Residents Lament Loss of ‘Totally Responsive’ Senior Lead Officer

When Pilar Reynaldo and her husband Noel McCarthy moved from Silver Lake to Avenue 64 in Garvanza about a year ago, they discovered to their shock that the house they had bought was on the designated route for the expansion of the 710 freeway—a crucial bit of information not disclosed as part of the sale, according to Reynaldo.

And then the couple realized something even more alarming: “We learned we were living on a lawless part of town located between Los Angeles and Pasadena,” Reynaldo said, explaining that the border between the two cities is something of a chronically neglected grey zone where vehicles regularly speed and accidents are common. 

(In June, a bicyclist was killed in a road accident near the intersection of Avenue 64 and Church, and for weeks neither the Los Angeles Police Department nor the Pasadena Police Department conducted any investigation into the mishap. The LAPD eventually opened a probe after an officer admitted that the department had “dropped the ball” on the investigation, as Reynaldo put it. Click here to read more about the issue.) 

Reynaldo said she contacted the local Council District office as well as the Los Angeles Police Department’s Northeast Division senior lead officer for the area. “They both blew me off,” she claimed, adding: “I was frustrated.” 

New SLO in Town

Early this year, Sgt. Ruben Arellano, the LAPD Northeast supervisor in charge of local senior lead officers, told Reynaldo there was a new acting senior lead officer for Garvanza and northern Highland Park—Fernando Ochoa. Reynaldo called Ochoa—not fully aware that she was helping shape local history as well as a cautionary tale.

“From the first conversation we had, he was utterly responsive,” said Reynaldo. “Whenever we called him,” he was at our house within five minutes,” added McCarthy.

What’s more, “he told me he had lived in the community for 17 years and been an LAPD officer for 25 years,” Reynaldo said of Ochoa. 

Tackling Issues on Ave. 64

Ochoa subsequently did something that drastically reduced speeding on Avenue 64: He had his patrol colleagues park a decoy car from morning to evening near the grey-zone intersection of the street. Another time, he warned a man fixing a sedan’s transmission on the street that he would impound the car if he didn’t get it out of the public space in an hour.

Last week, after Northeast Capt. Jeff Bert announced that Ochoa would be replaced by a permanent senior lead officer, Reynaldo and her husband reacted to the news as if they had personally suffered a blow.

“I am absolutely shocked and depressed that they would take away someone with such public relations skills and knowledge of the community,” Reynaldo said.

For his part, Ochoa doesn’t feel he went particularly out of his way to help Reynaldo, given that he did after all do nothing more than enforce the law. Told about all the good things that Reynaldo and her husband have had to say about him over the months, Ochoa had this one-line response: “I didn’t really do much.” 

‘Totally Responsive’

For Reynaldo and many of their neighbors, it’s not how much Ochoa did. It’s what he got done.

“From being not responsive at all, I got someone [from the LAPD] who was totally responsive,” Reynaldo said, adding somewhat cryptically: “He [Ochoa] has been absolutely nothing but resourceful and helpful.”

Reynaldo said that while she appreciates that Lloyd Chan, the relatively young man who will be replacing Ochoa sometime in the second week of August, is a seasoned patrol officer, as Capt. Bert described him, she finds it unsettling that Chan speaks no Spanish. 

“It kind of defies logic—a senior lead officer is a communication channel between the police department and the public,” she said. 

Bilingual SLO For Highland Park?

It’s a point of view shared by some members of the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, where Ochoa had consistently been active.

“Perhaps the new officer can contribute great things to the community, but the language barrier is really important,” said HHPNC member Brandin Engersbach. “It will probably be for the benefit of the community to have a senior lead officer who is bilingual because it’s [a SLO’s work] all about having a connection with the people.”

Patch asked Highland Park’s other senior lead officer, Mark Allen, how important he considered Spanish-language skills to be in a senior lead officer’s work. 

“I’ve been in Highland Park for 13 years and it’s never been a problem,” replied Allen, who understands more Spanish than he can speak. On-the-spot crime fighting is mostly the work of patrol officers, Allen explained, adding that the senior lead officer intervenes in a crime’s aftermath.

‘Only Effective Person’

Beyond the obvious fact that Ochoa turned out to be “the only effective person” for the cluster of residents living in the Avenue 64 grey zone around Church Street, his replacement strikes Reynaldo and her husband as something of an affront to the community’s sentiments. 

In a public meeting in Garvanza just last month, explained Reynolds, many residents told Ochoa how much they enjoyed working with him. Not just that. Some of the residents even contacted Sgt. Arellano and told him how “responsive, effective and caring” Ochoa had been and that they would like see him continue in his post. 

“I find it kind of offensive to the community that they disregarded our responses about how he worked with us,” Reynaldo said. “Obviously, they [LAPD Northeast] disregarded the community in their decision.”

For now at least, Ochoa’s exit from Highland Park, where, he said, his family and his parents spent a combined 50 years, appears to be a done deal, regardless of how his supporters feel.

“I thought Ochoa was there to stay and we’d like to see him back,” Engersbach said. “It’s something that we can still bring up before the neighborhood council.”