Irvine Meeting Draws Large Turnout : Cranston Holds Forum on County Crime

With a tinkle of an ice cream truck outside, U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston presided Friday over a two-hour community forum on crime at City Hall in Irvine--a suburban community better known for videocassette-recorder thefts than major criminal mayhem.

It was an overflow crowd. While Irvine may rank 311th of 406 California communities in FBI crime statistics, it sits in the middle of an urban area with a crime problem that often goes unrecognized, a panel of Orange County community leaders testified, backed by about 175 citizens who were spilling out onto the sidewalks.

“I think we all need to face up to the fact that we don’t all have Neighborhood Watches, we don’t all have communities where there is no crime,” said panelist Jean Forbath, director of Share Our Selves, a community relief organization.

‘42 Hidden Barrios’

Sister Carmen Sarati, a Catholic nun who works in a Santa Ana barrio, said: “We have a third-world culture clashing with the first-world stereotype of what Orange County is all about. We have 42 hidden barrios full of people without access to adequate housing and medical care . . . or even adequate police protection because the police are afraid to come into our neighborhoods.”

Cranston, who has already sponsored 44 such forums on various issues throughout California since January, said he was looking for answers on crime--from those who must deal with it.

“One of the cruelest consequences of crime is that it consigns so many of our citizens to a life of fear--particularly older Americans who live behind locked doors and bolted windows each night, venturing out only in daylight hours and then always in the shadow of panic,” the Democratic senator said.

Forum Polled

A straw poll of those at the forum showed that most thought that drugs, lack of family involvement and concern, and poverty were the greatest contributors to crime. In a county known for its conservatism, fewer respondents listed “judges being too soft on criminals” as a top factor--one of the reasons most cited in other communities, Cranston noted.

Sitting in the back of the room was Rep. Dan Lungren of Long Beach, one of a field of Republicans considering a 1986 challenge against Cranston and the shepherd of President Reagan’s 1984 crime reform package that narrowly cleared the House of Representatives last year.

At a press conference after the forum, Lungren noted that Cranston was absent for seven key votes on crime issues last year, including the crime package--which he said now provides the legal means for the federal government to prosecute foreign terrorists like the hijackers of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro.

“I find it very interesting that Alan Cranston finds time to come to Orange County to talk about crime, yet he couldn’t find time last year to vote on almost all the major criminal justice legislation,” Lungren said.