SANTA ANA : Police Win Award for Problem Solving

The Police Department has been honored by a national policing council for its work in the Harbor Plaza shopping center.

The department won this year’s Hermand Goldstein Excellence in Problem-Solving Award. It was selected from among 65 entries in a national contest run by the Police Executive Research Forum, Police Chief Paul M. Walters said. The forum is an organization that encourages improving the delivery of police services and studies policing techniques.

Contest judges awarded the prize to the department’s Westend neighborhood policing district for the way officers designed and carried out an approach to cut crime at a shopping center at Harbor Boulevard and 1st Street.

“These officers represent the new wave of policing,” said Mayor Daniel H. Young, who honored Westend officers at Monday night’s City Council meeting. The department took action between April and June of this year after shoppers at the plaza complained that growing numbers of panhandlers were approaching them for money, said Lt. Bill Tegeler, head of the Westend district. Increased reports of burglaries and other crimes led to declining business at the center, Tegeler added.

Seven officers combing the neighborhood near the plaza discovered that homeless people who were seeking shelter on the riverbed of the nearby Santa Ana River were often the same ones who used the shopping center as a place to ask for money and sometimes break into cars, Tegeler said.

Police warned the homeless to leave the riverbed, cleared property from the riverbed and patrolled the center using bicycles, golf carts and police cars, Tegeler said. “We managed to do it without any arrests,” he said.

Police also suggested structural changes at the center, such as moving water fountains and locking bathrooms, to discourage transients from loitering.

One undercover officer also discovered that a ring of people were using telephones in the plaza for a scheme to make unauthorized calls using stolen telephone credit card numbers, Tegeler said.

Crime drastically declined and business improved after police concentrated efforts on the center, Tegeler said. For example, he said, 12 cars were reported burglarized at the center in April, but only one car burglary was reported in June.