“Go to ops 2,” a voice says over the radio. It’s roughly 5:00 p.m. on a Saturday evening and north San Angelo is getting ready for the nightlife. Officer Frank Flores reaches down and turns the dial a couple of clicks.
“Where are we working tonight?” a second voice asks, followed by the chatter of the three men on the channel. Drug houses, and one of the patrolmen of Sector 1 has already got a lead on a house to sit on.
Flores and the other officers communicate their locations; devise a plan as to who does what. Here, on this kind of work, teamwork is key and each unit plays an integral role.
Checking the pending calls and taking incoming ones from dispatch, the officers go about their regular patrol. The self-initiated activity runs in the background, an available unit watching for suspicious activity and ready to move should something take place. He and his backup remain in constant communication—they know where each other are at all times.
“It’s not easy at all…especially by yourself,” Flores says of the drug game. “When you’re just one person…and you’re in a giant billboard, driving around, they’re (the criminals) obviously going to see that and aren’t going to do anything.”
Flores drives a Tahoe, meaning his billboard is a little bigger than the officers in the Chargers, and thus, a little more difficult to hide. He works a lot of traffic, stopping vehicles that commit violations and double-checking those who appear to be suspicious.
Sector 1 Charles Shift Sergeant Daniel Williams explains that officers divide up their roles based on preferences and skills in order to work as a cohesive unit. “I worked with an officer once that really liked checking alleys and businesses,” he said. “I liked working traffic, so when she was chasing them out of alleys, I was knocking them down on traffic. You feed into each others’ strengths and weaknesses and your weaknesses feed into somebody else’s strengths, so it works out real well.”
Teamwork is vital across all sectors, Williams said, and the procedures for self-initiated activity are essentially the same, but in Sector 1, that support seems to be a bit more vital.
The “Bad” Side of Town
Comprised of Paul Ann, the Bluffs and everything in between, Sector 1 encompasses San Angelo north of Houston Harte. Domestic disturbances, like in all other parts of the city, are still the number one call for service, followed by burglaries/thefts and drugs.
While the type of crime mirrors the rest of the city, the severity of it differs up north to a great extent.
“It’s usually busier here,” Williams says, comparing Sector 1 to the other two city sectors. “[We have] more of the high-priority, violent—the adrenaline rush calls. If we have a call in Sector 1, if it’s a bad call, it’s going to be a good bad call, not someone calling in and saying something happened and you get there and nothing’s there. If it happens here, it’s going to be more than likely a good, righteous call. We’ve had two double homicides in Sector 1 in the last 12 months,” he says as example.
Two days after the interview there was an aggravated robbery at Walmart. The suspect, wielding a weapon and non-compliant, was shot.
That’s not to say that Sector 1 is the “bad side of town”, Sgt. Williams continued, even if it is perceived to be. Williams says that since joining the PD in ’98 he’s worked all sides of the city and has seen the same stuff in every area. What makes Sector 1 different, he says, is its makeup.
“To me, I’d say Sector 1 is more of a working class sector. It has a lot of our lower middle class families in it; they work hard, don’t have a lot, but know what life is like. A lot of them stay real close to home—mom and dad live a couple blocks this way, aunt and uncle a couple of blocks that way, it’s all real close together like that.
“At the same time…Sector 1 is real diverse, because part of Sector 1 is the Bluffs. That is completely different than the rest of the sector,” he said. “You’ve got two extremes. You’ve got the Bluffs on one end and Paul Ann on the other, which I consider more of an upper middle class neighborhood, then in between you’ve got a lot of the lower middle class, you’ve got a lot of HUD housing up here, lower income families like that, that don’t have a lot, but work hard for what they’ve got.”
Williams says that it takes a special skill set to work in Sector 1, emphasizing not least an ability to communicate. The residents up north, he says, have a different set of priorities and different problems, and officers need to not only recognize that, but to be able to understand and speak to individuals on their level, without becoming condescending, judgmental or talking down to them.
‘If someone’s $50 lawnmower gets stolen up here, that’s a big deal,’ he says. ‘Somewhere else they might just say, ‘oh well, I’ll buy a new one’. Here, it’s a big heartache.’
It’s no mystery that crime is more prevalent in lower-income areas, and the same is true of San Angelo. Domestic disturbances are a problem citywide, but in the north they tend to be more violent. Drug possession is common all over, but in Sector 1 you’re more apt to find a drug house. Organized crime is higher, which means that officers have to be more organized in their enforcement.
“That’s one thing in this sector,” Williams begins, “I’m the Charles Company Sergeant, but a lot of the guys in the Bravo Company, they work real well together too. Up here, you’re going to have to work at it a little harder. I mean, it’s easy to find stuff, but it takes teamwork to build it. It’s real hard to do anything in this job all by yourself. You’ve got have somebody there to watch your back. You’ve got to have somebody there to keep eyes on a house while you go chase after this car, or whatever. You’ve got to have that teamwork there, and they all work together really well and support each other.”
Focused Patrol
Saturday night’s shift begins at a known problem house on the north side. When the officers start at 4:30 p.m., caller traffic is low and the pending calls are knocked out quickly.
Working a focused patrol area, one officer has got an eye on a location known to be rife with drugs, and as he witnesses a subject move from the location, he notifies the other officers with a description of the driver and the vehicle, as well as the license plate number.
“A lot of officers work it as they’re concentrating on problem houses, problem people,” Sgt. Williams says of focused patrol. “We identify a house that we have a lot of issues with, we initiate a lot of traffic, a lot of extra patrol in that area, trying to clean up that area, solve the problems of that neighborhood. That could be a house where you have known burglars working out of or a drug house, just a house that we have a lot of issues with for anything. We’ve started taking a lot of initiated activity to address problems to make it better for the neighborhood.”
Some officers prefer to work drug houses, others burglaries and still others traffic, Williams explains. Officers gravitate toward certain sectors and certain shifts for a reason, he says, and when a group of officers team up to address those three areas together, a constant stream of initiated activity comes in.
“You can really get out there and work it hard and everybody’s happy doing what they’re doing because they’re all there,” he said. “It’s one of those things that everybody has their own thing they like working on and teamwork helps you get there.”
For the most part, officers determine themselves which areas they want to concentrate on during their shifts, but information on problem areas is shared throughout the department, enabling them to better focus their efforts.
Due to the nature of the crime in Sector 1 and the reliance on teamwork, Williams stresses that relationships between officers are extremely important.
“When you have the friendship—not just at work, but off-duty also—you begin to learn to read people,” he said. “When you hear them key up on the radio you know just that little inflection in their voice, there’s something going on. There’s nothing there, but you know they’re hyped up for something and you better get up and support them.”
The Drug Problem
Frank Flores has been with the San Angelo Police Department since October 2008. In the past five years, Flores has seen the drug scene in his sector undergo a volatile change from misdemeanor marijuana to felony methamphetamine usage.
“When I first came on, it (meth) wasn’t that common,” he said. “It’s been around forever, obviously, but the things that I had noticed then was that marijuana was a real easy thing to find. Now, we’re finding methamphetamine a lot easier than we’re finding marijuana, so we’re finding felony drugs a lot more frequently than we are misdemeanor drugs.”
Drug-related crimes account for the third highest number of all incidents in Sector 1, and many of the thefts and other problems in the area are motivated or spurred by drug usage, officers say.
“If you look at your burglaries and your thefts…they’re being driven by the drugs,” Sgt. Williams said. “I’d say very few of the thefts that I’ve been to—they’re not stealing for food. They’re not stealing to support their family, they’re stealing to support their habit.”
Flores estimates that approximately half the time someone is arrested in possession, they are also under the influence. Most of the time, he says, if the police have been called on a subject under the influence, they’ve been called for just that reason. Failure to make eye contact, the way they answer certain questions, and other indicators tip off trained police that someone has been using.
The presence of drugs is dangerous, he continues, because with drugs come weapons and altered judgment. People don’t want to go to jail for a long time,” he says, “so they usually run, and things of that nature.”
Although there seems to be a concentration of drugs in Sector 1, it doesn’t necessarily exclude them from the rest of the city. “Some of the drugs we have up north come from different sectors,” Flores says. “It isn’t just made here and stays here, it’s all over the place. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep track of. Sometimes if a drug dealer knows we’re pretty hot on them and we’re tracking them they just uproot and go somewhere else.”
Hotspots
En route to attempt to locate a wanted subject, Flores’s radio goes off once more. This time he’s being dispatched to the Bluffs for a domestic disturbance, an occurrence rare enough to warrant the use of a map to find the exact location.
“We don’t get dispatched out to the Bluffs very often,” he says, navigating the streets of his sector. “Probably a majority of the calls that we go out to in the Bluffs are at River Crest for suicidal subjects or unruly patients, stuff like that. The majority of calls we go to out there are that and alarm calls, especially during windy weather and stuff—that’s when the majority of our alarm calls go out. It sets off a lot of house and car alarms, businesses.”
Likewise, calls to Paul Ann are relatively low as compared to “the heart of the sector”, and those tend to be typical neighborhood calls, Williams said. Loud parties, domestics and similar issues are common to the area; there isn’t a high volume of violent crimes or drug house operations.
The majority of the criminal activity up north is concentrated in the middle, where budget motels, densely-populated, low-income housing and Walmart contribute to caller volume.
Although most of the calls take place at residences, Walmart does account for high number of thefts in the sector, with officers responding to the superstore an average of once or twice a night, Williams said.
Chadbourne’s strip of low-end motels also account for a number of incidents, most of which is drug-related or circulates around violence. Prostitutes are also known to the area, however Williams said they aren’t a particularly big problem like some of the other crimes are.
“Those [motels] aren’t as bad as they used to be with drug problems and stuff like that, but there’s still some there,” Williams said. “The oilfield has played—to me, it’s played a big boom in cleaning up some of the lower-class motels because they’re renting them out long term to people instead of day-to-day, night-to-night to people, so it’s cleaned up some of those issues. You get someone that’s staying there three months as opposed to someone who, ‘we rent it out tonight and do whatever we want to do,’” he said.
“Every sector is different and you’ve got to work them differently,” Williams continued. “They’ve each got their own personality, their own feel to them. Each sector has its own parts in it that are just day and night different.”
In Sector 1, a lot of the policing centers on cleaning up concentrations of crime in known problem areas. In order to do that, Williams said, police need to know where those areas are. “Let us know if you have problems,” he said. “That’s what we’re there to help with—if people have problems. If we don’t know about the problems, we can’t address them. Just talk to us.”
Other Police Beat Articles
Sector 2: East San Angelo, Downtown and Domestics
Sector 3: West San Angelo, Car Wrecks and Thefts
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