When even gangs complain, you know you have a problem

Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay is fed up with what he calls “problem properties.”

They make up a small percentage of businesses and homes but trigger too many police responses, Ramsay said, for everything from noise complaints to underage parties to shootings. The high number of calls strains officers’ ability to respond to emergencies and to spend the time it takes to help others, he said in an interview this past week. So everyone suffers.

Owners of problem properties are being subsidized, Ramsay said, because taxpayers have to pay for extra police responses and for police to essentially manage the properties.

The properties include rentals and subleased venues, illegal after-hours clubs, owner-occupied homes, businesses and the usual troubled motels and hotels, including some along Broadway, he said. They are scattered around the city.

Case in point: Officers recently responded to calls at one apartment complex 16 times in a week. Ramsay figures the cost this way: 16 multiplied by a minimum of an hour per officer, multiplied by two because a minimum of two officers respond. And counting time to fill out reports, that equals the equivalent of one full-time officer assigned to that property that week.

“And we can’t sustain it,” the police chief said. The budget is flat. Hiring more officers isn’t an option now.

Another example: Even gang members have asked police to do something about a south Wichita home that police suspect of being a “flop house” for meth addicts and of being linked to drug dealing, car thefts, home break-ins and pilfering in the neighborhood, along with being an eyesore and a health concern.

When even gang members are complaining, “that actually tells you something,” said police Capt. Jose Salcido.

For months, his South Patrol officers have been spending a lot of hours dealing with the house in the 2500 block of South Mosley. Just Thursday, six police cars and two sheriff’s vehicles lined the curbs there.

Lack of tools

The police department, Ramsay said, is working on the overall problem by counting 911 calls by address, by developing a program to notify property owners and managers when there are repeated police calls and by looking into best practices elsewhere.

But a solution remains elusive because police in Wichita lack tools to deal with problem properties, said Ramsay, who is in his first year as the city’s police chief.

Ramsay, who came to the biggest police department in Kansas from his job as police chief in Duluth, Minn., said he has been “shocked” by the “lack of trust in government here” among some property owners.

In Duluth, an owner could be fined for a property that caused excessive police calls, Ramsay said.

Ramsay noted that he is still a landlord in Minnesota, so he understands the dynamics of managing properties.

He said he wanted to emphasize that Wichita’s problem properties involve relatively few owners.

Still, he said, it’s clear to police that some landlords don’t care what their tenants do to the neighborhood. When he goes to neighborhood meetings, one of the most common complaints is the one problem house or business that bothers everyone.

In meetings with landlords and real estate groups here, he said, he has learned that owners are concerned about the prospect of being fined without being notified and are opposed to regulations.

Still, landlords are crucial to a solution, so they have to take responsibility, he said.

“We have to do something. We have to look at options. So we are looking at potential ordinances.”

Ramsay said he wants to continue to meet with property managers “and see how we can come up with solutions to resolve this. Obviously, I want their input and support. We want to partner with them … and not have an adversarial relationship.”

Some large properties can be expected to generate a number of calls. That would include malls, big-box stores and hospitals, where there naturally are large numbers of people, Ramsay said. Those properties also do their share by hiring off-duty officers to help with the peace-keeping burden, he said. Hospitals can have high numbers because they are in the business of helping victims.

Ramsay said he wanted to be clear that he still wants people to call in emergencies and to report crimes, including domestic violence.

“We don’t want people to be discouraged from calling when they have been a victim of a crime.”

Problem house

Salcido, the Patrol South commander, can recite the problem addresses in his area. There was a private club that operated for several months last year near Lincoln and Broadway that consumed a lot of officer time in controlling crowds and traffic, in responding to fights and shootings. In one instance, police found three bullet fragments and 23 shell casings. In another, a bullet hit the club window.

All the disturbances related to the club, which was illegally operating as a private venue with drinking and music, diverted police efforts from the Old Town entertainment district and from other calls in South Patrol, the captain said.

The city cited the property owner for violations so many times that it became not economically feasible to operate the club, he said. It closed. But it shouldn’t have taken five months, Salcido said.

All that time, he said, “we’re tying up an officer just for baby-sitting the club.”

But if there is one spot that especially illustrates what Salcido and his police chief call problem properties, it is a house in the middle of the neighborhood on South Mosley.

It is the house that offends even gang members.

It sits in a line of small ranch-style homes where children now might not be safe playing outside, and the block is home to elderly residents who diligently maintain their property, police say. When school is in session, children let off by the school bus have to walk by the house.

The police department let Officer Claudale Cavanaugh take an Eagle reporter and photojournalist to the South Mosley house on Thursday to see what Ramsay and Salcido mean by problem properties.

The house stands out: heaps of stinking debris lining the space between the sidewalk and curb. In the driveway is a large dust-covered RV, backed in, on flat tires, with old newspapers lining the inside of the windshield. Junk is visible in the RV and clustered around it. A shirtless man standing in the open RV doorway eats a peanut butter sandwich. An open front door, without a screen, leads into the house. A filthy white door lies sideways under a front window. Tree limbs are stacked 5 feet high, filling the space on one side of the house. Weed-covered trash piles up in the back yard. And police cars line the curbs out front, partly in response to two apparently stolen vehicles on the street directly in front of the house.

The RV is home to a man on the state’s registry of violent offenders. The utilities have been turned off in the house. Someone’s bedding covers a bare spot in the front yard. A man sits in a chair in the driveway working on a bicycle. Another man combs through the debris by the curb, looking for any scrap of recyclable metal. Two women with sullen expressions, one missing teeth and wearing mirrored glasses, sit, puffing on cigarettes, by the RV. With no running water, the people gathered outside share jugs of water that Cavanaugh thinks have been filled from someone else’s faucets.

On a typical day, police count 20 people – men and women, mostly ages 19 to 45 – coming to and from the property.

It’s a “flop house,” Cavanaugh said, where the common denominator appears to be methamphetamine, the highly addictive and illegal drug that makes people lose sleep and weight.

Cavanaugh counted at least 31 times that she has been to that address since January.

She is the community police officer for that area, but because she is diverted to that house so many times, it hampers her ability to handle other neighborhood issues, including a case on South Ellis where someone slashed tires on 10 vehicles.

In one recent day, police arrested five people at the house on warrants, including for some felony crimes. About two months ago, police arrested a man there who was wanted in Texas on a parole violation. On Thursday, police found the blue sedan and maroon pickup that appeared to be stolen parked in front of the house. Police saw one man leaning into the blue car. They found two packets on him with a crystal-like substance. A field test indicated it was meth.

Most of the people who come to the house arrive on foot or bicycle.

Cavanaugh said she worries about the safety of a man in his 70s who lives next door. That man tries to help his neighbors, sometimes with food. The people gathered around the RV where the registered offender lives spill out onto the older man’s front yard, wearing away the grass.

A man who identified himself as Tarry Jones III said his mother owns the house with the RV parked out front and that the debris outside, including a stack of bare couch cushions, comes from efforts to clean out the house. Standing in the front yard, with no shirt, in the stifling heat, Jones said he and his friends are trying to clean up the yard but need more time.

But Cavanaugh sounded frustrated. “We’re not getting any cooperation,” Cavanaugh told Jones after she walked up and asked him how he was doing. “More and more stuff keeps showing up,” the officer said.

Later, Jones conceded: “We don’t need to have all this trash out here. I agree with them (police).”

Jones said there is no evidence of him having meth.

He said he is 28 and has collected some college hours and that he would like to become an electrical engineer. He said his mother works full time.

Cavanaugh said police don’t suspect Jones’ mother of any drug activity, that they think she keeps to herself inside. She could not be reached to discuss the police concerns about the house. The officer said she has never been able to contact the woman in person. The woman faces a municipal court hearing over the conditions of the property, Cavanaugh said.

According to property records, the three-bedroom, one-bath house was built in 1942, is 896 square feet and is appraised at $46,600.

Varice Walker, the registered offender who lives in the RV in the driveway, spent part of the morning methodically using a screwdriver to take apart a bike frame. Walker, 52, volunteered that he is on the offender registry because of a conviction for attempted aggravated battery, that he has “nothing to hide” and that he has been living there for about four months. The offender registry lists the South Mosley home as his primary address. If he was not supposed to be living there, he said, sheriff’s officers would have been “picking me up a long time ago.”

Walker said he thought police had been fair to him, but Jones said he felt harassed.

People come to his house daily, Jones said.

“I help people” who are homeless, he said. “I’m not going to leave somebody out in the cold.” Many of the people who walk or ride their bikes to the house are recovering drug addicts, he said.

He said he expected that the utilities will soon be back on. “We’ve been a little broke lately.”

Cavanaugh suspects that people who frequent the house are stealing things in the neighborhood to pay for drugs and that some of the backpack-wearing men who ride up on bicycles are there to deal meth. One man meeting that description kept on riding through the tunnel of police cars parked out front Thursday.

Sheriff’s officers showed up to photograph and collect fingerprints from the stolen pickup parked in front of the driveway, because it is their case. The truck’s owner had kept a gun in the truck, and Cavanaugh wasn’t sure whether it had been recovered after the truck was stolen.

When The Eagle reporter and photojournalist arrived back at the police station after visiting the house with Cavanaugh, Salcido told the journalists that what they saw at the house is typical.

“Don’t think we set this up,” he said, his smile quickly fading and eyes turning serious.

“That’s just how it is.”

This story was originally published June 25, 2016 at 4:45 PM with the headline "When even gangs complain, you know you have a problem."