POLICING WATCH : Staying Power

Officer Mona Ruiz of the Santa Ana Police Department has survived the gunfire, said no to drugs and faced down the scorn from two worlds. Her story, recently reported in The Times, is testimony to the sustaining power of a dream.

As a former gang member pressured as a teen-ager to conform, she has had to will herself forward to a constructive life. Her presence on the department’s gang unit, after leaving that world behind, gives special meaning to the idea of community policing.

The 380-member department has only 15 women officers, and of these only three are Latinas. Those numbers alone, unfortunately, are not surprising; the ratios are not dissimilar to those of many other police departments in the region. But more than the numbers it was the odds in life that were stacked against Ruiz.

This 5-foot-3 mother of three went to work for the Police Department as a clerk when she was in high school. She had to deal with both suspicion from those she left behind and hostility from some on the force.

Gregory C. Brown, a criminal justice professor at Chapman University, himself an escapee from the world of gangs in Watts, says Ruiz is remarkable for having stayed; in moving up she did not also move out, to some other place. Isn’t such dedication to one’s roots what community-building is all about?

By bridging battle-scarred divides, by resolving that things would be different for herself and her children, Ruiz has become a role model for our time--both an officer and a gentlewoman.