Residents Try to Crush Crime Before It Occurs : East Valley: Encouraged by police, groups are operating their own neighborhood patrols.

When Patricia gets off from work, she doesn’t go bowling to unwind. She crushes crime.

As a member of the Orange Crime Crushers, Patricia drives around her Sylmar neighborhood looking for crime, reporting everything from taggers to gunshots.

She joined the Crushers a year ago, after a rash of thefts occurred in front of her home; one truck had been stolen three different times.

“I thought, ‘This is enough. This shouldn’t be happening,’ ” said Patricia, who declined to be identified.

She is not alone.

Motivated by anger and frustration, resident patrol groups like the Orange Crime Crushers are forming throughout the area served by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division--60 square miles of the East Valley with a population of about 350,000. During the past four years, such patrols have popped up in Sylmar and Sunland, with everyone from ex-security guards to working mothers in their ranks.

And no matter who they are or where they live, the patrollers are all fed up with the lack of security they feel in their own neighborhoods. Some blame the Foothill Division itself.

“We’ve been neglected,” said one Orange Crime Crusher who’s been patrolling since the group was started in summer of 1991.

Foothill Division Senior Lead Officer Glen Younger, who works with the patrollers, agrees. “They’re doing it because we’re under-deployed,” he said.

In Sylmar alone, there is only one officer on duty for every 35,000 residents, compared to a Police Department average of one officer for every 2,000 residents, Younger said. As a result, police hope to sell the idea of resident patrols to more neighborhoods.

“The public is going to have to get more involved,” said Foothill Captain Tim McBride.

Police have agreed to give top priority to calls from resident patrol groups like the Orange Crime Crushers. McBride said patrollers must agree not to carry weapons and must ride two to each vehicle, which should be equipped with a cellular phone. Citizen’s arrests are discouraged, with patrollers encouraged to wait the nine minutes it can take for police to respond to a priority call.

“They can’t be armed and they can’t take the law into their own hands,” McBride said. “We tell them just to be our eyes and ears, not to take action.”

That is often more than enough responsibility. In Sylmar, 17 Orange Crime Crushers patrol 385 homes covering 18 blocks, splitting the chores seven days a week. Younger, who keeps the group abreast of crime trends, said Orange Crime Crushers are usually on the lookout for residential burglaries and stolen cars.

Since burglaries usually occur during the day, most Orange Crime Crushers patrol while the sun is up. They mark their patrols by wearing orange armbands and tying strips of orange cloth to their car antennas.

Younger said the tactic of maintaining high visibility is a big deterrent. “Criminals are like cockroaches: They don’t want to be seen or heard,” he said.

To keep the spotlight on potential criminals, patrollers go out at unpredictable times.

“Sometimes I patrol in the mornings, sometimes I patrol in the afternoons, sometimes I patrol at night when I get off from work,” Patricia said.

The Crushers’ success is hard to quantify. McBride said Foothill Division has no statistics to show decreases in crime since these patrols began. But some comforting trends are apparent, McBride said: a reduced number of calls for police help.

“I can tell you in the communities where we have these patrols, we’ve had a lot less complaints from the community,” McBride said.

One Sylmar resident, Bill Raymond, 41, says he has less to complain about.

“There was some trouble in the neighborhood before they started, with day and night burglaries, and it seems almost gone,” Raymond said. “With the patrollers coming by, it makes you feel better.”

In Sylmar, Younger said residents have formed more than 125 Neighborhood Watch groups, the highest number of any community served by the Foothill Division.

Alicia Erwin, 48, manager of the Mountain View apartments on Astoria Boulevard is forming a patrol group in her neighborhood. After a man with a knife attacked a tenant, Erwin got fed up with trying to protect her apartment complex with only her husband’s help.

“I told the residents that if they weren’t going to be at the Neighborhood Watch that I was going to resign and not be there to protect them any more,” Erwin said. “More than half of them showed up. I was very proud.”

Now tenants are talking with police about organizing apartment patrols.

They may team up with the Sylmar Graffiti Busters, a group considering the use of home video cameras to catch the vandals who, in the past, they have cleaned up after.

While McBride and Younger preach the benefits of resident patrols, they also hope to help a new generation learn to protect their neighborhoods.

“That’s a big part of it,” said Patricia, who hopes to set an example for her young daughter. “Showing her you just don’t sit back and let things happen.”