ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Agencies are in week six of Operation Route 66 to clean up the Central Avenue corridor. They’ve made more than 300 hundred arrests. 

“We are an at-risk child abuse prevention agency,” said Stacy Carrasco, site manager of PB&J Services. 

Now, people who live and work there are noticing changes.

PB&J Family Services is sandwiched in the heart of Albuquerque’s International District. They welcome children for daily pre-K and parents for other programming, but the neighborhood hasn’t always been as welcoming.

“The work is just beautiful. They were disposing of needles or feces and clothes into either our playground area, jumping over the fence, showering,” said Carrasco. “Our kids bikes were getting taken or almost getting taken, or we’d come to work, and it’s like ‘OK, now we have to pick up all of the mess that’s been left over here,’ you know, it’s hard.”

Carrasco says vandals took their cameras and came back nightly to try their luck at the storage unit facility on the other side of their fence. 

 In the past few weeks, she’s noticed things are starting to change. 

“I’ve noticed that there’s not a lot of action in the camera in the nighttime, or when we’re getting here to open our facilities. There’s not a lot of unhoused community members in our parking lot,” Carrasco said. 

Carrasco partially credits local law enforcement’s ongoing Operation Route 66. Officers and agents have arrested more than 300 people in the past five weeks. 200 of them had active warrants. 

Their charges range from probation violations to rape, drug possession.

“I feel comfortable that it’ll continue to be progression, or at least stabilize. We can’t totally take everything out, but at least stabilize,” said Carrasco. 

Bringing beauty back to the neighborhood she loves.