Santa Ana Asked to Verify Killings

* Since this year began, Los Amigos of Orange County has held a street vigil for each Santa Ana murder victim. We value each life lost. We pray for an end to the carnage. We are assembling a commemorative quilt, a square for each person who died violently. By our count, there are 25 squares so far. We are trying to check our press-based information against an official Santa Ana accounting of these killings.

Nowhere in the article “Latino Group Urges Faster Action to Solve Homicides” (June 22) is stated the purpose of our request: that the Santa Ana City Council check the list of unsolved murders (based on press accounts) for completeness and accuracy.

When Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters kindly met with us last March, he told us that all Santa Ana unresolved murders are treated as “open cases.”

Your article says that “Walters claimed that Los Amigos released ‘misleading’ information to the news media about the number of unresolved gang-related slayings.”

What is called “misleading” information is information gleaned from the media.

Walters’ quote reflects a police practice we believe is wrong. Slayings may be gang-related or linked to any number of circumstances. It is only in their resolution that some label begins to have substance.

Empty labeling does not dispose of a single case, nor should it be allowed to diminish the loss of a single life.

The media carefully qualifies crime stories with words like alleged. It mindlessly goes along with police declarations about “unresolved gang-related slayings.”

It is our perception that Santa Ana far and away leads the county in unresolved homicides. Your article quotes Santa Ana Mayor Miguel A. Pulido Jr. as saying, “This is a countywide problem. Why don’t they work on it that way?” We do. But we ask him to help us verify Santa Ana names, numbers and case dispositions and then tell us Santa Ana is not the largest piece of the countywide problem.

AMIN DAVID

Chairman, Los Amigos of Orange County