Merchants Fund Extra Patrols in Little Saigon

As Little Saigon, the heart of Orange County’s Vietnamese community, struggles to cast itself as a tourist hot spot, some merchants say one simple, unfounded emotion may be keeping people away: fear of crime.

“Perception is reality,” Westminster Police Chief James Cook said. “If the public perceives a place to be dangerous, then it just filters out and scares off the customers.”

To combat that fear, about 25 business owners are willing to shell out. In fact, they will pay more than $1,500 apiece to the Westminster Police Department for extra police patrols in the next 12 months.

The district, centered around Westminster’s Bolsa Avenue, is dogged by the perception that it’s dangerous, especially at night, merchants say. That translates into lost dollars for the several thousand Vietnamese businesses there, and dampens their hopes of someday turning it into a sort of Chinatown south.

“A lot of merchants are complaining their business is not as good as they thought, because the fear of crime is affecting the customer coming down and shopping in Little Saigon areas,” said Co Pham, president of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce.

So merchants have signed a one-year contract with the Police Department to pay $38,400 for an extra 1,200 hours of patrols. Police will begin meeting with the merchants this week to determine what kinds of crimes they think need the most attention and begin mapping out strategies to deal with them.

The idea is to prevent crime, rather than just react to it. Having foot and bicycle patrols that focus on seemingly minor crimes such as loitering and vandalism, according to the theory, helps avoid more serious crime.

In Little Saigon, the program is aimed as much at the impressions as reality, since police say crime has been dropping in Little Saigon--as it has throughout Orange County.

“They have about the same range of problems as anybody else, but the perception is they have a greater amount of hard crime,” Cook said.

For example, in November, December and January, police were called to Bolsa Avenue 396 times, a number comparable to those in other commercial areas of the city, Cook said. Eight cars were reported stolen in that period in Little Saigon.

The most frequent problems, Cook said, are traffic violations or accidents.

The police/business partnership comes as merchants and city officials are working on ways to attract more customers beyond Vietnamese residents who live nearby. The city is considering ways of making it more pedestrian-friendly, such as adding better street landscaping, signs and lampposts. A consultant is expected to be picked within the next month or two to help the city draw up a plan.

The partnership program, which city officials believe to be the first of its kind in the nation, was first tried one year ago this month at the Westminster Center. After one year, a survey of merchants showed they believed gang activity and fear of crime had dropped there. But the program was discontinued when the center was sold this summer and the new owners declined to participate, Cook said.

However, it did pique the interest of Little Saigon developer Frank Jao, who organized his fellow merchants and persuaded them to sign the police contract.

Jao, the head of Bridgecreek Development Co., said he believes Little Saigon is safe already. He tests neighborhoods by driving there in the middle of the night, parking his car and walking around to see if anyone bothers him. But an additional police presence, he said, should make people feel better about shopping there.

“Westminster, in my opinion, has been as safe as any city in Orange County, and far safer than L.A.,” Jao said. “But we don’t take that for granted.”

But some critics said the idea of private citizens paying for extra police protection creates the perception that “essentially, people with money can get better government services than others,” said Todd Brower, a constitutional law professor at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton.

“It’s a fairness perception issue,” Brower said. “I think really we think about things like police services as being things that are available to everyone equally and that we all share.”

But Cook argues that those who will benefit include not only the merchants but the people from all over the region who shop at Little Saigon.

And, he said, service will remain at the same level elsewhere in the city, because officers will be hired on their days off for the additional patrols.

Another benefit the program may have is the improvement of relations between the police and Vietnamese Americans. A recent police survey in Westminster found that Vietnamese Americans tended to have less trust in the local police than non-Vietnamese.

In Vietnam, Pham said, police “don’t protect you, they try to corrupt you.