Local cops: from bust to burnout

By Jack Gillum

ALVISO -- At 9:30 p.m. on a Friday night: "All right, find a place to eat," Officer Roy Gutierrez squawks over his Nextel phone to another unit.

"Hungry?" he asks the reporter. "We have to eat now." The early morning will come soon, and that means priority calls from the dispatcher.

Calls, that is, away from the university and up to the north side of Santa Clara, a place where many students don't travel and an area many don't conjure up when they think of the Mission City, or what they see in the glossy pages of admissions flyers. Cliche, white picket fences and quaint houses are instead exchanged for smokestacks and higher crime.

Even so, the police life of Gutierrez here is different from the fast-paced, dangerous work to which he's accustomed in the six years he's served on the Los Angeles Police Department.

South Central was a favorite. But dangerous. The area was rife with crime, gangs and drugs, replete with broken homes and derelict mothers. Gutierrez once recalls a woman on his old beat who performed $5 oral sex acts for crack. She was 8ý months pregnant.

Gutierrez, at age 32 -- and himself a family man -- can't get away sometimes. Driving down El Camino Real, and past the 24-hour Jack-in-the-Box, where Santa Clara students feast on two tacos for 99 cents in a drive through that painstakingly lasts forever, he receives a phone call.

"Trabajo," he says to his wife. "Work." And a lot of it, too. Gutierrez is on four, 10-hour shifts each week, at times volunteering for so much overtime it draws laughter from his colleagues. "They call me a whore," he jokes. A department of about 150 sworn officers means close-knit bonds, almost what he's used to from an LA division.

He traveled back to Santa Clara to be closer to his family and give them a better life. "It was kinda rough to be down there by ourselves," says the San Jose native.

High hopes

Gutierrez anticipates every day that maybe -- just maybe -- the California plate in front of him will come back as stolen on his computer. "C'mon," he says, following behind the car, perhaps making the driver tremble at the sight of the red-and-blue lightbar to the rear.

Nope, not this time. That zealousness is in the blood of many young officers. "They get in it, and they think they have a cause," says Clifford Levy, a psychologist and president of the national Consortium of Police Psychologists. But that fades as the days reach retirement.

Back in the breakroom, Gutierrez sighs. The job can feel like an uphill battle. "People just hate you. You feel like the enemy," he says, taking a bite of his chicken sandwich, one of three his wife made to get him through the long shift.

The food and the job can be killers, he warns. The stress of police work and quick runs to fast food chains are taxing. But that doesn't stop Gutierrez who, earlier in the night, took a food break with friend Officer Mike Crescini at Bennigan's on Great America Parkway, in addition to his wife's sandwiches.

Crimes and punishment

Around 10:25, Gutierrez's black-and-white rolls up to a street near San Tomas and El Camino Real. The sides of the road are choked with cars, many belong to high school girls and boys, all herding themselves in the same direction.

"Underage party," Gutierrez says. He walks up the side of the house, and pandemonium ensues. "Shit, it's the cops!" one boy yells as he streaks to the back of the house, hopping over the fence. Dozens of teenagers are crammed along the side of the house, many holding red, beer-filled Dixie cups, as music blares from the house.

At about 15 officers per 10,000 residents, the city of Santa Clara ranks about average for police presence in Santa Clara County, according to statistics published by the U.S. Department of Justice for 2000.

The homicide rate -- seven, for 2003 -- is higher than many other smaller surrounding towns, including Cupertino, Los Gatos, and Sunnyvale, statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation stated. Rates of robbery and assaults are also highest on the list, with a notable exception: San Jose.

But some officers say that there are plenty of cops on the street. Mike McDowell, a 17-year veteran of the department, notes that crimes, especially homicides, have gone down over the years. Now, McDowell's day patrols, he says, consist mostly of responding to 911 calls and burglary alarms.

At a nearby 7-11 the uphill battle motif is in full effect for the 47-year-old son of an airline pilot. It's just boring work these days. "I'm just doing it to pay the bills," utters McDowell, as he reaches for a book of matches.

Earlier, McDowell, who is married to his second wife and who talks about his 23-year-old son, was dusting off fingerprints at a cat burglary. Before that, he issued a ticket to a tedious U-turner near Costco. All in a day's work? These days, yes. He can't help but count down the eons until retirement.

Night shift

It's an easy, evening drive to the Avalon nightclub Friday night, where officers responded to complaints of rowdy customers. Gutierrez shows up when things are dying down. "Hey, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, get out of here!" one yellow-jacketed security officer orders to a group of clubbers in the parking lot while smoking a cigarette. An arrest of a rowdy patron was about it.

On the SCPD for just two years, Gutierrez has little seniority and slim bargaining power to get daytime runs.

After arresting rowdy patrons at the Avalon nightclub on a Friday night, Gutierrez receives a call of an overdose to the north side. Three in the morning means few commuters and empty roads-- a plus on his graveyard shift.

Waiting at an apartment complex for arriving officers and two paramedics is a family surrounding Vanessa, a 14-year-old who took down a good portion of 500-count, Costco-brand pills. Vanessa, police say, was upset at her father's mandate: No dating the 19-year-old boy she adored. Police estimate she could have ingested hundreds earlier in the evening but is stable enough to avoid a ride in the ambulance.

Gutierrez puts her in the back of the car, driving through the university area on the way to Valley Medical Center. The waiting room, separated from the rest of the ER with green bulletproof glass, looks like a makeshift shelter. Plastic seating and vinyl-upholstered chairs aren't comfortable for many waiting patients, who either lean on relatives or rest their backs on the tile floor.

"It's like this every night," sighs a hospital worker inside as she zips past a gurney.

Vanessa is throwing up. It's going to be a long night, Gutierrez says as he rifles through paperwork. An incoming trauma further stalls things. "Oh great, even longer," he says.

The hours seemed to crawl in an emergency room time warp. Three in the morning turns into four. Then into five. Gutierrez called Vanessa's father hours ago but he is nowhere in sight.

It reminds Gutierrez of a young child shot up from gang violence in LA. While the boy was in the ER, half dead with life-threatening injuries, the mother was complacent. "She asked if she had to come down," he said. He walks back to check on Vanessa's progress.

After tests and a charcoal cocktail to absorb the poison in her stomach, Vanessa is discharged. She's wheeled next door, with the stains of black charcoal still on her lips, to the psychiatric holding facility where she'll stay a few days for an evaluation.

Gutierrez says goodbye to the nurse and gets back in his car. Time to get back out and fight crime, or so he's told, to do the job that he loves but terrifies his wife. He fires up the ignition and checks the computer. No incidents pending.

Two more hours to go -- but then there's always overtime.

* Contact Jack Gillum at (408) 554-4849 or jgillum@scu.edu.