Program Helps Police, Residents Feel at Home : Glendale: COPPs, a community-based approach to law enforcement wins kudos. Expansion is under way.

One year ago, Hamlet Haroutyounian’s little hamburger stand had become a hangout for local gang members who made drug deals in plain view, sprayed graffiti all over the place and intimidated Haroutyounian whenever he protested.

The soft-spoken Armenian immigrant tried calling police. But soon after officers left, the hoodlums would return. Things were so bad that Haroutyounian could barely keep his fledgling business afloat and was on the verge of closing.

But then COPPs showed up.

COPPs is an acronym for Community Police Partnerships, a program in which Glendale police officers zero in on an assigned section of the city and get to know its people and problems. It may sound like Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show,” but the officers deal with issues Andy and Barney Fife never did, including battered women, prostitution and homeless encampments. And rather than just making arrests and taking reports, officers say they stick with the problem until it’s fixed.

Gang members “know the police will come, so they stay away now,” Haroutyounian said. “Business isn’t great, but it is improving. And we feel safer.”

Launched as a pilot program in January, COPPs originally focused on a one-square-mile area around Pacific Park--a low-income section of Glendale with high crime and gang activity. With a budget of about $300,000, the program started with one sergeant and two officers. Now, with a $375,000 grant from the 1994 federal crime bill, it is being expanded to the entire southern half of the city, with four additional officers and two mini police stations.

Glendale’s is not unlike the hundreds of other community-based policing efforts that have appeared across the nation in recent years. The officers assigned to the neighborhood beat no longer respond to radio calls; instead they patrol the area on foot, on bikes and in cars, make a point of getting to know residents, merchants and school principals and, as the officers put it, “help people help themselves.”

“COPPs is not so much a program as it is a philosophy,” said Officer Javier Ruiz, a founder. “Currently the Police Department handles problems in a Band-Aid approach--an officer responds to a call, diffuses the situation, takes a report and moves on to the next call. But we have a lot of latitude in this program in the way we handle police work. It’s very non-traditional.”

In the past eight months, COPPs officers have intervened in simple matters, such as overgrown lawns and unsightly properties, and more serious ones, like the case of a 14-year-old girl whose boyfriend had shaved her head in a jealous rage. The officers in that case not only arrested the boyfriend but also helped the girl get a restraining order to prevent him from bothering her again.

They have helped residents band together to form two neighborhood associations, worked with the owners of a run-down shopping center to spruce up the property and root out transients who slept in vacant stores, and disbanded a camp alongside a freeway ramp where homeless men were shooting at passing cars.

At Edison Elementary School, they have befriended several at-risk students and their families, steering the children away from gangs and truancy.

“Since the officers started coming around, now I can sleep at night,” said Evelio Martinez, 70, who lives next to a boarding house that has been the site of several disturbances. Martinez said the COPPs officers helped cut down his neighbors’ often erratic behavior, which included howling at the moon and asking to borrow a cup of sugar in the middle of the night.

The only people who don’t seem to like the program are those known as “criminal transients,” who deal drugs and commit other crimes in commercial areas, police said. Local laws prohibit police from coming onto private property to arrest loiterers without landlords’ permission. But the COPPs program has obtained waivers from several property owners, allowing the officers to make arrests as needed.

Currently, the officers are trying to oust undesirables from an aging commercial strip at San Fernando and Los Feliz roads. Business owners there have long complained about transients who drink beer, urinate and defecate in the open and harass female customers. The transients had become so entrenched there that, until recently, several were sleeping in a treehouse they built in the parking lot.

But the loiterers aren’t leaving quietly, and some say the officers are violating their civil rights.

“Most of the people here are just trying to look for work. The police don’t have the right to push us around,” said Juan Manuel Garcia, a 22-year-old day laborer from Mexico. “This is public property. Anyone can stand here.”

Ironically, the only political opposition to the program came early on from Glendale Mayor Rick Reyes, who is a former Glendale police officer. Reyes said in an interview that while he subscribes to the concept of community-based policing, he was concerned that Police Chief James Anthony’s original request for $500,000 to start the program, which was later reduced, was too high.

“It was the money that I was primarily concerned with,” said Reyes. “Why do we have to pay $500,000 for community-based policing when we should be doing it now, for free? Having said that, it’s in place and I support it now, because I think it’s what law enforcement should be doing.”

In the wake of the Rodney G. King beating and the police-reform recommendations of the Christopher Commission in Los Angeles, community policing programs have been growing in Southern California. Pasadena has used its program to clean up the Lincoln Triangle, a drug-infested area in the northern section of the city, and the Los Angeles Police Department has established community advisory boards made up of residents who meet regularly with police.

Glendale police hope to expand COPPs over the next three years to 12 officers covering the entire city. There are also plans for a number of storefront substations, an effort that has proven popular in Ventura and other communities.

“It’s like the old days in middle America, when everybody used to know their neighborhood cop,” Officer Ron Gillman said. “The people are glad to see us, the kids love us and we get to be involved in situations where we solve some real problems. It’s very gratifying.”