Straight Talk About Gang Peril

Santa Ana police launched a youth program Monday as part of a growing effort to fight gangs and promote education in the Santa Anita neighborhood.

Officers held an all-day workshop with 100 students at Stephen R. Fitz Intermediate School just west of the neighborhood, bordered on the east by the Santa Ana River. Topics included drug and gang awareness, standing up to peer pressure and the importance of setting educational and career goals.

The department has started a series of programs in Santa Anita since March, when police and FBI agents entered the neighborhood to arrest more than 100 suspected drug and weapons dealers.

Police said the arrests were just the beginning of Operation Orion, a long-term plan to reduce crime and improve the social fabric of the neighborhood.

Seventh-grader Reynel Salgado said he hadn’t planned to attend college until he heard local businessman Francisco J. Valle speak at the workshop Monday.

Valle, son of a fieldworker, said education and hard work helped make him an oil-business millionaire.

Reynel was clearly impressed.

“I could get a better job than working at McDonald’s or Taco Bell,” Reynel said. “I could be a lawyer or something.”

Other speakers encouraged students to find alternatives to gang life.

“For many [families] in the neighborhood, it’s sometimes three or four generations who have been in the same gang,” said Lt. Bill Tegeler, commander of the department’s Westend Division.

Police hope the program at Fitz Intermediate will help “prevent [students] from joining the gang, like their older brothers or uncles or dads,” Tegeler said.

The department might hold similar workshops at other schools, he said.

The school program is one of several police initiatives in Santa Anita.

Officers now patrol the neighborhood on foot, on bike and even in a golf cart to build relationships with the community, Tegeler said.

The department offers tutoring to students living in one large apartment complex and one mobile home park, and has collaborated with the city on after-school sports programs at local parks.

Things have changed dramatically at Fitz Intermediate since the arrests that marked the beginning of Operation Orion, Fitz Principal Derick Evans said.

Graffiti, which used to appear on desks and bathroom walls every day, is almost nonexistent. Fights are down, and students seem “more relaxed,” he said.

“There seem to be [fewer] overt symbols of pressure to join these gangs,” Evans said. “That is giving me some indication that somebody’s doing a good job, either us or the police department.”

But Santa Anita community leader Roy Alvarado said the neighborhood has a long way to go.

“I still see the same things happening here,” said Alvarado, a 10-year resident who is president of the Santa Anita Neighborhood Assn.

“I did see different faces taking over for some of these guys [who were arrested]. The elements are still here, and everybody really knows it.”

The Police Department does not have updated statistics on crime in the neighborhood since the arrests, Tegeler said. But more than 70 of the gang members targeted in the sweep pleaded guilty to various charges, he said.

Alvarado said the department’s efforts represent the beginning of a long process in the neighborhood.

“We needed this many years ago,” he said. “It’s a start, [but] it’s only a drop in the ocean, is what it amounts to.”