Police Go to Air in Cruiser Crackdown : Law Enforcement: Radio network links six different agencies, allowing officers to funnel parade of cars away from Pico Rivera.

Officers from six law enforcement agencies have joined forces on the ground and through the airwaves in a new effort to control cruising in and around this city.

And last Sunday, at least, the officers successfully managed the massive gridlock that occurs here when young men and women hit the road to meet each other and show off their cars.

The crackdown was precipitated when hundreds of cruisers had a street party that blocked three lanes of the Pomona (60) Freeway north of the city last week. The California Highway Patrol asked for an emergency meeting of law enforcement agencies, which took place last Thursday--the day after the incident--in the basement of the Montebello police station.

As a result, on Sunday there was direct radio contact for the first time among the police departments of Whittier and Montebello, the sheriff’s stations at Pico Rivera and Temple City, and the Highway Patrol offices in East Los Angeles and Santa Fe Springs. Usually, officers go through dispatchers to communicate with another agency.

Lt. James Ware of the Pico Rivera sheriff’s office said the direct communication was crucial because a minute either way can make or break the effort to literally head cruisers off at the pass, or in this case, the entrances to Whittier, Beverly and Rosemead boulevards.

Those streets are the preferred cruising strips in Pico Rivera, although the lines of traffic also enter adjacent neighborhoods if the main roads are blocked off. The more sophisticated cruisers use beepers and cellular phones to chart each other’s location and share information about ways past street barriers, which authorities long have been using on popular cruising nights.

In Sunday’s crackdown, the officers’ goal was to create a flexible funnel that would channel cruisers onto the freeways, where low-speed cruising is difficult, and divide cruisers’ ranks in the process. In order for this to happen, the officers, at a moment’s notice, had to react to cruisers’ attempts to enter the city from different directions.

When the cruisers changed routes, the officers quickly responded--repositioning barricades and roadblocks and sometimes actually turning motorists around. The Highway Patrol also closed seven freeway off-ramps to keep cruisers from re-entering Pico Rivera.

The first-ever radio coordination allowed the different agencies to act in concert for the entire traffic region, which typically extends to Montebello in the west, Whittier in the east, the Pomona (60) Freeway to the north and Washington Boulevard in Pico Rivera to the south.

On Sunday, in addition to racing from one key intersection to another, Pico Rivera deputies handed out 133 citations for a variety of offenses, including ignoring traffic barriers, driving without a proper license or seat belt, operating an illegally modified vehicle and playing boom boxes at too high a volume. Pico Rivera deputies alone towed eight vehicles and arrested one cruiser for carrying a gun and another for driving under the influence of cocaine.

Even so, it was a quiet night, most officers agreed: less gridlock and fewer hassles than usual during the prime cruising time from mid-afternoon until after midnight.

“We were very pleased,” Ware said. “The cooperation . . . was outstanding.”

Cruising is hardly a new phenomenon in California. Los Angeles officials have taken steps to relieve cruising-related congestion on such major thoroughfares as Hollywood Boulevard and Ventura Boulevard. And in Modesto, the town that inspired the movie “American Graffiti,” city fathers voted earlier this year to ban the activity from their streets.

But banning cruising by law and actually eliminating it are two different matters. And past enforcement efforts, even when they seem to work, usually have just pushed cruisers into someone else’s jurisdiction. Pico Rivera’s own cruising problem has been exacerbated by successful attempts to push cruisers out of East Los Angeles and off Whittier Boulevard in Montebello and Whittier.

Magazines that cater to customized car and motorcycle enthusiasts currently rate Pico Rivera as a cruising hot spot, and the number of cruisers has increased steadily over the last four years on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays to as many as 8,000 cars, packed mostly with Latino youths, city and law enforcement officials said.

“It used to die down from the end of summer until Christmas vacation,” Ware said. “Now there doesn’t seem to be any slack time, unless it starts raining early on Sunday.”

Said Sheriff’s Detective Gabe Velasquez: “It’s cheap entertainment for them. Have you seen the price of a movie lately?”

When the cruisers arrive in force, traffic slows to a crawl, blocking the roads for residents as well as police and paramedics. And when cruisers get past barriers into residential neighborhoods, their noisy street parties create disturbances.

Recently, deputies report that gang members from across Southern California have joined the cruising, enlarging local concerns.

On July 22 in the northern part of Pico Rivera, four local gang members were stabbed--two critically--when nine gang members from the Venice area left their vehicles with knives and baseball bats. All nine are in County Jail awaiting trial on attempted murder.

“They threw rocks and bottles at the wrong people,” Ware said of the stabbing victims. “The other gang members just got out their weapons and started carving people.”

The next week, there was a freeway shooting involving cruisers near a Pico Rivera off-ramp on the San Gabriel River (605) Freeway. One person was injured, sheriff’s detectives said.

And days after that freeway gunplay, a drive-by shooting left two youths seriously injured at a popular cruising hangout on Crossway Drive known as “The Spot.”

But the last straw for local officials was what happened Aug. 8. That is when cruisers found a new place to have a street party--in the three right-hand lanes of the westbound Pomona Freeway just before the Santa Anita Avenue exit, north of the city. The 11:30 p.m. get-together involved between 300 and 500 cars and more than 100 motorcycles, said Lt. Steve Tanner of the CHP.

“The cruisers had literally gotten out of their cars and were drinking beer on the freeway,” Tanner said. “It’s frightening to me. If a car or truck is out of control and crashes into a crowd like that, we’ll have a lot of people seriously injured.”

Although the communications system used Sunday will remain in force, Detective Velasquez said budget constraints could blunt its effectiveness. “I don’t know how long we can keep it up because we had so many agencies involved. Most everybody working is being paid on an overtime basis,” he said.

Last year alone, Pico Rivera spent about $400,000 dealing with the cruising problem. And Sunday, the city’s anti-cruising patrol was increased from nine deputies to 14.

As for residents, they must still resign themselves to gridlock and/or inconvenient traffic barriers. Said Lt. Ware of local sentiment: “Sometimes they blame us. Sometimes they blame the cruisers. Sometimes they blame nobody and yell a lot. I feel sorry for them. They’re just trying to get from one place to another.”

Of course the cruisers were none too pleased with Sunday night’s events either. “Can we cruise with you guys,” one shouted at an officer. “Then we won’t get pulled over.”