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EAST PALO ALTO — They were toddlers when their town earned the dubious distinction of America’s murder capital a quarter-century ago. In this bayside community bypassed by Silicon Valley’s wealth, gunfire became the soundtrack to childhoods spent avoiding parks and hustling home before dark.

Now, as Detective Lydia Cardoza and Officers Jose Luaorozco and Robert Olvera patrol East Palo Alto’s streets, their Peninsula hometown that witnessed so much tragedy has undergone a transformation few had imagined possible. Violent crime has dropped precipitously — by over 60 percent in the past 25 years. Murder has almost vanished.

“Now you see people jogging, and kids playing in the parks,” said Luaorozco, a 26-year-old Marine veteran and two-year officer who once lived on Dumbarton Avenue. “They’re not worried if there’s going to be a drive-by shooting.”

East Palo Alto became the per-capita murder leader of the United States in 1992 when its 42 homicides, fueled by gang and drug warfare among its population of 24,000, pushed its killing rates past crime-plagued Compton and Washington, D.C.

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In 2017, the city logged one homicide, a mid-December murder-suicide between domestic partners, not a street crime. Since 2014, the city has seen no more than a handful of killings each year. Aggravated assault totals are hovering in the 50s, plummeting 80 percent from four years ago.

There’s no denying that has been helped by East Palo Alto’s economic transformation — the city has benefited from regional tech growth and the arrival of big-box stores, furniture giant IKEA and the Four Seasons Hotel, which replaced the liquor stores that lined Whiskey Gulch off Highway 101.

But economics alone don’t explain the change.How East Palo Alto shed its murderous rep is really a story of how a community came to trust its police force, maybe for the first time ever, and in doing so finally fulfilled one of the main reasons for the city’s existence.

Tragically historic times

Ruben Abrica is in his latest mayoral stint for East Palo Alto. A resident for nearly four decades, he was part of the campaign to incorporate the city in 1983, serving on its inaugural city councils.

“One of the reasons we became a city was to improve public safety and have our own police department,” Abrica said.

But the new city, and its nascent police force, had an uphill battle in the crack epidemic decimating a predominantly black population.

Ruben Abrica, East Palo Alto mayor, is photographed at the vacant site of a former market in East Palo Alto, California, on Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. Abrica remembers this site, which housed a marketplace, as a hotbed for illegal activity in the city's early years. City Hall and the police station is across University Ave. behind him. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

Detective Lydia Cardoza, of the East Palo Alto Police Department, is photographed in front of her church, Saint Francis of Assisi, in East Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. Cardoza grew up attending this church. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

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Pastor Paul Bains is photographed at The Peoples Plaza in East Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. Bains grew up in the city and has seen the changes. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)



Pedestrians cross University Ave. at Bay Rd. in East Palo Alto, California, on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

Officer Robert Olvera of the East Palo Alto Police Department is photographed in front of the Boys and Girls Club in East Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. Olvera grew up in East Palo Alto and spent lots of time at the club. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

Chief Albert Pardini, of the East Palo Alto Police Department is photographed at the police station in East Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)



A pedestrian crosses Bay Rd. in front of city hall in East Palo Alto, California, on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

Officer Jose Luaorozco of the East Palo Alto Police Department is photographed along University Ave. after a night shift in East Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017. Over the past 25 years, East Palo Alto has evolved from having the highest per capita homicide rate in 1992 to one homicide in 2017. Officer Luaorozco grew up in East Palo Alto. (Gary Reyes/ Bay Area News Group)

Pastor Paul Bains, who settled in the area in the 1960s, remembers it well. Bains runs Project WeHOPE, a nonprofit supporting homeless and at-risk adults in the region.

“Before crack, there were two-parent homes, and people owned their homes,” said Bains, whose family moving company was once the city’s largest private employer. But that changed: “Palo Alto had drive-ins, and East Palo Alto had drive-bys.”

This new reality carried over into most of the 1990s. Olvera, 27, grew up blocks away from his local school, and his family drilled a strict regimen: school, the Boys and Girls Club, home. He remembers leaving town to shop for groceries.

“People don’t have to be afraid to walk to the store,” Olvera said. “We have no problem shopping here now.”

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What Cardoza, Luaorozco and Olvera also remember from their childhoods was the frequent but brief sight of police officers.

“Crime was off the charts, so police couldn’t really do community policing,” Olvera said. “It was going to someone who needed help, then going on to the next call.”

But their work piqued Cardoza’s curiosity and helped set her current career, which was preceded by a stint working intake at the San Mateo County jail. Olvera remembers officers responding to a burglary of his family home and not being able to speak Spanish — and saw a void he could fill. He was a community service officer before becoming a cop.

Luaorozco became friendly with the wave of officers responding to drug dealing next door, shootings at the corner, and in one instance, a home invasion at his house. He was a 14-year-old member of the police explorer program in 2006 when he and his mentoring officer responded to the fatal shooting of Officer Richard May, who had been chasing an assault suspect who was eventually sentenced to death for the killing.

An inspired Luaorozco followed in May’s footsteps first when he joined the Marines, and then became a hometown officer.

Cops start hitting the streets … to chat

The police department in the 1990s battled trust issues with residents amid headline-grabbing corruption and misconduct. On at least two occasions that decade, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office was called on to help police the city, an embarrassing bout of irony. But residents remained fearful of helping police, frustrating crime-fighting.

“We knew people knew what happened,” Abrica said. “But no one was cooperating.”

By the start of the new millennium, a shift toward community policing began taking hold, Abrica said. Burnham Matthews, who took over as chief during the height of the “murder capital” frenzy, is largely credited with helping the force shed its corrupt past, and successors Wesley Bowling and Ron Davis were instrumental in driving down the homicide rate.

“The last 12 years, we’ve seen the most dramatic turnaround,” Abrica said.

Helping that along was a series of federally assisted gang crackdowns, capped by “Operation Sunny Day” in 2014 near the end of Davis’ tenure that led to the indictments of 16 high-profile targets in the biggest gang bust in county history.

“There were a few operations that did take out some of the more hardcore criminal elements,” Abrica said. “You can’t do it all on good faith and trust.”

The same year that “Sunny Day” was announced, Albert Pardini, then assistant chief of the San Francisco Police Department, was appointed as police chief in East Palo Alto. Bains said Pardini’s arrival accelerated community policing in the city.

“He walks around the city, and listens to our concerns,” Bains said. “He recognized the role of faith-based groups. He helped us all come together to solve problems.”

The results speak for themselves: Pardini’s term has already seen year-to-year drops in violent crime of 64 percent and 33 percent.

For all of his experience policing a major city like San Francisco, Pardini looks completely at home protecting a city of 30,000 residents, and regularly joins his officers’ foot patrols. The chief is genteel in his demeanor but firm about his aims, and once-slumping department morale has flourished.

“We had a department that the community saw as a reactive department,” Pardini said. “(Our) relationship was developed by talking to them at community meetings, walking the community, meeting people in their front yard, and talking to them in situations where they don’t need police.”

In January, when police responded to an assault at a taqueria, the lack of cooperation Abrica once lamented was gone.

“We had to call more officers to the scene not because there was a problem, but because there were too many people there telling us what they saw,” Pardini said.

His officers take that spirit to heart, particularly when interacting with the city’s youth.

Luaorozco said he joined his hometown police department in large part to inspire kids that remind him of himself as a boy.

“Children see me, see that I grew up here, and see me doing well and that I didn’t fall to the influences that others got into, whether it was gangs or drugs,” he said.

Cardoza similarly leverages her local ties.

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“Officers are a lot closer to the community as a whole,” she said. “Closing that gap and opening up those lines of communication have been really crucial to all the changes.”

“East Palo Alto is growing up”

Abrica and Bains routinely take stock of how much their beloved city has changed.

“It took tragic days and cleaning up the police department to get here,” Abrica said. “And a lot of it goes to community policing. That’s the foundation of the successes. There’s trust on both sides.”

Bains is heartened by what he’s seen, particularly the collaboration between faith-based organizations and nonprofits. Still, the wins don’t come without worries.

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Redwood City: Hit-and-run leaves pedestrian on life support “When you see million-dollar homes next to our homeless shelters, that’s gentrification on steroids,” Bains said.

But that’s another battle for another day. Long-standing neighborhood signs that prohibit shortcut traffic to the Dumbarton Bridge are being overtaken by ivy and trees as the city becomes less and less of a place to drive through.

“This city is a very proud city, and a very forgiving city,” Bains said. “East Palo Alto is growing up.”