By Sean Emery and Denisse Salazar
Orange County Register
SANTA ANA, Calif. — Santa Ana has drop-off in crime after it changes its police tactics.
Santa Ana leaders are celebrating a significant drop in homicides over the past year, including a reduction in gang killings to levels not seen in more than a decade in a community that has historically led the county in gang violence.
Last year brought a 45 percent decrease in gang homicides in Santa Ana, the most significant reduction since a homicide spike in 2006 led the department to increase its gang unit.
As a result, gang homicides are nearly at levels not seen since 2000 in a city that is home to about a third of Orange County’s approximately 300 documented gangs.
Santa Ana police officials say efforts to target gangs rather than gang members, to aggressively investigate and bring closure to cold cases, to partner closely with school police, parole and probation officers and the District Attorney’s Office, plus a high-profile takedown of Mexican Mafia members are believed to have played a role in the decrease.
When non-gang-related homicides are included with the gang incidents, there were a dozen slayings in Santa Ana during 2011, compared with 29 the previous year, a nearly 60 percent drop.
Santa Ana police Chief Paul Walters says the number of killings in 2011 was believed to be the lowest since 1978, when 100,000 fewer people lived in the community. It was enough for Forbes to recently rank Santa Ana in fourth place among America’s safest cities, based on violent crime and pedestrian-fatality rates.
The falling violent-crime rate is in line with decreases reported among nearly all of Orange County’s larger cities.
But for Santa Ana, which has struggled for years with high rates of violent crimes, particularly among the more than 5,000 documented gang members who live in the city, the drop in homicides came despite a struggling economy and significant belt-tightening at the Police Department.
“As you lower staff and stretch detectives, my concern was that you would burn people out,” said Walters, who also serves as Santa Ana’s interim city manager. “It’s pretty amazing given all the circumstances.”
Despite fewer crimes, gangs still a problem
While slayings and assaults are down, law enforcement officials and residents caution that it doesn’t mean that gang issues have disappeared. Less-violent gang-related crimes, such as vandalism, robberies and reports of shots fired without victims have shown an uptick during the year, they said.
Susana Villanueva lives in a gang neighborhood less than a mile from Santa Ana’s Civic Center with her husband and three children, ages 4, 6 and 10.
Villanueva, 31, says she avoids certain areas, even during the day, because she doesn’t feel safe in her neighborhood.
“There have been shots fired from the apartment complex across the street,” Villanueva said in Spanish on a recent Wednesday afternoon.
“We don’t want gangs. We want to feel safe,” she said.
Targeting gangs, not individuals
For the past several years, the city’s gang unit has focused on large-scale sweeps as a deterrent to violence and a way to round up criminals, particularly the gang members who serve as the leadership.
But in 2011, gang officers and detectives have shifted their focus to entire gangs rather than individuals, making as many arrests as they can before moving on to the next group.
“The thinking is we take out one guy, there is another guy who takes his place,” said Sgt. Lorenzo Carrillo, who heads the department’s gang investigative unit. “You hit a certain area, and the word gets out pretty quickly. It drives them underground, and the activity they are doing decreases.”
The gang unit focuses on crime data and input from community members, probation officials and officers who patrol the city’s neighborhoods to determine where gang activity is on the rise.
“We’ll saturate that area, and we’ll get out there and start talking to community members; we’ll start making contact with gang members in that area, and by just simply talking to people out in the community, you can figure out what is going on,” said Sgt. Eric Paulson, who heads the department’s gang-suppression unit.
The strategy was on display on a Thursday in December, when gang and probation officers teamed up for a series of probation checks and arrest warrant searches targeting gang members.
During searches of several homes and apartment units on a single night, the officers took eight people into custody, including several who hadn’t kept current with probation officials.
While the city’s longstanding territorial gangs have deep roots in certain neighborhoods, Carrillo said, the department is also seeing new, younger, “hybrid” gangs that serve as feeder groups for established gangs. The hybrid gangs are believed to have been involved in two killings in 2011.
“They are violent, but they don’t have the guns and the sophistication,” Carrillo said.
County law enforcement officials are hoping to halt the spread of hybrid gangs to other cities. Within Santa Ana, they have instituted the Gang Reduction Intervention and Partnership program, in which police, the District Attorney’s Office, social services and faith-based groups work to deter students from joining gangs and educate parents about the dangers their children face.
Along with the Police Department, Santa Ana is also home to the county’s only stand-alone school police department. Under the leadership of Chief David Valentin, the Santa Ana Unified School District Police Department has tightened its relationship with its counterparts at the city Police Department over the past three years.
“It’s essentially a city within a city. We are busier than some smaller municipal agencies in Orange County,” said Valentin, who also serves as a senior command staff member at the Police Department.
School police officers maintain a relationship with the Santa Ana Police Department’s gang detail, as officials try to prevent fights or confrontations that begin on campuses from spreading into more extreme violence in the community.
The school officers also maintain relationships with students, providing gang officers with resources during investigations. Valentin said at least one planned retaliation gang shooting was headed off in 2011 when a resource officer learned of a planned drive-by and passed the information to the gang detail, resulting in an arrest and a seizure of handguns.
Police say the biggest change in gang activity in recent years has been the rise in technology, particularly the prevalence of cellphones and online social networks.
“The communication that these guys have, it’s instant,” Paulson said.
Despite cutbacks in other areas, the District Attorney’s Office has kept its gang-prosecution unit untouched. As a result, the gang-prosecution unit’s overall conviction rate is more than 90 percent, Assistant District Attorney Marc Rozenberg said.
“You take a group of criminals, and about 15 percent will be gang members. They are responsible for anywhere between 65 to 85percent of the crimes that are committed,” Rozenberg said. “The numbers come out very consistent that a very small group of people are responsible for a really large portion of the crimes.”
The drop in homicides, particularly those involving gang members, has also given detectives more time to work on open cases from previous years. Cold-case gang detectives in 2011 made 10 arrests tied to past slayings.
Budget woes provide ongoing challenges
Despite last year’s relatively low crime numbers, law enforcement officials worry that a combination of budget pressures and recently enacted changes to the state correctional system could lead to a spike in violence.
Under the state’s inmate-realignment plan, many offenders who previously would have served time in state prison are now being sentenced to county lockup.
In addition, thousands of prisoners who previously would have been monitored by the state parole board upon their release are now being transferred to the oversight of county probation officers.
“I think you are going to start to see an increase just because there are a lower number of law enforcement officers, and you are seeing a large number of people coming out of prison,” Paulson said.
Santa Ana’s gang and homicide units have lost several positions. Detectives are also required to work one day a month in patrol, a move that provides more oversight on the streets and gives newer officers a chance to work with more-experienced personnel - but it also takes investigators away from their cases.
“For us, we are basically in survival mode,” Walters said. “It’s constantly a juggling act of what can we take from and still not hammer the core services.”
Fighting the pull of gang life
Dolores Secundino has had a first-hand experience of the gang violence in Santa Ana.
Her 14-year-old grandson, Angel Secundino, was shot to death in a gang-related attack in 2006, and her youngest son, Inocente Secundino Jr., was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2009 for gunning down a rival gang member.
The 61-year-old grandmother says she lives in fear that her grandchildren will be recruited by gang members or that they will be assaulted because of the gang ties Angel and her son had.
“I tell my grandchildren that the gang lifestyle doesn’t lead to anything good,” she said.
Earlier this year, Secundino visited her grandson’s grave and discovered the headstone had been smashed into pieces. Then in the summer, Angel’s father was shot at in front of her house, but the bullets missed him.
“I don’t feel safe,” Secundino said. “I tell my husband to sell the house, but he says the home value is bad.”
Copyright 2012 Orange County Register