EAST P.A. POLICE DEBATE FLARES

At meeting, chief and sheriff exchange views on crime

East Palo Alto Police Chief Wesley Bowling brought a cache of drugs seized
in recent arrests to display at a city council meeting Thursday to defend
his department's response to the city's rising crime rate.

But the session, designed to allow the council to collect information about
public safety as it prepares its budget, quickly became a veiled debate
about whether the city should retain its police department or contract all
public safety services to the San Mateo County Sheriff's Department.

Bowling called it ``a `my-gun-is-better-than-your-gun' session.''

Bowling showed council members 2.6 pounds of cocaine, three pounds of
heroin, 1.5 pounds of crack cocaine and 2.5 ounces of methamphetamine. Then
he said his department had made 18 arrests over four nights during
Operation Hot Spot, which has targeted about 20 addresses and blocks in the
city where crime is rampant. The operation will continue two nights a week,
Bowling said.

His presentation was merely a paragraph in a long-running debate about
which agency should protect East Palo Alto residents. The topic has flared
again as the city's homicide rate has risen in past months.

In 1997, there were 16 homicides, compared with one in 1996. There have
been two homicides in 1998. Residents in the city of 22,000 people complain
they hear gunfire at night and see men loitering on corners. They fear that
crime will reach the 1992 level, when 42 murders branded the city as the
murder capital of the country because of the high per capita rate.

San Mateo County Sheriff Don Horsley told the council his officers, who do
some work in the city, had made 26 drug-related arrests recently. He told
council members that his department had brought crime down 38 percent in
Fair Oaks, another minority enclave in San Mateo County.

The county assists East Palo Alto, which pays $650,000 annually for patrol
and dispatch services. Earlier in the week, Horsley announced that a county
strike force would target four gangs and drug dealers allegedly responsible
for the bloody turf war that has punctuated crime. Mayor R.B. Jones
complained that Horsley should have contacted city officials before
establishing the initiative.

Bowling said he has 35 officers, 11 of whom are on the streets at any given
time. The department takes 141 calls daily, far too many to handle, he
said.

Horsley quickly said: ``If you just go from call to call you will never
solve the crime problem unless you engage the community.''

The underlying debate between the two agency heads was not lost on a
handful of residents at the meeting, all of whom seemed aware the city has
viewed local control of the police department as an important part of the
city's incorporation 14 years ago.

``Local control -- I hear you loud and clear,'' resident Fred Kianani said.
``Apparently local control is not in the hands of the police department. It
is in the hands of the drug dealers.''