He reports improvement in the relationship between police and the community, particularly in the Valley, since the King beating. He says complaints to his organization about police abuse have been “reduced considerably.”

Paul Hoffman, American Civil Liberties Union legal director, reports favorable community reaction. He adds that “the information has really been anecdotal and not comprehensive in any way.”

Pacoima activist Irene Tovar says, “There is no doubt in my mind that there is better community relations.” Before community-based policing there was little communication between police and the Valley Latino community, she says.

However, Karol Heppe, executive director of Police Watch, a private citywide agency that advises victims of police abuse, says she has seen little improvement in police-community relations. “It’s business as usual,” she says of complaints to her office. Complants averaged 51 a month in 1990, spiked to 82 in 1991 and have gone down again, to 48.

A fitful start is to be expected, according to law enforcement experts who champion community-oriented policing.

Jerome Skolnick, a UC Berkeley law professor who has written about police subjects, says community policing usually takes hold fastest in middle-class, stable neighborhoods where the threat of crime is a high concern. Thus the Valley may be the best laboratory for a program, he says.

“Community-oriented policing is more than anything else a vision of how you talk to people, how you interact with people,” Skolnick says. “It works better with more stable populations.”

Skolnick says success is judged by levels of comfort and fear, not crime statistics.

“The police can only do so much to stop crime that is rooted in persistent social problems stemming from income inequality and social deprivation,” he says.

Pamela Delaney, executive director of the New York City Police Foundation, a citizens’ watchdog group, agrees that results cannot be quantified. “Ultimately, the goal of solving problems will reduce the number of radio runs,” she says. “But there is a long lead time before there are significant results. . . . But if people are satisfied, does it really matter if crime is going down or up?”

Kroeker, however, keeps an eye on a handful of statistics for indications of how Valley community policing is doing.

They show that arrests in the Valley are down while crime and police response time to emergency calls are up. Community policing is presumed guilty for part of both trends because it has taken lead officers away from crime calls.

But Kroeker notes that the decline in arrests has been only for minor crimes. And the rate of increase in crime is down--to 5% for the first five months of this year, compared with 8% during the same period in 1991.

Kroeker says he expected community policing to exact a price in one important measurement of police service: the time it takes to get to an emergency.

The expectation proved true, but Kroeker says the increase, an average 18 seconds per call to 7 minutes and 54 seconds, is within bounds. “I can accept it,” Kroeker says. “If it gets to a minute, I won’t.”

Meanwhile, police in the Valley assume the project is here to stay in some form.

“Unless I am told otherwise--and I don’t expect to be--we are not backing away,” Kroeker says. “To do that would be to fall back--to lose the synergy and momentum we’ve developed. It will be burning bridges with the community. We can’t turn back.”

Staff writer Leslie Berger contributed to this story.