Arbor Hills group keeps a watchful eye on crime

Trouble ebbs and flows like a tide in the neighborhoods of the Arbor Hills Association.

One day the tide brings in drugs.

Another it brings in burglaries or stolen cars.

Metro Police work to push the crime out with the tide, but with the certainty of nature, another tide will bring in more trouble.

"It comes and goes," says Capt. Frank Barker, commander of Metro's Downtown Area Command. "You give it some attention, then you have to give other areas attention and things pop back up.

"There's always a maintenance factor."

The tide is currently out, thanks in large part to the Arbor Hills Association.

This is a neighborhood improvement organization that was born out of desperation in mid-1995, when the area was plagued by drug dealing.

The association's boundaries stretch from Las Vegas Boulevard on the west to Eastern Avenue on the east, Bonanza Road on the north and Stewart Avenue on the south.

A gang of drug dealers, which had been operating for six or seven years, was busted in the area in 1995. At its height, police say, the gang was importing 75 to 80 kilos of cocaine per month.

Residents of the area say gunfire at night was common.

"Sometimes, several times a night -- automatic pistols and machine guns," area resident James Lucas said.

But with the arrest of the gang members, drugs and shootings have ebbed dramatically.

"We haven't had any real trouble since 1996," C.E. Nelson, who bought a tri-plex apartment building in the area in 1971, said.

Though the association doesn't claim it played a direct role in the end of the drug gang's reign, Lucas says the mere fact that neighbors joined forces has had an impact on preventing the resurgence of drug dealing.

"Nobody worked with the police," Lucas said. "I can't tell you what people in the neighborhood did, exactly. It was all done informally. The group lent a cohesion to the concern."

It was the cohesion that gave people the courage to take control of their lives.

"One day I went outside and confronted one of the guys who had stopped for drugs," recalled Yvonne (Bonnie) Bradley, who was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Arbor Hills Association and is still its president, even though she recently moved out of the area.

She took down his license plate number, and after a tense confrontation with the drug dealer, she called police. Within five minutes officers were on the scene breaking up the transaction.

"It's a continuous struggle," Lucas said. "If you create a vacuum, criminals will fill it."

Nelson says he can see drug dealers creeping back into the general area, though the problem is nowhere near what it was a few years ago.

He sees them gathering at an apartment complex under renovation and on a couple of street corners.

One day they're gone, but before you know it, if you aren't vigilant, they're back -- like a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock's movie "The Birds."

Lucas said people in the neighborhood never thought anything could be done to change for the better.

"Everyone was rather pessimistic," he said.

But once the Arbor Hills Association was formed, with membership voluntary and at a nominal fee of $5 per year, neighbors starting speaking to each other, sharing information and making plans to improve their area.

"We became a vibrant, functioning neighborhood," Lucas said.

Bradley said the Arbor Hills Association had one of the biggest cleanup drives in the history of Las Vegas in November 1995.

Volunteers spent four days ridding the area of trash, a persistent problem that never seems to go away completely.

Bradley said the organization started out as a Neighborhood Watch Committee, a popular program sponsored by Metro Police.

"As we kept getting new members, we grew into an improvement area," she said.

There were about 45 members, but that number has plummeted as the problems have become less severe.

"The organization has become more quiescent, because the threat has diminished," Lucas said.

Now there are about 10 active members, with Nelson and Bradley probably the most active.

Most mornings, Nelson tours the area looking to see what the tide has brought in.

Several months ago, Nelson and Bradley became concerned about an unusually large number of cars that were parked on the streets.

A few area residents were carrying on auto repair businesses out of their homes, using public streets as their garage.

"The repairing of autos has become a growth industry," Nelson said.

A call to the police resulted in about 30 cars being towed away or otherwise removed from a one- or two-block area, Nelson said.

Currently, graffiti is at high tide -- gangs communicating with gangs using arcane symbols.

"Problems come and go," Bradley said. "One of the big problems we're having right now is with graffiti."

Today, it's the White Fence Gang. Tomorrow another gang will make their marks.

Bradley is frustrated by the constant ebb-and-flow of problems and the difficulty in keeping people interested in solving them.

"A lot of people just don't care," she said. "They give up."

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