Changing El Monte’s Image to Fit Reality

Two signs greet motorists crossing the El Monte city line on Peck Road. “Welcome to Friendly El Monte” reads the first, and under that: “Patrolled by Helicopter.”

The juxtaposition sums up the schizophrenic view of law enforcement in this gritty blue-collar city of 115,000, and if at times it is an unintentionally comic combination, it is also quite effective.

One of the poorest cities in the San Gabriel Valley, El Monte also is one of the safest cities in the nation with populations between 100,000 and 500,000. The city’s own survey ranks it as 10th-safest, and police tout both their crime-fighting equipment and their highly focused programs for at-risk youths.

During the past 18 months, El Monte has led almost all other comparable Los Angeles County cities in the drop in its crime rates. Only far more affluent Glendale saw a greater dip in crime in the first six months of 1997, according to recently released FBI crime statistics.

Even the police seem a little baffled by their good fortune--they didn’t notice how comparatively safe their city was until reading about it in a newspaper two years ago. Now they are revving up a publicity campaign to promote El Monte as a safe place to raise a family, hoping to inundate the area with information about the drop in crime.

“We’re trying to change a long-lived stereotype,” assistant city administrator Matthew Weintraub said. The prevalent image of El Monte as a dangerous town “is a notion that does not hold up.”

The helicopter signs were posted years ago. When El Monte last year was ranked as the 20th-safest mid-size city in the nation in one survey, a business group had it engraved on dozens of pencils and distributed them. The newest additions are banners scattered throughout town proclaiming that El Monte is now the 10th-safest city nationwide.

El Monte’s campaign highlights the increasing use of crime statistics, numbers that police admit are notoriously unreliable markers of public safety but have been seized upon nationwide by cities hoping to draw more business and more affluent residents. In fact, El Monte viewed the original FBI statistics--which according to a Times analysis ranked it 16th--as inaccurate and crunched the numbers again to put itself in the 10th rung.

A 72% Latino city with a median household income of $28,000, El Monte has been unable to even lure an International House of Pancakes franchise within its limits, according to Chamber of Commerce officials. So being ranked in the same league as Thousand Oaks and Huntington Beach generates exceptional civic excitement in town.

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Police Chief Wayne Clayton, an avuncular 41-year veteran of the department and graduate of El Monte High School, credits strong citywide youth programs and his department’s aggressive community relations division, in which officers find jobs for at-risk youths and even put them up in their own homes.

Plus that helicopter, an armored car and the extra 20 officers in the past seven years.

“We try to balance things,” Clayton said.

But no one can pinpoint exactly why crime plummets, Clayton added. “I think everybody’s searching for the same answer,” he said. “If there was this one simple thing, you could jump all over that.”

To some City Council members, the chief deserves plaudits--and more. The council last month agreed to pay $1,082 for a five-disc CD changer that was installed in Clayton’s new city-purchased Mercury Grand Marquis.

“The man has done a fine job,” Councilman Jack Thurston said. “I don’t feel that that was unreasonable.”

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Mayor Pat Wallach did. A longtime police critic, she was on the losing end of the 3-2 vote. “Services need to go back into the community, not into department heads’ cars,” Wallach said. “The Police Department has had a lot of political clout.”

Clayton said the CD player was added to the car while it was on the lot without his knowledge. He said he had requested that the CD player from his old Mercury be installed, but that the current model only accommodates the more expensive five-disc player.

Still, he says the addition is justified and that political enemies are trying to make hay out of the issue. “We do a lot of driving in these cars,” Clayton said.

At first glance, El Monte may not look like a safe harbor. A collection of apartment buildings, mostly rental homes and industrial lots, the city is studded with hamburger and taco stands and discount stores. Just outside the city limits is South El Monte, which has a sprawling industrial area. El Monte’s biggest employers include Longo Toyota, the nation’s largest car dealership, the headquarters of Marshall Industries, an international electronic distribution company, and a Wells Fargo processing center.

Though demographics have shifted dramatically over the decades--once mostly white, the city is now majority Latino and increasingly Asian American--whites remain in most of the positions of power in local government.

In a way, little has changed. For decades, residents said, El Monte has contended with an image as a civic wasteland. The oldest city in the San Gabriel Valley, El Monte once marked the end of the Santa Fe Trail.

In the 1940s and 1950s, it was the shopping hub of the valley, with large department stores such as Sears and JC Penney built around the San Bernardino Freeway, which bisects the 10-square-mile town.

Even then the city was dotted with bars and desolate railroad tracks, bringing with them a sometimes seedy air that permeates books such as author James Ellroy’s recent memoir of his mother’s killing in 1950s El Monte, “My Dark Places.”

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Then malls sprouted in surrounding cities such as West Covina, and retailers closed their doors. “We kind of got left in the dust,” Clayton said.

The city became a magnet for new immigrants, with Latinos becoming the majority as whites fled for outer suburbs.

In the early 1970s, gang battles racked the town. It was then, Clayton said, that the Police Department hit upon its community policing strategy, which he believes is bearing fruit today.

Clayton recalls that the local Boys Club compiled a list of the 10 youths who would have the most promise if their lives were turned around. That list almost perfectly matched a police list of the 10 most dangerous gang members in town.

Police began to find jobs for problem youths and referred them to local social agencies. Crime dropped. That pattern continues today, police say, in part because of the Community Relations office in downtown El Monte, where six officers and a cadre of volunteers and other officials try to prevent crime by helping at-risk youths.

The office has expanded recently with the aid of federal grants and additional City Council funding. Its czar is Officer Ken Weldon, a garrulous veteran who wears a T-shirt with the logo of his youth baseball team and whose desk is shadowed by a cardboard cutout of John Wayne.

“This is a one-stop shopping center,” Weldon said in his office as volunteers bustled about. “We can help you if you help yourself.

“We’ve found that by helping people get jobs and getting them into service, they see us in a different light--as people who are trying to solve problems,” he said.

Last week, the office staff included a former computer graphics designer who is coming off a heroin addiction and is staying at a police officer’s home. Also present were school employees who tracked truant students and targeted them for counseling, a probation and parole officer, the six El Monte police officers and volunteer Alex Martinez.

The 19-year-old Martinez says he was going astray when Weldon took him under his wing three years ago and found him a job.

Now Martinez is studying at East Los Angeles Community College and hoping to be drafted by the Colorado Rockies as a pitcher. “If it wasn’t for him [Weldon] and my coming over here for counseling, to be honest, I’d be somewhere else doing something else.”

Outside, in El Monte’s faded but still vibrant downtown of discount stores and Mexican restaurants, where signs, music and conversation are predominantly in Spanish, residents said trust in the Police Department is one reason they have long felt secure in their town.

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“I feel safe here,” said Gabriel Alvarez, a 19-year-old Citrus College freshman who had just left the Ritmo Latino store, which sells Spanish music. “People who don’t live in El Monte, they say El Monte--whoa! They just don’t know.”

Locals spoke with pride about their city. “This isn’t a rich city, but it’s all right,” said Maria Rodriguez, 22, a receptionist and lifelong resident.

She gestured to the surrounding sidewalks filled with parents pushing strollers. “We don’t have fancy stores, but this is nice.”

Mary Cordova, a 52-year resident, said: “It’s just life in a small town. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Although many were mildly surprised to hear that their city ranked in the upper echelon of safe cities nationwide, upon reflection it made sense.

“Before, I thought there would be too many crazy people here,” said Roy Alvarez, 30, who moved with his wife and three young children from Rancho Cucamonga last month. “But now that I’m here, I see it’s OK.”