Ground Zero on Drew Street : Neighborhood Beset by Drug Dealing and Gang Terror Aches for Peace

GLASSELL PARK —  Nine-year-old Alicia can name, with the ease of a narcotics expert, the different drugs that are sold on the streets around the cramped, two-bedroom, apartment she shares with her family in a neighborhood known as Drew Street.

“I know what rock is,” the fourth-grader said one afternoon as her parents and her 12-year-old brother sat at the kitchen table talking about their neighborhood.

“They sell drugs over here,” Alicia said, pointing through the living room wall. “And over there, and over there,” she added, moving her arm in a circle that surrounds her family.

Alicia attends Fletcher Drive Elementary School, which is only a few blocks from her family’s second-story apartment. She walks to school every day.

Her mother says she doesn’t want Alicia shot in gang cross-fire or caught between drug deals.

A stray bullet shattered their living room window once last summer and the family car has bullet holes from a gunfight in the driveway outside their apartment.

“We are moving,” her mother said as she shooed her daughter off to her bedroom. “People are crazy around here.”

Welcome to Drew Street, an isolated two blocks in Glassell Park, just across the railroad tracks from the LAPD’s Northeast station, where the presence of drug dealers and gangsters often forces families to take cover indoors after dusk.

The problems on Drew Street, which have spread throughout the community of several blocks around it, have evolved over the past decade as small, cramped apartments, like the one Alicia’s family lives in, have cropped up on the neighborhood’s northern end.

Since June, police have concentrated anti-narcotics enforcement in the Drew Street neighborhood in an effort to break the cycle of crime and despair. Special units and even one door-to-door solicitation for help from residents have raised some hope that conditions are improving.

But, problems persist--a combination of fear and apathy among residents, shortages in police staffing, distrust of police and the disinterest of public officials--leaving many to conclude that the neighborhood’s problems are too deep and complex to be solved.

“Drew Street was always the street you didn’t go to,” said Gerard Orozco, 24, a legislative aid to Councilman Richard Alatorre who grew up near the street.

Orozco said his parents forbade him from going to Drew Street.

“My parents just told me, ‘You have no business on Drew Street’ . . . because of the gangs.”

Orozco said he has seen the problems grow over the past six years.

“They get bigger, then it calms down and it flares up again,” Orozco said. “There used to be a lot of gunfire in the area and now that’s died down. What we’re seeing a lot now is graffiti.”

The neighborhood, now simply called “Drew Street,” encompasses a 12-block area bounded by Forest Lawn Memorial Park, San Fernando Road and Fletcher Drive, with only southern entrances and exits.

Many of the fenced-in apartments concentrated in the northern end of the street bear bold signs, put up by Los Angeles police, warning drug dealers and gangsters that the Los Angeles Police Department patrols the area regularly.

In July, Northeast officers and youth Explorer Scouts went door-to-door in the neighborhood distributing flyers pleading, in Spanish and English, for residents’ cooperation in helping them pick out the drug dealers.

“Help. This Is Your Street,” the simple flyer reads. “It Does Not Belong To The Dope Dealers. Help Northeast Police Officers Get Your Street Back For You And Your Children.”

From that flyer campaign, Capt. Rich Wemmer, head of the Northeast Patrol Division, said 12 suspected dealers were arrested.

“We can be more effective if we have the assistance of the residents,” Wemmer said.

In October, the Northeast division’s Special Enforcement Group, a plainclothes, anti-narcotics unit, made a bust that they believe broke up one of the neighborhood’s most flagrant drug-selling operations, which had long dominated the area from a two-story apartment. Thirty previous drug arrests had been made in and around the apartment building.

After observing what appeared to be a drug transaction on Estara Avenue, which intersects Drew Street, police chased Enrique Lopez into the one of the units, where they arrested him and three women on suspicion of selling cocaine base. They seized cash and 60 rocks of cocaine worth about $2,000.

The four are awaiting trial in January.

Although the seizure was not large, “that was the final break in that apartment,” Officer Jim Shiver said.

“The reason we had 30 incidents there before is that we couldn’t get to that apartment,” Shiver said. “It’s on the second floor and (the dealers) would throw the rocks (of cocaine) down on the walkway or get one of their runners to do the work. . . . The owner has put a security guard out there and the activity has stopped.”

Since then, crime and arrest reports have plummeted. After eight months in which crime reports and arrests for the two-blocks of Drew Street averaged almost 50, the number dropped from 31 in October to 14 in November. There have been only five reports so far in December.

Residents say they let their children play outside after dark and police say the narcotics dealing is being whittled away.

Before the October bust, Drew Street resident David Sanchez said in an interview that his family was “tired of living like animals.” Since then he said the amount of drug dealing and gang fighting has declined.

However, Sanchez and other residents conceded that there still is not a high level of trust between police and the community.

Illustrating the difficulty police have had getting the area’s residents to cooperate with their investigations, Detective Erwin Velasco said that one Sunday night in August several gang members, armed with handguns and shotguns, kicked down the doors of three Drew Street apartments, stealing electronic appliances and taking money from the residents’ pockets.

Velasco called the August robbery spree “terrorism” on “regular, decent people.”

The victims, including some who were out on the street during the 9 p.m. melee, wouldn’t cooperate with the police in their investigation, he said.

“We’re afraid that if people don’t start getting identified and arrested that these crimes might get worse and result in deaths,” Velasco said.

Sanchez said his house has been the target of retaliation from gangsters and drug dealers on numerous occasions.

Referring to the area’s drug dealers, Sanchez said, “We know every person. But we have to be quiet in order to not have problems.”

In the absence of a strong community network, the recent gains might be hard to sustain.

Recently, the Northeast division’s commitment to the neighborhood suffered when top leadership decided to disband the Special Enforcement Group through the holidays to place its seven members on patrol.

Capt. Robert Riley, who took command of the division early this month, says he hopes to have the unit running again after the first of the year. Until then, the driving force behind Drew Street neighborhood reform is stalled.

The area’s political leaders say they cannot offer any immediate solution for Drew Street’s problems.

Julie Jaskol, a spokeswoman for Councilman Michael Woo’s office, said her office has received only a few calls about Drew Street, mainly about trash and graffiti, and doesn’t plan any initiative specifically in the neighborhood unless residents come forward and ask for help. Drew Street has been in the 13th District only since July.

“It’s the usual course of affairs,” Jaskol said. “We can’t walk into a neighborhood and say, ‘Listen up. Here’s what the plan is.’ If people aren’t motivated, then the programs don’t work.”

Peter Quezada, founder of Neighborhoods For Peace, a Northeast Los Angeles group that has been counseling and mentoring gang members in the area since 1987, said the problems on Drew Street won’t be solved overnight.

Quezada, who once focused his energy on the area, said he has had to cut back his involvement with gang members in the Drew Street area because his program has been underfunded.

“I couldn’t clean it up,” he said. “It’s a long haul, a big time commitment. The Police Department is stretched to the whole community.

Orozco, Alatorre’s aide, said apathy among residents is one of the primary reasons the efforts to clean up the neighborhood have failed.

“The people there . . . have to be educated,” Orozco said. “Frankly, I see a lot of freeloaders there. Some of these people throw couches out on the sidewalks and play their radios really loud.”

Mary Shambra, who has been principal of Fletcher Drive Elementary School for three years, has a more optimistic view of the neighborhood that is home to most of her pupils. She said Drew Street parents and teachers are showing their faith in the neighborhood tonight by having a posada, a Christmas candlelight procession, through the neighborhood.

“The majority come from decent, hard-working immigrant families who are sometimes victimized by the crime. . . . They love their children and they want the best for them,” she said.

She expects 200 children, parents and teachers to participate in the parade.

“In addition to this being a teaching activity about Las Posadas,” Shambra said, “it is showing our community that the streets can be safe enough for the traditions.

“It’s a little bit of craziness on my part.”