ANAHEIM : Police Chief Outlines Neighborhood Plans

Police Chief Randall Gaston released the city’s new Community Policing Plan this week.

The plan is aimed at reducing crime and improving the relationship between officers and residents in eight neighborhoods.

Seventeen officers are being assigned full time to the program, which will be implemented March 14. The program calls for officers to learn the concerns of each neighborhood’s residents and property owners and help them organize Neighborhood Watch programs. It seeks to eliminate feelings of mistrust between the department and residents, the report says.

The plan also calls for opening four “storefront” police substations in the northern, southern, eastern and western parts of the city.

The plan does not say which neighborhoods will be targeted, and Gaston did not return several calls for comment Wednesday. The neighborhoods were selected by the department after input from the city’s Gang/Drug Task Force, the Code Enforcement Department and other agencies.

Gaston wrote in a 29-page report on the program that it is needed for several reasons, including the public’s changing expectations of police officers, changes in the city’s ethnic composition and the city’s increasing crime rate.

“In order to deal with community concerns relating to crime, the fear of crime, social and physical order and neighborhood decay, the Anaheim Police Department has adopted a policing philosophy based on a community policing concept,” Gaston wrote.

“Fundamental to this philosophy is the belief that these serious issues can only be impacted through strategies that employ a total community effort involving police, government, school, church and neighborhood partnerships,” he wrote.

The city has had similar programs in the past on a trial basis and both residents and the police considered them successes.

The most notable program targeted the Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood between 1989 and 1992. One officer was assigned full time to the neighborhood, which is considered one of the city’s most violent.

The officer’s job was to meet with residents and property owners and help them deal with their neighborhood’s problems. The crime rate did drop and more crimes were solved. The program ended when a federal grant dried up.