Santa Ana Police Drug Tactics Are No Tough Sell to Her

She remembers her family telling the story of how her grandparents dropped coins into a toll box and crossed into the United States in 1900, when her mother was 9 years old, and settled in New Mexico, where there was work in the copper mines. Her parents headed West and in 1924, she became the first of the 10 children in her family to be born in California.

Everybody’s got a life story and that’s how Isabel’s started. Now an amazingly young-looking 70 years old, she and her husband have lived for the past 26 years in a comfortable neighborhood in the southeast corner of Santa Ana, a life made possible by his career as a cabinetmaker. Isabel stayed home all through the years and raised two children and now is a grandmother of three teen-agers. She acknowledges that she and her husband’s lives are pretty much the American dream, if the dream is defined as not starting out with much 45 years ago and ending up living fairly comfortably.

Their home is geographically removed from the city’s roughest neighborhoods, but they once lived on the west side of town until a murder on their block convinced them it was time to move. But even now, in the relative safety of their east-side neighborhood, Isabel says she doesn’t feel freed from the threat of crime.

It was the subject of crime that I wanted to talk to her about; more specifically, her city’s decision to have undercover police sell drugs made in the county’s own laboratory. At first blush, it seems like both a bizarre and sad juncture for a society: that the police are making drugs to sell to people so that they can, in turn, arrest them.

The police rationale was rather straightforward. Simply put, they say there are some bad guys out there on the streets, and they want to send them to prison. And more to the point, they’ve decided not to sit around and wait for them to make a mistake. The cops want to help them.

But beneath that layer of what sounds like borderline entrapment is, perhaps, more the heart of the issue. And that issue is to make people like Isabel feel safe and give her some sense that the drug culture and its potentially violent spinoffs aren’t running the city.

The question I put to Isabel this week was whether she approves of the police being in the drug-sales business. In the absence of a scientific poll, I was content to let her be my Silent Majority, based on her life story. What I was really interested in is how a citizen grapples with an issue like this--or if they do grapple--before deciding whether they like it or not. When we began talking, I had no idea what side of the issue she would be on.

For Isabel, the issue isn’t all that complicated. “Like the saying goes, it takes a thief to catch a thief,” she said. “It doesn’t sound right for them to be making drugs, but if that’s the only way, or if that’s one way to do it . . . it’s like those stings to catch other people, so I don’t see too much difference.”

I asked what she thought when she first heard the police were using county-manufactured drugs. “We laughed because we thought it was funny. But when I stopped to think about it, that’s when I thought, that’s a way to catch them.”

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She said she has no real misgivings about the policy. “I don’t think they’re going too far. I think they’re trying a lot of ways to try and stop it, or at least cut it down.”

She supports the police on most matters, she said, and is willing to give them the benefit of a doubt. “I put them up there with service fellows, they put their life on the line,” she said. “I guess I trust police and expect them to be good. I grew up with the feeling of respect for them, kind of like with a priest. You trust them, and you depend on them.”

Over the years, Isabel has attended neighborhood meetings that focused on crime-related issues. I asked if she and her friends have given up on anyone controlling crime. “I haven’t given up. I think they can put a dent in it. We all talk about it, but we don’t do much about it. We’re afraid, really.”

“We’re afraid.” That’s the message that gets back to the police, and it’s the message that drives policies like cooking your own drugs to sell on the streets.

To some of us on the outside looking in, it sounds like an idea born of desperation and fraught with all kinds of risks.

To Santa Ana residents like Isabel, desperate times require desperate actions. And nothing strikes of more desperation than the feeling that you can’t walk to the corner grocery at night or stroll through a city park.

Santa Ana citizens want to be able to do that again. And in this lifetime. They’re tired of a world turned upside down, and that’s why Isabel and others like her who spent their lives playing by the rules are willing to put up with a topsy-turvy scenario where cops sell drugs.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.