Shell-Shocked Residents Ask Officials, Each Other for Help : Forum: Citing fear of crime, Ventura Avenue-area neighbors plead passionately for police patrols, an increase in jobs and cleanup of streets.

Saying they live in constant fear of crime and random drive-by shootings, about 400 Ventura Avenue-area residents crowded a school cafeteria Thursday, imploring their neighbors and city officials to help revitalize the community.

During an impassioned two-hour meeting, residents yelled, pleaded and reasoned with each other to work at increasing area jobs, intensifying police patrols, cleaning up unkempt Avenue-area streets and driving out neighborhood gangs.

“What we’ve always stood for is pride and we don’t have any pride anymore,” said 49-year neighborhood resident Carol Wren, urging her neighbors to take action amid bursts of audience applause. “Where has it gone? We’ve got to take our community back!”

The forum at Sheridan Way School came in the wake of a series of nighttime shooting sprees on West Harrison Street in March that sent residents cowering under tables and sleeping on floors to duck stray bullets.

In a dramatic climax to the meeting, Ventura City Police Chief Richard Thomas announced that officers in his department will open a substation in the area and are in final negotiations on a property at Olive and Main streets.

But a substation was only one of many improvements residents called for at the forum, which they decided would be the first in a series. The next meeting will be June 9.

Speaker after speaker complained of the local gang members, who they said terrorize residents and deface property on a regular basis. One woman, who asked that her name not be used, said she was watching a television show Wednesday night when she was startled by rocks crashing through her front and bathroom windows.

The woman, who has been active in galvanizing the community, said she received an anonymous call Thursday morning from someone who warned her: “Next time, it won’t be your windows or your house. Back off.”

During Thursday’s meeting, after about 15 minutes of gang-related complaints from that woman and other residents, resident Paul Castaneda called out from the back of the room.

“Hey, all of you people right here!” he said. “You were never sweating this issue 20 years ago. We were all in the streets then, too, but you weren’t sweating it.”

Castaneda, who identified himself as a former gang member, chastised many in the audience for organizing only after the violence spilled over onto their streets, and then wanting to banish gang members rather than trying to help them.

“You people are all scared, but how many of you ever took time to stop and talk to a gang member?” he asked. “I work, I’m getting married, I’m trying to make it, but you guys go on me by what I look like.”

Castaneda’s remarks provoked a flurry of cheers and yells, and the meeting threatened to disintegrate into warring fragments as neighbor started shouting at neighbor across the large room.

But M. Tony Garcia, a West Park Road resident who has lived in the area for all of his 77 years, stood up and called out for calm.

“This is how division begins,” he said. “We’ve heard grievances all evening. But you know who’s to blame? We’re all to blame.”

By 7:30 p.m., an hour and a half into the session, the volunteer resident coordinators directing the session had begun to compile a manageable list of immediate objectives, among them helping the police to construct the substation and badgering City Council members to spend more money on Avenue projects.

Councilman Gary Tuttle, who attended the meeting along with Councilman Jim Monahan and Mayor Tom Buford, urged the residents to pester city politicians as much as their more affluent, east-side peers do.

“It’s getting to be city budget time, and right about now, I get about 20 or 30 calls from people on the east end, wanting to know what about my sidewalk, I need my olive trees trimmed,” he said. “My suggestion to you is to call all seven council members all day, and you will get results. One hundred fifty calls to council members will make a difference.”