Police Patrol Program Helps El Salvador Keep Lid on Crime

MEJICANOS, El Salvador —  For the last 10 months, a new kind of police officer has been patrolling the narrow passageways of Zacamil, one of the roughest neighborhoods in greater metropolitan San Salvador.

It’s an area best known for the guerrilla snipers who fired at soldiers from tenement rooftops in this suburb 11 years ago at the height of a civil war. The war ended in 1992, but neighbors say the fighting has never stopped in Zacamil. But now the gunfire is between rival gangs.

Zacamil is the prototype for the increasingly violent neighborhoods of this postwar country, where polls show that public safety is the chief concern.

Police in Zacamil once holed up in the precinct building, taking reports from the few citizens who dared to speak up about crimes. But since April, 140 Police Intervention Patrol, or PIP, officers on bicycles and on foot have been circulating in the neighborhood as part of a pilot program for a U.S.-sponsored law enforcement project.

They patrol the neighborhoods looking for people carrying weapons or acting suspiciously. They check identification, ask for an address and confiscate weapons if the person does not have a permit. The information is written on a 4-by-6-inch card and later transferred to a computer donated by the United States.

They are starting to get results.

In the first six months that PIPs were in action--the most current figures available--reports of robberies dropped 44%, car thefts were down 35% and killings fell 25%, compared with the same period a year before. Assault charges nearly doubled, but police believe that is because they are witnessing domestic abuse that they did not know about before.

The PIP officers even helped crack a kidnapping ring. They picked up a thief who offered to inform on acquaintances in exchange for a lighter sentence. The problem: He only knew their nicknames: “Gray Hair” and “Filer.”

Police put the names into their databank and turned up Giovanni Francisco Coto and Gustavo Enrique Campos, who had reputations as area troublemakers. When questioned, the men offered information about a kidnapping ring, which led to the arrests of 14 suspects.

“Without the computer, we would have been looking through 12,000 file cards,” Police Sgt. William Portillo said. That is, if they had any file cards.

The concept of keeping files on contacts with citizens and patrolling to be in touch with people in the neighborhood was modeled after a program introduced in San Jose, Calif. After Luis Cobarruviaz retired as police chief there, the U.S. Embassy last year invited him to head an ongoing support program for Salvadoran police.

In the past, the program helped establish the police academy and invested in laboratories and training in sophisticated investigative techniques. But Cobarruviaz saw another need.

“The others were investigators, and he is a police officer,” explained Hugo Ruiz, who recently was named deputy police commissioner of Soyapango, another crime-ridden suburb of San Salvador, after establishing the PIP program here.

In Zacamil, Cobarruviaz found piles of mountain bikes donated by the Chinese and in need of repair. In addition, 25 of 30 U.S.-donated vehicles were inoperable, most with transmissions ruined by inexperienced drivers. The U.S. government provided mechanics to fix the cars and bikes, while the officers underwent four weeks of training in community patrols.

“Some of what they taught us is too idealistic,” a young officer said. “You cannot walk up to a bunch of gang members and say, ‘Gentlemen, please stand up so that we can frisk you.’ ”

Still, the program has succeeded in getting officers out on the street. “Now we know who the neighborhood drug users are,” said Officer Juan Francisco Flores, 20, who has been with the department for less than two years.

The program was expanded to Soyapango late last year and to downtown San Salvador this month.

“We are not going to eliminate crime,” said Ruiz, “but we are at least going to reach crime levels that are manageable for the police and livable for the people, so that public safety is not people’s biggest worry.”

Nevertheless, the success of community patrols is limited by shortfalls in other areas of police work and the lack of overall citizen confidence in officers.

Early this month, the operation that led to the capture of the kidnapping ring was tarnished by tragedy. Informants Coto and Campos, who had refused police protection, were killed in a daylight drive-by shooting.