“We recognize that (cameras) are the future of policing,” Quezada
says. “Our officers have been asking for them.”
Anaheim, home to more than 336,000 residents and major tourist
attractions including the Disneyland Resort, is the first city in
Orange County to require its officers to capture their encounters
with the public on camera, although a handful of other agencies
are testing them.
For the last 1½ years, Anaheim PD officers have been using audio
recorders.
“The community demands transparency,” says Quezada,
who took an unlikely path to becoming police chief of one of
America’s largest cities. Quezada is the son of immigrant parents
from Mexico who toiled in the fields and a cannery in Northern
California before settling in East Los Angeles to raise a family.
Quezada and his three older sisters grew up in the rough
neighborhood of Rio Honda in Pico Rivera, a “gateway” city to
Los Angeles that has long been home to Latino street gangs.
Quezada recalls working as an aide at a recreation center when he
was 14. He frequently would run across heroin addicts shooting
up in the public restroom.
“I would lock them inside the bathroom to keep kids from coming
in,” Quezada recalls.
While in the fifth and sixth grade, Quezada would look around
his classroom at times and notice some empty seats.
“Some of the kids would just vanish,” he says.
As police chief of Anaheim, Quezada is determined to reduce the
risk of such disappearing acts by getting his officers and residents
to work more closely together to make the city safer. Such a closer
relationship is particularly important in a city where more than
half of residents are Hispanic yet, according to an analysis by
The Associated Press released in September, only 23 percent of its
police officers are.
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Quezada aims to make the Anaheim PD a nationwide leader in
the “Problem Oriented Policing” approach to crime and public
disorder by forging partnerships with residents and business
owners who, in turn, promise to throw their support behind
specific problem-solving efforts.
“The key is listening to the community to determine what their
problems are instead of having us tell them what their problems
are,” says Quezada, who joined the Anaheim PD in 1996 after
spending three years with the Los Angeles PD.
Examples of how the Anaheim PD, under Quezada’s leadership,
has been making strides in improving dialogue with the city’s
communities include:
• Supplementing his Chief’s Advisory Board with a grassroots
group of residents from each of the city’s 22 neighborhoods.
Called the Chief’s Neighborhood Advisory Council, or
CNAC, the first meeting was held in November 2013, with
more than 20 members of the community participating.
“We challenged them to come up with ideas to improve
communication between our officers and their communities,”
Quezada says. “My message to them was, ‘We are one city,
and one police department.’”
• Launching a mobile version of the PACE (Public Awareness
through Citizen Education) citizen police academy. “It was
a huge success,” says Quezada of bringing the program to
Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. “A lot of the education
was missing as to how and why we operate the way we
do. What does the community want? It wants the police.
Many residents just don’t know what the police department
is about. They think we just drive by in a black-and-white,
handle emergency calls and then leave. To go out and spend
five minutes explaining our role to them was huge.”
• Continuing to expand programs aimed at young people.
During the summer, more than 1,000 people packed an