Street Barricade to Curb Drug Sales Urged in L.A.

LOS ANGELES —  In a radical proposal to curtail drive-by drug sales, Los Angeles police want to permanently barricade public streets in a 12-square-block area in the San Fernando Valley and erect a guard station to admit only residents and their guests.

Under the proposal, the city would put up barricades and apartment owners in the Sepulveda neighborhood would donate money to set up and staff a guard station at the corner of Sepulveda Boulevard and Rayen Street.

“This would make this area a vastly safer community for the law-abiding people who live there,” Police Cmdr. Chet Spencer said. “Why should they be subjected to the danger and the shootings that go along with drug activity when there is something that can be done about it?”

Narcotics detectives make an average of 50 drug-related arrests a month on a two-block stretch of Columbus Avenue in the neighborhood, Lt. Gary Rogness said.

Fed up with the steady stream of drug-buyers, police last week set up sawhorse barricades at four entrances to the area to deter drug buyers. The roadblocks, similar to those used in the Pico-Union area west of downtown, have been so successful that police do not want to reopen the neighborhood, said Capt. Mark D. Stevens of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division.

To permanently close the roads will require approval from the City Council, which is permitted under state law to remove city streets from public use, said John Haggerty, an assistant city attorney. However, Haggerty said the council has done so primarily at the request of residents who want streets closed off to commuters, not to deter crime.

The concept is a sharp departure from traditional law enforcement methods and reportedly is the first such effort on a large scale in the nation.

In Opa-Locka, Fla., a suburb of Miami, police clamped down last year on a five-block area that had been plagued with drug dealing, robbery and homicide, Opa-Locka Police Cpl. Edward Moore said. Access to the neighborhood was restricted to one entrance and exit, which was periodically manned by a patrol car. Anyone was allowed in and out, but crime in the area dropped because criminals had no fast route of escape other than the one that led directly to the patrol car, Moore said.

In Los Angeles, the concept was first tried on a smaller scale in a three-block stretch of Bryant Street in Northridge three years ago, and police claim that it has reduced crime there. The Sepulveda zone, however, is more than four times as large and would require the support of many apartment owners, instead of the one owner involved in the Northridge apartment house development.

Councilman Joel Wachs, who represents Sepulveda, introduced an interim measure Tuesday that would keep the Sepulveda roadblocks up as long as police deem necessary, said the councilman’s field deputy, Rick Kunz. Initial authority to set up the barricades was given under a 30-day permit from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation because police said the area represented an unusual hazard to life and property. The council will consider Wachs’ interim measure next week.

“If the police and property owners agree, we would support this,” Wachs said. “The goal of this is to drive them out. All the conventional means have failed.

“When a case becomes so extreme--and it is most worse here than in most places--you have to resort to extreme means.”

Stevens said four of five property owners he polled are enthusiastic about the idea. A meeting is planned in January between city officials and the owners, numbering more than two dozen. Officials had no estimate Tuesday of how much the proposal would cost.

Charlotte Wisch, whose family owns 12 units in the 8900 block of Columbus Avenue, also known known as “C Street” because of the heavy traffic in rock cocaine there, called the LAPD proposal “a great idea,” well worth the increased cost to owners. She said she believed that the area would become more desirable to tenants as a result.

Some residents of the neighborhood said in interviews they also support the barricades. Ignacio Robles and his wife, Esperanza, said their 4-year-old daughter was run down by a hit-and-run driver whom they believed to be in the neighborhood to buy drugs. The girl suffered a broken left rib.

Standing on Columbus Avenue on Saturday night, Robles said the street had been quieter and they had been able to sleep at night since the roadblocks were put up last Tuesday.

“But as soon as they take away the barricades, it will be the same,” said Robles, who works as a groundskeeper at a golf course and cannot afford to move his family out of the neighborhood.

“All it’s going to do is make the problem go someplace (else),” said William J. Genego, a professor of law at USC. “It makes people on that street happy, but it isn’t going to get rid of the problem.”

“It would be almost criminal for us to sit here and look at the problem and say we can’t do anything about it,” Capt. Stevens said. “We have to try something else to keep the neighborhood out of the hands of the drug dealers, and this is that something.”

But a national spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the plan, calling it unconstitutional because the barricades would deprive non-residents of free access without probable cause that they did something wrong, she said.

“When you indict an entire neighborhood, you throw probable cause out the window,” said Colleen O’Connor, national public education director for the ACLU.