Drug Arrests On the Rise During 1992 : Crime: The countywide upsurge reflects a crackdown on street dealers. The figures still pale in comparison with L.A.

Narcotics arrests in Ventura County, reflecting a local law enforcement crackdown on street dealers, appear headed for a dramatic increase in 1992 compared with a year ago, the Sheriff’s Department reported this week.

The upsurge in arrests coincided with two trends observed by local and federal narcotics officers in the county during the year: more illegal methamphetamine labs and more indoor growing of marijuana in an effort to avoid police aerial surveillance.

“Our strategy is that we aim at the street-level dealers,” Sgt. Arnie Aviles of the sheriff’s narcotics unit said. “They’re the most visible,” he said, and generate the most complaints from the public.

Through November, the Ventura County sheriff reported 1,220 narcotics arrests--ranging from trafficking to illicit use of drugs--contrasted with 901 arrests for the same period in 1991, a 35% increase.

The sheriff’s figures cover all of the county except for five cities that have their own police departments: Ventura, Oxnard, Simi Valley, Santa Paula and Port Hueneme.

Preliminary state Department of Justice figures, covering all Ventura County jurisdictions, including these five cities, also reflect an upsurge in narcotics arrests when projected for the entire year.

For the first six months of 1992--the latest state data available--711 narcotics arrests were recorded in Ventura County against 558 for the same 1991 six-month period, a 27% increase, the agency reported. The total number of narcotics arrests for Ventura County in 1991 was 1,235, according to the state agency.

While an increase for Ventura County, the figures still pale when contrasted with the Los Angeles area, a major international drug trafficking center, where there were about 41,000 narcotics arrests in the city and county through October, 1992, according to police and sheriff’s statistics.

The surge in narcotics arrests in Ventura County reflects the increase in drug trafficking in the area, said Ralph Lochridge, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles regional office.

The DEA’s tri-county region covering Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties has absorbed more drug traffickers “as law enforcement pressures build up in Los Angeles and Orange counties,” Lochridge said.

The DEA’s strategy has taken a different tack than local law enforcement’s emphasis on street arrests, Lochridge said. This is reflected in a 14% drop in DEA arrests in the tri-county area in 1992, from 104 arrests in 1991 to 91 arrests in 1992, he said.

“It continues along with our strategy of concentrating on the big fish, the high-level violators, instead of the mutts and gophers,” he said. “We’re going after the major traffickers, which is really the mission of the DEA.”

This philosophy, he said, is evident in DEA figures that show that 376 pounds of cocaine were confiscated in the tri-county area in 1992, contrasted with 240 pounds in 1991, a 57% increase.

“Cocaine is the primary drug of choice,” Lochridge said.

Mexican nationals, he said, “control over 90% of all cocaine distribution” in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, he said.

They are the middlemen trafficking in cocaine produced in South America, which is moved over old marijuana smuggling routes in Mexico, and then into California, where the wholesale price ranges from $14,000 to $18,000 a kilo (2.2 pounds), he said.

“Los Angeles continues to be the primary source area for cocaine and heroin shipments into the tri-county area,” Lochridge said.

Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Santa Maria and Paso Robles “are prime distribution points,” he said.

In an effort to avoid aerial surveillance, Lochridge said, more illegal marijuana cultivation moved indoors in the Ventura County area in 1992 than in the previous year. In previous years, he said, marijuana could be found growing in remote areas of the county such as in the Los Padres National Forest.

Some of that still goes on, he said, but more and more drug agents are encountering “secret indoor grow operations that can’t be spotted from the air.”

Still, he said, new technology and old-fashioned tips continue to lead agents to the illegal hot-house operations.

Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Aviles said that in 1992 the “most dramatic thing we have seen is the amount of methamphetamine labs on the rise in Ventura County.”

“It’s easy to make,” he said. “It’s like baking a cake. And it’s extremely cheap. You can snort it, inject it or smoke it.”

Police figures for Oxnard, which has historically accounted for about a third of all crime in Ventura County, show that narcotics-related arrests there jumped to 2,090 as of Dec. 15, contrasted with 1,917 such arrests in 1991, a 9% increase.

“It’s a philosophical thing,” said Oxnard Police Department spokesman David Keith in discussing different approaches to waging the war on drugs.

“If you hit the big-time drug dealer, you dry up the source,” he said. “If you go after every single small-time user, you frustrate the dealers. It’s a matter of supply and demand.”