Outgoing Oxnard Police Chief Not the Retiring Type

Oxnard Police Chief Art Lopez will end a 34-year career in law enforcement today and immediately begin a second career as part owner of an investigations and security firm in Los Angeles County.

“I wanted to relax a little bit, but it just didn’t work out that way,” said Lopez, who turns 55 next week. “On Monday morning, I’m back at work again.”

Lopez, who was Oxnard’s top cop for six years and was one of three finalists for police chief in Los Angeles in 2002, retires after spending almost all of his adult life in uniform, including nearly three decades with the Los Angeles Police Department.

“I don’t know any other job,” Lopez said Thursday, as he discussed today’s simple goodbye -- a lunch with friends and a cake-cutting at the police station.

“But I recall [former L.A. police chief] Ed Davis telling me police chiefs lose their effectiveness after six or eight years. And I knew it was time for me to move on.”

Lopez leaves behind a simmering controversy. He has joined county prosecutors in seeking a permanent ban on Colonia Chiques gang members from gathering within a huge “safety zone” in which about half of Oxnard’s 192,000 residents live.

Invoking a strategy common in Los Angeles but unprecedented in Ventura County, prosecutors gained a temporary ban last summer after a spate of gang-related homicides. Lopez said violence in the safety zone has dropped sharply. A judge’s ruling on a permanent injunction is pending.

But some community groups insist that the anti-gang injunction is racist and is being used by police to harass innocent Latino youths.

Lopez said seeking the injunction was one of his best decisions.

“There are some civil libertarians who don’t care for it,” he said. “But this was hugely popular with the community.”

Oxnard officials, citing a 24% drop in crime since 1997, said Lopez was welcome to stay indefinitely.

“I think he did a great job,” Mayor Tom Holden said. “He arrived at a time when violent crime was escalating, and he implemented successful programs to control it.”

Lopez created a violent-crime task force, shifting manpower and department attention to controlling gang violence, Holden said. “And the gang injunction was a tool that was needed.”

Assistant Chief John Crombach, 51, will take over as interim chief while officials search for a permanent replacement, Holden said. In 1998, Crombach was appointed interim chief until Lopez was selected.

Lopez said Crombach would make an excellent chief, as would several others in the department.

“I think Crombach is probably the most qualified,” Lopez said. “But I don’t think it’s right for me to endorse a successor.”

Since arriving in Oxnard, the low-key Lopez has distinguished himself as a calm and orderly executive with a knack for turning hostile community meetings around. He improved relations with many ethnic leaders.

But even before last year’s gang injunction, those relations were tested by a string of police shootings in 2001 that touched off fear and anger in the community. Over eight months, Oxnard police shot and killed five men, most of them mentally ill.

The last was the fatal shooting of a distraught, knife-wielding 23-year-old artist who was killed while hiding in his bedroom closet after his mother called police to take him to a hospital for treatment.

All of the shootings were ruled justified by county prosecutors, but Lopez ordered more training for his officers on how to deal with emotionally disturbed suspects. Sixty to 70 officers have been trained, Lopez said. And Ventura County has implemented a comprehensive system so specially trained officers are available at all times.

“Those shootings were our biggest controversy,” Lopez said. “Especially the last one.”

A lawsuit arising from that last shooting cost the city $1.55 million, one of the largest payouts in city history.

Lopez said he would maintain ties to Oxnard, staying active in the Salvation Army and the local Boys & Girls Club. He said he would help raise money to erect a memorial to the seven officers killed on duty in Oxnard. And he said he would keep his condominium near the beach at Channel Islands Harbor.

But his primary residence will be in the Porter Ranch area of the San Fernando Valley. And his main focus will be in Los Angeles County.

Lopez will receive a pension of nearly $125,000 a year for service with the LAPD and in Oxnard.

In his second career, he will join another retired LAPD veteran, Capt. Ken Hillman, in running the security firm, Lopez said. They plan to expand a 90-officer security force by adding a private investigations unit and security detail to protect the rich and famous -- both lucrative specialties, Lopez said.

“I really want to try something outside of police work,” he said.