Crackdown on Violence Demanded

Rattled by the deaths of two teenagers in less than a week, residents lined up Wednesday, urging the City Council to put a stop to the deadly gang violence.

Publish the names of gang members, spend more money on police forces, and revive the Police Department’s gang task force, said two dozen residents who came out for a special meeting called to address the youth problem. “You need a task force that is bigger and meaner,” said Allen Pollock, 62, who lives in the North Oxnard neighborhood where 15-year-old Luis Magana was fatally shot on Monday. “We don’t want to be known as the Dodge City of Ventura” County.

Police Chief Harold Hurtt said at the meeting that he is prepared to provide extra gang patrols and homicide investigators, but that it will cost the Police Department about $25,000 a month in overtime.

Unless the city can foot the bill, other police programs, such as bike patrols and community-oriented policing, could suffer, he said Wednesday.

“I understand the financial situation of the city, but this is a critical time for us,” Hurtt said. “It is critical we don’t slip back.”

City Councilman Andres Herrera said in an interview Wednesday that he would support taking money from other departments to pay for beefed-up police service.

“I think we have reached a point where we don’t want to be alarmist, but we can no longer tolerate what is happening,” Herrera said. “Right now, cost is almost immaterial to establishing public safety.”

Wednesday’s special meeting was called specifically to deal with the latest spasm of violence. Oxnard’s overall crime rate fell 5.8% in 1995, with a total of 11 homicides for the year. But Magana’s death on Monday marked Oxnard’s fifth homicide in just one month of 1996.

“I think the bottom line is that whatever we are doing is not working,” said Councilman Bedford Pinkard, who attended a candlelight vigil for the slain teenager Tuesday.

Before Wednesday’s meeting Hurtt announced plans to revive the department’s gang task force and deploy 12 officers to keep it on the streets seven days a week.

Hurtt also said the department would assign extra homicide detectives and add more shifts until the murder cases are solved or the leads run dry.

“I just want the residents of Oxnard to rest assured that we are going to give what we see as a very high threat to security our utmost attention,” Hurtt said.

But Hurtt did not discuss specific strategies the police would use to track down criminals, saying he did not want to jeopardize police safety or tip off suspects.

Hurtt and other city staffers initially planned to brief the City Council on such strategies Wednesday behind closed doors before holding a public meeting. But officials scrubbed the closed meeting plan after The Times protested it would violate the Brown Act, the state law that generally requires government bodies to meet in public.

The Ventura County Star also objected to the closed meeting and threatened legal action if the public was shut out.

“I just think that the challenge that has now been issued by both local newspapers over our ability to discuss the specific tactics for our police personnel . . . is diverting attention from the real issue,” said Tom Frutchey, Oxnard’s city manager.

Hurtt said that he had asked to meet with the council in private because he wanted to brief the officials in detail on his department’s response to the flare-up of gang violence. “We really wanted to give [the council] an in-depth view of where our investigations are,” Hurtt said. “And we didn’t want to share with the persons involved with the violent activity what our strategies are going to be.”

Hurtt said he had planned to tell the council which suspects officers are targeting and what confidential intelligence indicates about the situation.

Earlier in the day, City Atty. Gary Gillig said the closed meeting was justified under an exception to the open-meeting law. The law allows government councils to meet in private during extraordinary times of unrest--specifically when there is a “threat to public services or facilities.”

Gillig called the threat to public services a real one because he said so many officers have been pulled off their regular duty to investigate the recent killings.

But in a letter to Gillig, Times lawyer Karlene W. Goller called such a use of the exception “a ruse to get around the [law].”

“[The law] does not allow the Oxnard City Council to close a meeting to discuss law enforcement, which is exactly what the council is planning,” Goller wrote.

After a spate of letters and phone calls from media lawyers, city officials changed their minds several hours before the meeting.

The meeting opened at 9 p.m. with community members asking for a stronger police presence.

But some community leaders worry that strengthening police response will not rein in the violence.

“The real cure isn’t more cops,” said Oscar C. Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Ventura County Mexican-American Bar Assn., said earlier Wednesday. “I think the disease is much deeper than that. There are some fundamental problems here. I think what we need is to pay more attention to some aspects that public servants have no control over and and that is the family life. I wonder how many parents know their kids are gang members.”

Karen Burnham, Oxnard’s recreation superintendent, suggested Wednesday expanding city youth programs as a way to keep teenagers out of trouble. Opening another teen center and including more youth in City Corps, a volunteer work program, could serve as short-term solutions.

“It is important to give the youth, who are looking for some organized activities, some positive options, instead of the more negative ones others are choosing,” she said.

Pinkard places some hope in a task force now working on a youth “Master Plan”--a blueprint for what programs and activities the city could provide to keep Oxnard’s youth on the right track.

Pinkard traces youth violence to what he calls a steady decline in city activities for youth due to state cuts in money for local governments. A former city recreation official, Pinkard said Oxnard has lost 32 after-school programs, three teen centers and scores of sports leagues since the 1970s.

“We neglected young people several years ago when we began to disassemble recreation and youth programs,” Pinkard said. “I think [the violence] is the direct result of cutbacks that we had at the time.”

Wahlgren is a Times correspondent and Kelley is a Times staff writer. Correspondent Andrew D. Blechman also contributed to this story.