Boosters Give Officer a Blue Badge of Courage

Inside the Mar Vista Gardens low-income housing project, there is a silence that often comes with peace, interrupted occasionally by the sound of playful children and mothers preparing dinner in their kitchens, their silhouettes visible from behind unlocked screen doors.

But it wasn’t this way three years ago, when Pete Casey became the Los Angeles Police Department’s senior lead officer for the Westside neighborhood where the project is located.

“It was hell,” said Gualberto Benitez, who manages property on nearby Slauson Avenue. “The gang members did whatever they pleased. They stopped traffic selling drugs, and if you saw something, no one ever talked about the problem. We were ignored for so long that people just gave up.”

Decades of violence and drug trafficking by an 800-member gang had helped cause the decay of what was once a neatly trimmed neighborhood of pastel houses and apartments, leaving the primarily Spanish-speaking working class residents living in a virtual battlefield.

Residents say the problems were alleviated somewhat when senior lead officers, specially trained members of the Police Department who work as liaisons with the community, were deployed in the area in the late ‘80s.

For his efforts organizing community cleanups, establishing dialogue between the Mar Vista Gardens Citizens on Patrol and police, and developing partnerships between city service providers and the community, Casey received the Officer of the Year award Friday from the Pacific Division’s Booster Assn.

The two other winners were Chad Lewis, a special problems unit officer, and Kimberly Kempton, a field training and basic car officer.

Casey remembers his first few days on this beat with displeasure. He can’t shake the image of a gang member he arrested on Slauson, a young man with flaming red devil’s horns tattooed on each side of his shaved head.

“You can’t mess with us,” the handcuffed youth said with an icy laugh as he was led to the patrol car. “We’ve owned this place for 30 years.”

He was almost right but, said Casey, “to me, that was unacceptable.”

“When Casey came along, a lot of people said, ‘We’re not going to connect with him,’ ” Benitez recalled. “He doesn’t even speak Spanish. And the gang members did a lot of things to try to scare him away.”

Gunfire whizzed by the stocky, bespectacled officer’s head, and gang members littered walls with graffiti depicting him riddled with bullets. Or they threw bottles at his patrol car as he passed by, all warnings to leave the streets to them.

Along the black-fence-lined blocks of Slauson, there was an average of 30 open-air narcotic sales arrests and at least 16 robberies a month. Children ran from the playgrounds of Braddock Elementary School to their front doors each day after classes ended at 3 p.m., afraid of stray gang bullets. Violence and graffiti had bled into the nearby Mar Vista Gardens housing development.

“I took this very personally,” said the 35-year-old officer. “People said to me, ‘Casey, we can’t sleep at night.’ I tried to imagine myself living there. I presented ideas to the community leaders and said if I didn’t succeed, I’d step down.”

As a young boy growing up in Delaware, Casey swore he would come to California and join the LAPD like his television heroes on “Adam 12.”

These days, as he patrols his beat in the area between Marina del Rey and Culver City, every graffiti-free brick wall and trimmed tree stands as a symbol of victory for Casey and the eight officers who work with him. Over one year, the officers set up surveillance cameras and arrested more than 20 key gang members.

He remembers dismantling two treehouses built by gang members who used them to terrorize bicyclists. And inside Mar Vista Gardens, he helped the Los Angeles Housing Authority establish an eviction policy and throw out 26 families of hard-core gang members.

“When you first meet him, you think he’s low-key, like you don’t know what to expect from him because he’s kind of quiet,” said Slauson resident and community leader Betty White. “It took time for us to warm up to him.”

Now Casey is fighting another battle.

Diagnosed almost a year ago with lymphedema, a swelling of the limbs due to blockage of lymph vessels or glands, he has undergone seven operations and is now in remission. At times, residents say, when illness prevented him from working in the neighborhood, he would still patrol the area he knows so well from home--by telephone.

“Through the whole illness, we were so close to him,” said White, who remembers when the community held a special prayer for Casey at a local church. “I believe, and he believes, that because we prayed for him, he made it. . . . [The doctors] didn’t think he was going to make it.”

Susan Wagner, a community resource specialist for City Atty. James K. Hahn, said she has worked “with a lot of senior leads, a lot of good ones. But Pete has the dedication that is extremely high.”

She said Casey skillfully uses all the city government resources available through the FALCON program. Focused Attack Linking Community Organizations and Neighborhoods involves the LAPD, the city attorney’s office and the Department of Building and Safety, and is aimed at cleaning up crime-plagued neighborhoods.

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“Pete has thrown himself into the project,” Wagner said. “He saw how overgrown the trees were, so he contacted street maintenance and he’s out with them trimming trees. If he finds problems, he brings them to me, and we figure out how to work it out.”

Former partner Cliff Yamamoto said that even when Casey was home ill, he would keep in constant contact with community leaders.

“He came back to work because they were going to take me out of this spot and put in someone that’s never worked in the area,” Yamamoto said. “Coming back to work has been good for him. I don’t think you’ll ever meet anyone who loves his job so much.”

He added jokingly: “He’s made it too boring to work here.”

Some community members worry about what will happen to the area once Casey returns to the streets as a patrol officer, possibly as early as July, as part of Police Chief Bernard C. Parks’ plan to put senior lead officers in more traditional jobs. But Casey assures them he will still be there.

At a youth rally recently in Mar Vista Gardens, Casey answered questions from children who wanted to know about guns, including whether he had ever been shot at. With a smile, Casey stood up, unbuttoned his police uniform to reveal a black T-shirt with a Superman logo on it and told the students: “Focus on school, focus on family, focus on careers.”