GILROY
– Pedals to the metal, undercover stakeouts and drug busts:
Welcome to a Friday night with the Gilroy Police Department’s
Anti-Crime Team.
GILROY – Pedals to the metal, undercover stakeouts and drug busts: Welcome to a Friday night with the Gilroy Police Department’s Anti-Crime Team.
Rolling out of the GPD’s Rosanna Street headquarters at sundown Friday, ACT Cpl. Robert Locke-Paddon, Officer Erik Tiner and an automatic riffle share the front seat of an unmarked GPD car.
Normally, GPD patrol officers ride their beats solo, but because Locke-Paddon and Tiner are part of the GPD’s ACT unit specifically designed to keep Gilroy’s gangs, drug dealers and most violent criminals in check, they ride two and often three officers to a vehicle.
“With the type of proactive work we do and the criminals we deal with on a daily basis, you feel a lot better when there’s someone watching your back,” said Tiner, who’s been a member of ACT for six months. “It becomes dangerous whenever you have to chase somebody or get involved in a physical confrontation. The difference between us and the criminals is that they don’t have to play by the rules and we do.”
Filing through a large stack of papers inked with criminal biographies and photos of more than 50 local parolees, probationers and wanted criminals, Tiner and Locke-Paddon begin their Friday evening by making a traffic stop only four blocks from GPD headquarters.
Routine traffic stops such as this one for an obstructed license plate can many times result in an arrest of a local gang member or drug dealer wanted for a warrant, but this time the driver’s record is clean and he is let go with a warning.
After all, in 1993 when Gilroy’s gang problem was at its pinnacle and former police chief Roy Sumisaki developed the idea for a proactive crime team in Gilroy, it was not to distribute traffic tickets, but to push violent criminals and drug dealers off Gilroy’s streets. And since ACT’s inception, police officials and city leaders alike have been frequent in publicly crediting ACT for handcuffing the city’s gang troubles and reducing the crime rate.
“We don’t really respond to calls like a patrol officer would,” Locke-Paddon said. “We drive around the neighborhoods, talk to our contacts and try to get a feel for what’s going on. You learn the main players, their faces and their names, and after a while you use your instincts to separate the good guys from the bad ones.”
Those instincts lead Tiner and Locke-Paddon to San Ysidro Park on the east side of town, where neighborhood residents gather on a warm night to play basketball, barbecue and relax. The problem is that the park is known for gang and drug activity, and the ACT officers know there’s a good chance they will see faces and names attached to their stack of warrants.
This is one of the neighborhoods in which the eight-member ACT unit has worked hard since 1993 to reduce the amount of crime and make the San Ysidro Park safe for kids to play. Many of the local residents know the officers by name, and although their police cruiser does not sport GPD decals or roof-mounted sirens, it is easily recognized.
When Locke-Paddon makes a U-turn to follow a passing white van similar to one driven by a known criminal, the van speeds off and makes a quick turn into an apartment complex.
The officers track down the vehicle, but a call comes in from a fellow officer who needs assistance on a stakeout of a local hotel room being used as a base to sell methamphetamine.
Locke-Paddon and Tiner are asked to monitor traffic coming out of the hotel room, and they select a location at a nearby gas station to sit and wait.
“When you’ve been dealing with criminals for so long, you start to get feelings when something’s not right or someone’s not telling the truth,” Tiner says while waiting in the car. “A few years ago I contacted a guy I saw jay-walking – something I’d never done before – and it turned out he had murdered his wife the day before. Things like that are hard to explain – I guess we’re like fishermen who know where to fish.”
Tiner and Locke-Paddon are about to catch a big one.
The two ACT officers are called in along with another car of two ACT officers and a state parole officer to assist a GPD plain-clothed unit and an agent with the United Narcotic Enforcement Team (UNET) who are about to seize the Leavesley Road hotel room under surveillance.
The plan coming over the radio is for Tiner and Locke-Paddon to detain the suspected dealer who is waiting for food in the drive-through line at the In-N-Out burger next to the hotel. The officers will then join the others in securing the room.
As the suspect gets his food from the In-N-Out burger and pulls his truck forward to the hotel parking lot, Tiner and Locke-Paddon turn on their interior-mounted sirens and pull the man over.
“He’s on probation so we can search him at anytime,” Tiner said.
They find a thick wod of hundred-dollar bills equaling more than $1,300 in the truck’s center console, along with an array of gadgets and valuables believed to be stolen or traded for drugs: a diamond ring, high-powered binoculars, collector baseball card set, high-end bow- and-arrow set and several pieces of car stereo equipment.
Tiner stays with the handcuffed suspect while Locke-Paddon joins the other officers to enter the room.
The officers can see through the ground-floor window that there is another man in the room, and they get a room key from the front desk.
After one loud knock, the group of seven officers enters the room with guns drawn.
The man in the room is quickly handcuffed and found to be under the influence of methamphetamine.
Thirty-three grams of methamphetamine worth an estimated $950 are found in the room hidden underneath a mattress, along with a scale. Both men have previous records, and are arrested on several charges, including felony possession with the intent to sell.
Locke-Paddon says this is the ACT unit’s biggest drug bust in six-months.
“A bust like this is big for us, even though this guy was a relatively small-time dealer,” Locke-Paddon said. “Methamphetamine is the most popular drug in this area, and it fuels a lot of the crime we see, whether it’s gangs or theft or whatever. If we can get this guy, then we can get the guy who he buys from and so-on. We have to keep being aggressive if we want to beat the criminals.”
