Colombia-Style Narcotics Violence Invades Oroville : Drugs: Budget cuts have opened the door for dealers. Law enforcement is fighting back with a vengeance.

OROVILLE, Calif. —  The Butte County district attorney wanted to send a message to drug dealers to clear out of the county. So Mike Ramsey had one of his narcotics investigators tool around town in a 1980 Corvette that had been seized in a drug raid, just to make the point.

Soon, drug dealers sent their own message right back. The midnight-blue Corvette was fire-bombed one night as it sat in the investigator’s driveway.

The Colombian-style drug violence that has invaded this Gold Rush town of 10,000 escalated in July when someone fired four shots at Ramsey’s brick home in the dead of night. Eight days later, the home of the local narcotics task force commander was sprayed by a barrage of bullets.

For weeks, Ramsey slept on his front porch with a pistol by his side, hoping to catch the gunman if he returned. “This is not Colombia, and we’re not going to stand for it,” the district attorney said.

But Oroville may not be able to afford to do much else. Despite its peaceful setting in the farmlands of the eastern Sacramento Valley, Oroville finds itself beset by many of the same nightmarish urban crises that plague California’s largest cities.

Budget cutbacks that reduced by half the number of sheriff’s deputies have helped turn the area 70 miles north of Sacramento into a haven for drug dealers, lured here by underground magazines that signaled “no law north of Sacramento.”

The rate of violent crime in Butte County is among the highest in the state, and far exceeds most other rural counties, according to the state’s latest figures.

Even if criminals are caught here, the County Jail is so overcrowded that all but the most serious criminals must be released after a short stay, and others are sentenced to house arrest.

“There’s very little consequence to criminal activity,” Ramsey said. “People here say, ‘Commit a crime and go to your room.’ There’s not a lot of deterrent effect in that.”

The low cost of living in Oroville, the county seat, has drawn welfare recipients from the cities. More than 9% of the county’s population is on welfare; since early summer, more than two welfare families a day have moved here. Unemployment in this agricultural and logging county runs above 10%.

Public libraries are kept open through the efforts of volunteers who hold bake sales to raise money. Butte’s county government, which was barely rescued from bankruptcy by the state last year, is headed toward fiscal disaster again.

“Butte is just about ready to go under,” Ramsey said.

Many of the difficulties can be traced to the early 1980s, when the county was forced to cut back spending under Proposition 13, the property tax-cutting measure. Already a lean county, Butte was reduced to skin-and-bones services.

The cutback in sheriff’s deputies, it turned out, was like issuing an open invitation to drug dealers. Underground publications, including several biker magazines, heralded the developments in Butte County. One, Ramsey said, advised its readers: “You won’t be hassled if you want to kick back and do your thing in what the locals call ‘Beautiful Butte.’ ”

Another magazine identified Butte Creek Canyon, at the north end of the county, as the ideal place to grow marijuana or set up a methamphetamine lab, Sheriff Mick Grey said. “We had carloads of people coming up there,” he said. “There were a lot of people looking for a quick buck.”

Over the years, dozens of methamphetamine labs have sprung up around this quiet town on the Feather River.

“There was a lot of publicity statewide on the reductions in staff, and we started to see the influx of undesirables,” the sheriff said. “Up in the foothills, they got a foothold, and we’ve had a hell of a time rooting them out.”

There are reasons that the drug traders seem open and even insouciant here.

The Sheriff’s Department has only 79 sworn officers, including the sheriff, to patrol a county of 184,000 people. The Butte County Jail is so overcrowded that defendants are allowed to miss three court appearances before they are locked up and held for trial. Many criminals are released after serving only a small part of their sentences. Many others are merely ordered to stay home, wearing an electronic leash that monitors their whereabouts. As fast as they put people in, it seemed, they had to let them out.

Ramsey said local authorities have been coming down harder on drug dealers by appropriating their assets--such as the blue Corvette--and using them to investigate other drug dealers. He suspects that the drive-by shootings were carried out by people who took it personally when their property was seized.

Ramsey’s house is on the edge of Oroville, where he lives with his wife and three daughters. It was attacked at 3:30 in the morning on July 18. Three shots ricocheted off the brick exterior and the fourth went through a window. No one was hurt.

The easygoing Ramsey, a second-generation Oroville native who attended UC Berkeley and once worked as a newspaper reporter, moved his family out. But he stayed behind, hoping to catch the shooter himself.

He kept his car in the driveway and pointed toward the street to give chase if he had to, and he lay in wait, night after night, hidden on the front porch. “I had visions of dueling it out in the street,” the 43-year-old district attorney joked. “But of course that’s a John Wayne fantasy.”

On July 26, at about 2:30 a.m., four bullets slammed into another house a few miles away. This one belongs to Mitch Brown and his wife, Sue Webber-Brown. He is a state Department of Justice special agent who supervises the local narcotics task force; she is an investigator in Ramsey’s office.

One bullet went through the wall of the room where their 8-year-old son was sleeping. It ricocheted around, broke a large mirror and landed on the floor two feet from the boy’s head.

“I was outraged at the fact someone would shoot at my house,” Brown said. “Most people who are involved in the trafficking of drugs would not stoop that low.”

To many in Butte County’s law enforcement community, the shootings crossed the invisible line that holds their personal lives off limits from the professional conflict between cops and criminals.

Even many drug dealers hold strong family values, Ramsey said, noting that dealers have been known to turn in fellow dealers who neglect their children. Through informants, word came filtering in that the dealers, too, were upset by the attacks.

Soon after, investigators also picked up the rumor that the attacks were meant as a warning to Ramsey and Brown to back off.

They had the opposite effect.

A team of officers from across the county, joined by 40 agents from the Department of Justice, came down on drug dealers with a vengeance. In the three weeks after Brown’s and Ramsey’s houses were shot up, the task force shut down half a dozen methamphetamine labs and arrested more than 40 people--quadruple the usual number of drug arrests.

“We attempted to put a lot of pressure to bear on the drug community to give up the shooter,” Ramsey said. “We have made a great dent in the drug trafficking locally that we had not been able to before.”

No one has been arrested for the shootings, but the crackdown has so disrupted business that narcotics traffickers would like to see the culprit arrested, Ramsey said.

“We have received offers from informants to deliver him to my front lawn--dead,” he said. “I wake up every morning and look out on my lawn.”

Among drug dealers, the pressure is mounting: Some have gone to great lengths to prove to their peers that they were not the shooter.

“We actually had drug dealers coming in and volunteering for polygraph examinations to prove they hadn’t been involved in the shooting,” said a surprised Sheriff Grey, who strapped the volunteers onto a polygraph and learned a few things that helped his investigation.

“They’d say: ‘I don’t want anybody in the street thinking I’m the one that did that.’ ”

Grey said he believed that his department was closing in on suspects and he was hopeful that an arrest may come soon.

For the time being, the crackdown has given a boost to the morale of Butte County’s law enforcement officers--but the county’s fundamental problems remain.

Will Randolph, Butte County administrative officer, said the county is running a deficit of about $7 million this year--about twice the size of the sheriff’s department’s operating budget.

County supervisors are considering the politically unpopular step of levying a utilities tax, he said, but even with the tax they will have to turn to the state for a bailout again this year.

“We can’t cut any more,” Randolph said, “and still survive as a viable unit of government.”