Residents of Grid 186 Fight Back : Crime: Santa Ana neighbors are helping police in an effort to clean up their area.

SANTA ANA —  Needle tracks cover her arms and the skin between her fingers as Denise clutches a $10 bill and shivers in the alley behind Minnie Street.

Although it is nearly 40 degrees on a Friday night, Denise waits. Already, her high from the last injection two hours ago has begun to ebb.

Denise is 21, a prostitute, and five months pregnant. But tonight she will buy a bag of heroin the size of a pinkie nail from any one of the dealers on the Minnie Street corridor.

“I like my highs too much to let it go,” said Denise, who frequents Minnie Street every day to appease her $100-a-day habit. “It makes me feel good, like I’m drifting and floating away.”

Denise is one of the hundreds of street regulars on the Minnie Street corridor of Grid 186, so named in the police system of locating areas in the city. It is one of Santa Ana’s most crime-plagued neighborhoods, with 3,702 calls to police in the first 10 months of this year.

But it is also a neighborhood that is trying to fight back.

Despite the fear of retaliation, residents and neighborhood organizations are trying hard to work with police to combat the daily hustling of drug dealers, addicts, gang members and car thieves entrenched in the area that is Grid 186.

“The traditional way of arresting people and cutting down on crime doesn’t work here,” said Santa Ana Police Lt. George Saadeh, who is the commander of the district. “Arrests aren’t the answer any more. We need the residents to work with us.”

Grid 186, known to residents as the East Side, is densely populated in its north end by a string of apartment houses. But at its southern end are manicured lawns and single-family houses.

“Through the years, I’ve watched fences and bars on the windows go up. I’ve seen graffiti being marked up on the trees,” said Rita Corpin, 48, who has lived on Myrtle Street for 39 years. “You don’t walk alone in the East Side at night. It’s not safe to walk alone.”

Addicts and gang members quicken their pace and slide into alleys at night when a police car cruises by. A slow whistle breaks the silence.

“They whistle to warn others that we’re around,” said Officer Jeff Launi. “Sometimes, that’s all we hear when we hit the streets. The same old whistle.”

On East Walnut Street, a known drug dealer calls out “pollo” (chicken) and ducks into an alley.

“That’s one of the nicest things people have called me here,” Launi’s partner, Mark Nichols, said.

About 70% of the crimes in Grid 186 occur on Minnie Street or in the northern section, where apartment complexes each have 40 units or more. Although the buildings are less than 5 years old, they were constructed when the city density laws were less restrictive.

With that many people in that small a space, Saadeh said, crime is inevitable. In November alone, 317 police incidents were reported in the grid, including 32 car thefts, 18 warrant arrests and 15 narcotics crimes. Most of the incidents were reported from the northern section and from the Minnie Street corridor.

Selling drugs has turned into a means of survival for some of those who have settled in the area, said Mary Ann Salamida, director of the Neighborhood Service Center, which provides social programs for area residents.

“People need money. They need a fast buck. I don’t think they are aware of its repercussions. They are not looking ahead,” Salamida said.

Denise is well known by the police who patrol the neighborhood. She knows some of the police officers by their first names, and they know her.

She is not afraid of walking alone anywhere in the East Side. When she needs her fix, she leaves her 3-year-old twins with her mother and heads for the railroad tracks. She likes to walk along the tracks until she reaches the southern section of Minnie Street, which is nicknamed Big Minnie . There, she buys her heroin and then “slams,” injecting herself with borrowed needles.

For her job, she carries condoms in her denim jacket. She has been working as a prostitute for four years. On a good day, she can make $200 easily. On a bad day, she makes sure she has enough to buy her drug.

During her last month of pregnancy, she plans to travel to Mexico to see her father and go cold turkey. A week ago, she had her an ultrasound test to make sure the baby was all right, so far.

“It looks healthy. I don’t think anything is wrong with it, everything is in the right place. I don’t know about its brain though,” Denise said.

“Look, this is hard for me. I’m strung out. I know something can turn out wrong with it. But I can’t stop now; maybe later.”

Like many others in Grid 186, Denise has been in and out of the Orange County Jail, which is too crowded to keep them for long.

“The jail situation ties up our hands,” Saadeh said. “If we arrest people for marijuana, cocaine or heroin, they won’t stay in jail. They get out the same day. We could arrest people 24 hours a day; it still wouldn’t help the neighborhood,” Saadeh said.

So police are turning to other methods to try to rid the neighborhood of crime. In apartment buildings, officers work with managers to evict tenants who sell drugs. They also have been cracking down on bars with histories of repeated violent incidents, citing them when they have more customers than the legal capacity.

And in the south end of the neighborhood, Saadeh attends the monthly meetings of the East Side Assn., a group of about 100 residents who meet monthly to tackle the crime problem.

“We have an excellent rapport with the Police Department,” said Corpin, chairperson of the association and a teacher at La Quinta High School in Westminster. “If we didn’t, we would have bailed out of here long ago.”

Corpin has stuck it out even though she has been a victim. Two years ago, Corpin and a neighbor called police after another neighbor refused to turn down music during a New Year’s Eve party by a neighborhood gang.

A few days later, gum turpentine was poured on her car and her tires were slashed.

But what makes her more angry are people who fear that kind of retaliation and don’t report crimes.

“For those who don’t call the police, it makes the effort harder for those who do,” Corpin said. “Retaliation is very intimidating. There is strength in unity. We could retain some control of our lives or else it would be intolerable.”

Some residents fight back by jotting down car license numbers of people openly dealing drugs on the street, and noting which apartments they visit. Some call to report new gang graffiti on walls, or the appearance of abandoned cars.

The East Side Assn. has distributed a flyer with tips on how to call for graffiti removal and how to keep the neighborhood clean. In 1986, the association persuaded the city to reduce the allowable apartment density from 90 units per acre to 22.

The association is also trying to recruit more residents from the northern section, which has no such group. One reason is the distrust of the police officers in the north and the Minnie Street corridor.

To help combat that distrust, police officers are invited to make regular visits to the Neighborhood Service Center’s classes in English as a Second Language, where they tell students, many newly arrived Latinos and Cambodians, how to report crime.

Police also must try to combat residents’ fear of retaliation, which Saadeh said is extremely rare.

Maria R. has lived on Standard Street for about two years and is afraid of the dealers and addicts who come right up to her yard. But she worries that they would hurt her children if she said anything.

“I don’t want my sons to see the drugs. I don’t want them growing up near the drugs,” she said.

The residents don’t know that the police and neighborhood organizations can help them, Saadeh said.

“They often feel hopelessness, Saadeh said. “But people are more aware now. Things can’t change overnight. But they don’t have to feel all alone.”