Trust overcomes fear

By Sam Skolnik

Thursday, July 10, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Vianney Hernandez initially regretted her decision to become the manager of the Pine Village Apartments four years ago.

The large complex at the corner of Arville Street and Silver Dollar Avenue is in the area known as Pennwood-Arville. In 2004, the neighborhood was filled with drug dealing and prostitution, and suffered more than its fair share of shootings and stabbings.

“Everything in this area was really bad when I came here,” said Hernandez, a native of Mexico who lives with her husband and young daughter in the apartments. “I didn’t want to work here.”

That has fundamentally changed, she said. Credit years of hard work by city agencies, Metro Police and residents, who have jointly recognized the unique challenge of fighting crime in a neighborhood where many of the residents don’t speak English and have been reluctant to deal with the police.

About three-quarters of the neighborhood is in the southern tip of Las Vegas city limits, in Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian’s Ward 1. Tarkanian said she noted the higher than average crime rates in Pennwood-Arville when she first took office in early 2005. This was the neighborhood, she said, that needed the most help in her ward.

Tarkanian began working with one of her bilingual staffers, Adriana Martinez, to coordinate efforts of her office and police; city departments including Neighborhood Services; nonprofit and faith groups; local leaders including business owners and apartment managers; and school officials.

Together with people who live and work in Pennwood-Arville they formed a group that now has one of those catchy acronyms: KEEN, which stands for Keeping Everyone’s Eyes on the Neighborhood, and everyone involved says it’s working.

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Pennwood-Arville is about a mile west of Interstate 15, stretching from Decatur Boulevard on the west to Valley View Boulevard on the east, between Sahara and Sirius avenues. It has more apartments than houses.

But the key demographic is that upward of 75 percent of the population is Hispanic, according to police and residents. Those who wanted to reduce crime in the neighborhood realized it was critical to communicate in Spanish and make it clear that Metro’s priority was to reduce crime and improve the quality of life for residents, not to report potential illegal immigrants to federal authorities who want to deport them.

Maintaining that type of trust within the valley’s Hispanic community has been difficult in the wake of some high-profile cases, such as last year’s fatal pipe bomb explosion inside the Luxor parking garage. Federal agents working with police detained three illegal immigrants who were witnesses or roommates of witnesses and worked to deport at least one of them.

One of the two Spanish-speaking officers dedicated to patrolling Pennwood-Arville, Mike Buttars, conceded that local-federal police cooperation does sometimes trump Metro’s indifference to immigration status. “That’s still a reality,” especially when it comes to violent felons, Buttars acknowledged.

But in the vast majority of cases, Buttars said, it’s not in his interest to concern himself with the immigration status of the people he deals with on his beat, because it has little to do with his main priority — making the neighborhood safer.

At this week’s Pennwood-Arville community meeting, held at Clark High School, the discussion was in Spanish and illegal immigrants were made to feel welcome. Those are two of the main reasons the crowds at the meetings have steadily increased.

Progress is being made, said Metro Lt. Bruce Miyama of the Bolden Area Command, in large part because police are taking the time to listen to residents.

Police have been conducting two community meetings each month for the past year, one for residents and one for apartment managers. The meetings initially drew about a dozen people, but the meetings for residents have grown to consistently have audiences of 80 or more.

At Tuesday’s residents meeting, more than 70 adults, with at least a dozen of their kids running around behind them, talked about pressing neighborhood concerns and upcoming events such as National Night Out, the annual community event designed to take the streets back from criminals, to be held Aug. 5. There was a palpable energy in the room.

Among the participants were Jose Manuel and Anicetto, who conceded to the Sun that they are in the United States illegally. Anicetto, a 48-year-old cement layer who has lived in the neighborhood five years, said it hasn’t been easy for many in the community to trust the police. But, he added, those attitudes have changed somewhat with the more frequent interactions with officers, particularly the Spanish-speaking ones.

“Of course, everyone has some fear of deportation, especially those of us with families,” said Anicetto. “But I help the police. I don’t have fear.”

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The improvement in the neighborhood isn’t due only to the improved relationship between police and residents, however. City agencies also have been providing assistance, from day care for children and classes in parenting, English and music to making sure that street, park and apartment community lights are functioning.

“What I love about this is, we look at this as a team to say: What can we do together to address this situation?” said Ronnie Smith, principal of Clark High School.

In the case of the one business on the corner of Arville Street and Pennwood Avenue, a 7-Eleven, city assistance meant getting rid of the public pay phones outside the store that for years were a magnet for drug dealing.

As Dale and Lori Clayton were in the process of becoming franchise owners of the convenience store about three years ago, Tarkanian suggested they have the phones removed. The Claytons agreed, and with Tarkanian’s assistance, city workers dismantled the phones the very day the Claytons took control of the store.

Before the phones were removed, police were responding to several hundred calls from nearby residents a month, the Claytons said police told them. Afterward, the number dropped to almost zero, the couple said.

All of this has resulted in reduced crime, recent Metro statistics show. Looking at January-May of 2007 compared with the same time period this year, all crime indicators remained steady or dropped.

For their crime-reporting purposes, police used two of the Pennwood-Arville neighborhood boundaries, but stretched the neighborhood farther west to Jones Boulevard and south to Desert Inn Road.

While the number of violent crimes such as assaults and robberies either remained the same or dropped slightly, property crimes including burglaries and auto thefts dropped dramatically — even compared with the drop in such crimes throughout the region.

Hernandez, the apartment manager, tells a story that helps illustrate the changes she’s seen in Pennwood-Arville.

When she moved in, her company required her to give all residents her cell phone number. That was to make sure that if a resident needed her, they could contact her.

In the first year or so, Hernandez said, she received an average of 20 phone calls from tenants over each weekend, day and night. The calls were mostly about police business, she said, to report things such as drug dealing, prostitution and public drunkenness.

Residents were averse to calling the police, so they’d call Hernandez instead and have her call them.

She said she now gets only one or two of those weekend calls. She believes that’s because crimes are much rarer in her neighborhood. And now, when necessary, residents often call police themselves.

“It’s been slow progress, but a complete effort from everybody,” Hernandez said. “After four years, I’m proud to say that you can walk outside at night without being afraid.”