New Chief Announces Plans to Restructure Santa Ana Police Operations

Santa Ana Police Chief Clyde Cronkhite Monday unveiled a restructuring plan that he said would make the Police Department more responsive to such specific community concerns as drugs, gangs and vagrancy.

But the head of the police officers’ union criticized the plan, saying it lacked a long-range perspective.

The reorganization places a lieutenant in charge of each of four city sectors. Each lieutenant will oversee neighborhood foot patrols, a community police center and “attack teams”--special task forces that will try to devise strategies to fight chronic crime problems.

These four lieutenants will be charged with coming up with long-term solutions to neighborhood problems. Day-to-day operations will be the responsibility of three other lieutenants who will serve as watch commanders for the department’s three shifts and oversee the department’s regular patrol force.

Until now, watch commanders have functioned largely as station commanders and have had little contact with patrol forces out on the street, Cronkhite said.

The lieutenants, captains and chief will meet regularly with members of the city’s Neighborhood Watch program, which in Santa Ana is called Community Oriented Policing, Cronkhite said.

“If you have a problem and approach it from one angle you’re doing a pretty fair job,” said Cronkhite at a lunchtime news conference at the Grand Plaza Hotel in Santa Ana. “But if you approach it from three angles, you have a better chance at whipping it.”

Sgt. Donald Blankenship, president of the Police Benevolent Assn., dismissed the reorganization as “a lot of flash and dash.”

“This thing just isn’t that big of a deal,” said Blankenship, who has fought with city administrators for the past year to appropriate more money for police salaries. “The biggest thing is probably the attack teams, and they’re just another name for SWAT-Hypes (a task force aimed at drug trafficking in 1986), major enforcement teams, special enforcement detail. . . . Anyone who has been here for a while will look at this and roll their eyes and throw it in the trash can.”

Cronkhite, who came to Santa Ana about six months ago, said he also plans to study particular areas of the city that generate a large number of police calls. Studies in other cities have shown that 60% of all calls may come from as few as 5% of a city’s addresses.

“Instead of just answering radio calls, we’ll be trying to get at the heart of what causes them and try to reduce them,” he said.

Cronkhite said he was informing 12 of the department’s 17 lieutenants Monday that they would be receiving new assignments when the restructuring takes effect July 1. Some of those lieutenants will be moving out of office jobs into positions that will involve more field work, Cronkhite said.

Cronkhite has already moved 22 police officers from office work back to regular patrol and said he hopes to fill 19 vacant patrol officer positions soon. He has asked the City Council to budget money for 10 additional police officers for each of the next five years and has already received authorization to spend $100,000 in federal grant funds to lease police helicopter services from other law enforcement agencies.

Blankenship, however, said he doubted that the city would be able to hire additional police officers at current salaries when other cities can offer a safer environment and competitive wages. Three officers have resigned this month alone, he said.

“They can’t hire them as fast as they can quit,” Blankenship said. “All they’re going to do is work the existing forces harder.”