Community Policing Hits Home : Law enforcement: When police asked for help fighting crime, Valley residents and merchants responded. And the crime rate dropped.

The many skeptics of the powers and potential of community-based policing need only visit with Officer Joe Losorelli and his often-mean streets of Van Nuys to see that it can work--that criminals can be the ones put on the defensive, instead of everyone else.

Losorelli is one of several dozen of the Los Angeles Police Department’s senior lead officers in the San Fernando Valley who have been at the vanguard of the city’s first concerted effort to promote the concept of community-based policing for the past three years.

As part of that effort in the Valley’s five police divisions, the senior lead officers have enlisted the residents and merchants of the neighborhoods they patrol, asking them to become the eyes and ears of the Police Department in its war on crime.

Have they heeded the call? Have they ever, police say.

From the lush green avenues of the West Valley to Losorelli’s blighted section of Sepulveda Boulevard to the gritty neighborhoods to the east, the response has been even better than police had hoped for, as homeowners and renters alike have joined with them to keep a lookout for crime and for crime trends.

More than 3,000 residents are registered as block captains in the Neighborhood Watch program--a cornerstone of community-based policing. A typical block captain might have dozens of residents participating in their Neighborhood Watch group. The group members do everything from keeping an eye on neighbors’ homes to conducting, with police training, surveillance on areas hit by taggers or other criminals.

Police say they don’t keep comprehensive statistics on the number of Neighborhood Watch participants but agree their ranks have been growing. The growth reflects a steady evolution of community-based policing in the Valley from a small cadre of officers and volunteers who went door to door in 1991 seeking new Neighborhood Watch members to a well-oiled machine that is responsible for what police say is a dramatic drop in many types of violent crime.

“Community-based policing is working just great out here,” said Deputy Chief Martin H. Pomeroy, who commands all Valley police divisions. From morning breakfast gatherings to night meetings, Pomeroy said, he spends “the great majority” of his time these days working with community groups, chambers of commerce and any other organization that already is involved in community-based policing efforts or wants to participate.

Pomeroy cited such community policing efforts as the primary reason for a 14% decrease in serious crimes such as homicide, rape, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft in the first three months of 1994 over the same period last year, and for a 9% drop in such crimes in 1993 when compared with the year before.

“We have had a continuing reduction in crime throughout the Valley,” said Lt. Joe Germain, who heads an anti-gang unit known as CRASH, or Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. “The reduction has been across the board.”

Officials acknowledge that there is no way to definitively connect community-based policing with the crime rate, which is influenced by many variables. But they doubt the rise of the program, and the drop in the crime rate, is entirely coincidental or unconnected.

Perhaps nowhere has the effort been more impressive, however, than in Basic Car Unit 9A21, the domain of Officer Losorelli.

Last year, Losorelli became the first LAPD officer ever to establish a civilian network that included a block captain on each and every one of the 150 or so blocks in his west Van Nuys area. For his work--which often includes 16-hour days--Losorelli was named senior lead officer of the year in the Valley in 1993.

And for their work, the residents who work with Losorelli saw a significant drop in crime and blight, and developed a two-way system of policing in which they have some say in how things are done. “No doubt about it,” Losorelli said, “more people are getting involved every day.”

Losorelli is particularly proud of one of his accomplishments: starting a Sepulveda Business Watch organization in late 1992 and transforming it from one merchant into a crime-fighting network with 360 businesses.

Sgt. Ed Brayton, the community-policing coordinator for Van Nuys Division, said all of his senior lead officers do as Losorelli does, although each is given leeway to work with civilian volunteers as they see fit.

Indeed, there is a kaleidoscope of community-based policing programs in the Valley, some large and some small.

Bilingual officers assigned to Project Amigo help Spanish speakers navigate the police and governmental bureaucracies, telling them where to handle DMV and Social Security problems, traffic citations, unfair-labor complaints and landlord-tenant disputes.

The vaunted Jeopardy program provides first-time juvenile offenders with an alternative to gangs and drugs; some box, while others keep themselves busy running and training on a track team, said Detective Andy Monsue, who coordinates many of the Valley community-based policing programs.

Operation Sparkle--initiated citywide this year--is in its fifth year in the Valley, getting volunteers to paint out graffiti and clean up trash-strewn neighborhoods. Monsue said 5,000 people participated in Operation Sparkle last year and that he hopes to see at least 1,000 more volunteers this October.

And of course, there are the Neighborhood Watch groups, which tell their civilian block captains of their concerns and alert them to crime problems. These, in turn, are passed along to police and city agencies.

“The information goes up and down, from the community to the police and back,” Brayton said. “It’s not a question of the Police Department saying this is the way it’s going to be and you’re going to live with what we give you. They are helping us formulate strategies and solve problems.”

Much of the groundwork for the Valley’s community-based policing effort started with Deputy Chief Mark A. Kroeker, who was tapped by Chief Willie L. Williams recently to set up a similar program in South-Central Los Angeles.

Kroeker may have left the Valley before seeing his pet project come to full fruition, but he’s been keeping tabs on it since taking over his new post six months ago. He says he is greatly encouraged by what he has seen in the Valley, both for its residents and those in the rest of the city.

“Crime is coming down in the Valley and violence is coming down in the Valley,” Kroeker said. “And to me, that is very encouraging.”