Cleaning the Streets : Grass-Roots Involvement in Policing Brings Awards

ANAHEIM — Elodia Gonzalez has stared down drug dealers. She has patrolled her street with a flashlight and faced death threats more than once. But perhaps her biggest feat was talking to law-abiding neighbors.

Gonzalez was credited Tuesday with helping to turn around a drug-riddled neighborhood on Sabina Street by rallying fed-up neighbors to demand more attention from city officials.

“When the drug dealers said they were going to kill her, she said, ‘I can kill you, too,’ ” said John Gaudette, a community organizer who last year watched Gonzalez persuade fearful neighbors to tell their stories to city officials at a meeting, which many say sparked the turnaround. “She’s a fighter.”

Gonzalez, 38, was among eight local people and organizations, including several police departments, honored for their work in community-based policing, the voguish new law-enforcement approach that aims to clean up troubled neighborhoods through grass-roots organizing.

The awards were devised by the group Orange County Together as a way to measure and encourage community policing. The group, formed by the Orange County Human Relations Commission and United Way of Orange County after the Los Angeles riots two years ago, consists of community leaders, business people and representatives of local government.

The butter-over-guns philosophy of community policing showed strongly in the award-winning programs.

The group gave its top officer’s award to a Costa Mesa bicycle officer who hounded city officials into scrubbing graffiti from an alley again and again for a month straight and organized neighborhood cleanup days. A team award went to Garden Grove police and a residents group that launched a newsletter and organized tenants and landlords to begin cleaning up crime-ridden Stuart Drive. A partnership award went to Santa Ana police and a group of parents so fearful of drug dealers that they banded together to walk their children to school.

“We find now that officers deal more with social issues than they do with law-enforcement issues,” said Garden Grove Police Lt. Scott Hamilton, who shared the leadership award with Gonzalez. “Police officers have to be social workers if they’re going to be successful.”

Analysts say community policing, a concept as loosely defined as it is widely discussed, is more than a catch phrase. Traditional police efforts failed to stamp out crime in many neighborhoods and often left them with an endless cycle of arrests and more crime, said Hugh Foster, director of the Golden West College Criminal Justice Training Center, which won a training award. The new approach gets residents involved in everything from targeting run-down buildings to planting trees, Foster said, and has reduced crime in targeted neighborhoods.

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Residents report a dramatic turnaround in Gonzalez’s Anaheim neighborhood, where a 13-year-old friend of her daughter died in a drive-by shooting a few years back, and where Gonzalez was afraid to clean up her yard for fear of coming into contact with syringes and condoms.

After years of standing up angrily to drug peddlers and vainly appealing for city action, Gonzalez, a mother of two, found out about a local organizing effort spearheaded by the Orange County Congregational Community Organization. Last May, the group rallied 500 residents for a showdown with city officials, and Gonzalez managed to get 10 of her neighbors to speak out at the meeting, despite their fears of gang retribution.

The following week, police assigned a community action team to the area and crime plummeted. Five months later, neighbors had a block party to celebrate their victory.

Gonzalez said she no longer fears for her daughters on the once-menacing street. Gone, too, are the drug dealers who hung out in front of her home.

“For so long we had no help or backing from anyone--even the police,” she said. “We had to put together 500 people to have that much power.

“Now it’s quiet. Thank God.”

Garden Grove launched its community policing approach last year, rewriting the Police Department’s mission statement to erase references to crime-fighting and instead emphasize the quality of life and making residents feel safe, Hamilton said.

The department won a $660,000 federal grant for community policing and used some of the funds to expand a patrol officer’s effort to improve the Stuart Drive neighborhood, a collection of largely low-income apartments plagued by frequent shootings, thefts, graffiti and gang activity, Hamilton said. Two officers assigned to the neighborhood work out of a donated apartment there, getting tenants together with landlords, helping residents launch a newsletter, holding job fairs and barbecues and getting the city to close off a nearby street that had become a popular shortcut for speeding cars.

Police said calls for officers have dropped by a third from the year before, and the approach has been extended to two other neighborhoods.

“It’s meant a lot,” said Mercedes Morales, a three-year Stuart Drive resident who publishes the neighborhood newsletter. “(People) feel more secure going out.”