Preemptive Strikes on Crime Stir Debate : Laws: Local ordinances and court orders are limiting the activity zones for panhandlers, prostitutes and gang members. But the trend is dismaying to public defenders and civil libertarians.

Once a lady of the night, “Passion” now plies her trade on Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight. She changed her hours after a judge convicted her of prostitution and then, as a condition of her probation, banned her from performing a laundry list of otherwise legal acts from dusk to dawn.

Now police can arrest her for violating her probation if they spot her walking down the street or simply talking to motorists.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” she says.

City and county officials in Southern California--pushed to the limit by panhandlers, prostitutes and gang members--are experimenting with a wide range of methods that attempt to curb crimes before they are committed. It is one of the newest trends in crime-fighting. Seemingly mundane acts--carrying a cellular phone, standing on a street corner, even wearing a belt buckle--can now be punished by fines or jail time.

To the dismay of public defenders and civil libertarians, far-reaching local laws and court orders targeting gang members have sprung up from Bakersfield to Pomona to Westminster since the late 1980s, banishing them from favorite hangouts or forbidding them from being seen together in public.

A tough anti-loitering ordinance aimed at drug dealing is on the books in Monrovia and, at the request of police, prosecutors in the northwestern San Fernando Valley have quietly begun asking judges to banish panhandlers from profitable corners.

From South-Central Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, strict probation conditions have driven prostitutes out of their old neighborhoods.

The new tactics are gaining converts, or at least sparking interest, in cities across the nation.

“California is leading the way in many respects in anti-crime programs,” said Kim Ogg, the anti-gang director for Houston, who came to Los Angeles County last fall to get a firsthand look at injunctions issued against gangs in Burbank and Norwalk.

But the programs are not without critics, who contend that illegalizing behavior that is legal in almost all other circumstances is just a temporary solution--Passion says she still works steadily--and flies in the face of the Constitution.

“What we’re really saying is, we don’t have the resources to wait until you commit the crime,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Public Defender Alex Ricciardulli. “So we’re not going to punish you for what you do, we’re going to punish you for what you are.”

Not so, say prosecutors and police, who applaud these new tools for stomping out crime in neighborhoods torn by vice and violence.

“We have to become more progressive, more innovative, and employ new techniques,” said Burbank Police Sgt. Eric Rosoff.

While the trend apparently began in Southern California when Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn obtained a broad injunction against a Westside gang in 1987, other cities and communities took the prohibitions to new levels.

In 1991, the San Fernando City Council banned gang members from Las Palmas Park after a mother and her three young children were wounded by gang cross-fire.

The next year, Burbank authorities won a court order banning suspected gang members from being seen together on a section of West Elmwood Avenue, including some who lived there, after two people were shot and injured within a few hours.

The slaying of apartment owner Donald Aragon on Van Nuys’ Blythe Street in the fall of 1992 prompted the city attorney’s office to obtain a court injunction to curb the acts of a gang it claimed had taken over an entire block.

“We had a neighborhood under siege,” said Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Jule Bishop, who helped draft the injunction and has prosecuted gang members for violating it.

Issued in 1993, the injunction forbids gang members from doing everything from possessing portable telephones to standing on rooftops. The order also established a curfew for juvenile gang members.

Last August, county prosecutors received an injunction against a Norwalk gang, establishing curfews and forbidding 22 members of the Orange Street Locos from, among other things, carrying crowbars, baseball bats and other potential weapons.

Law enforcement authorities and some residents say the methods have been effective.

The restrictions imposed on the Westside and San Fernando gang members, for example, were allowed to expire after violence in those communities subsided.

Norwalk residents said the injunction there has restored calm to a street where they were once regularly terrorized by fire-bombings, gunfire and car break-ins.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti touted the Norwalk program, saying it “restores hope that you can take your communities back.”

And in Burbank, “the gang that was prevalent is much less active,” Rosoff said. “They got an idea that ‘this is our kingdom,’ but the order took a lot of wind out of their sails.”

But not everyone is satisfied that justice is being served.

Jennie Marquez and other Elmwood residents said that they have never considered the boys on the block to be gang members, and that little has changed in their neighborhood since the injunction took effect.

“The cops have their view and we have our view,” Marquez said.

Some critics go a step further. They say gang injunctions ignore the right to due process, promote guilt by association and perpetrate stereotypes.

“You get a mentality in the mind of police and the public that if you see groups of black and brown men they are gang members,” said Edward Chen, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which is appealing an injunction issued against a San Jose gang. (Legal challenges are also pending against the Burbank and Blythe Street injunctions.)

Jonathan Turley, a professor of constitutional and criminal law at George Washington University, criticizes the tactics as a “mutation of the legal system.”

“There are many nations around the world that have all but eliminated crime by eliminating most individual freedoms,” Turley said. “Los Angeles County seems to have forgotten that the challenging task in a free society is to restrict criminal activity while accommodating individual freedoms.”

Turley, who believes at least several of the court orders are unconstitutional, said he finds the trend particularly troubling because it signals a willingness by judges to go along with the public’s increasing desire for retribution against criminals.

Some judges, however, have agreed with Turley.

Saying it violated the Constitution, an Orange County Superior Court judge last year dissolved a temporary court order that had prohibited four dozen members of a gang from “standing, sitting, walking, driving and gathering or appearing anywhere in public view” with each other in a 25-square-block area of Westminster. The district attorney’s office has appealed the decision.

The previous year, a group of Beverly Hills Municipal Court judges resisted imposing a set of tough probation conditions recommended by prosecutors that would have prohibited convicted prostitutes from nine acts, including sitting on any bus bench without boarding the first bus that arrived.

Residents of Blythe Street say the injunction on their street has led, quite simply, to police harassment.

“It’s like we’re in prison,” said Gisel Valenzuela, 16, who, like others on the block, said she has been stopped and questioned by police on numerous occasions, even though she is not a gang member. Valenzuela, who said she generally likes the police, said the problem usually arises when new officers are assigned to the beat. Officers familiar with the residents do not make as many mistakes, she said.

Back in Hollywood, it is clear to Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Bill Sterling why he worked with police to draft the probation conditions that restrict prostitutes.

“The fact is, people in this neighborhood have the right to be protected from streetwalking prostitution and the blight that comes with it,” Sterling said.

In the past, police officers had three ways to catch prostitutes: The officers had to catch them in the act with a customer, get a prostitute to agree to engage in a sex act and then wait for her to attempt to carry it out, or get a prostitute to solicit them.

Under the new program, which has since spread to the San Fernando Valley and South-Central Los Angeles, convicted prostitutes are handed maps marked with areas where they are not welcome.

Prostitutes like “Jazz,” for example, can now be arrested between 5 p.m. and 6 a.m. for talking to motorists and accepting rides or sitting in parked cars with them. Jazz is also forbidden from standing on a public street unless she is engaged in a lawful activity.

To the frustration of police, instead of stopping crime, the court orders have merely moved it around. Or at least changed its hours.

“I don’t miss working nights at all,” says Jazz with a grin.

Vice officers hope to quash the prostitutes’ countermeasures with even more restrictions, such as applying the prohibitions around the clock.

Sterling thinks he may have another solution. He is waiting for the state attorney general’s office to issue a decision on whether a pair of ordinances passed by the city of Bakersfield are preempted by state law.

The Bakersfield ordinances make it illegal for people to loiter or wander about public property with the intent to commit prostitution or drug dealing if the opportunity arises.

“If we could get a law like the one in Bakersfield, that would be a gigantic tool,” Sterling said. “We could put prostitutes out of business.”

Bakersfield officials said they modeled the laws on the anti-drug loitering ordinance adopted by Monrovia in 1990, which has served as a model for several other cities as well.

But trying to battle the world’s oldest profession by banishing prostitutes has a history of failure.

“This way of dealing with prostitutes and petty thieves goes on all throughout medieval Europe,” said David Cohen, a professor of rhetoric and classics at UC Berkeley. “Cities would proclaim they were going to put an end to prostitution and clean up the city, but of course it’s always futile because the demand is always there.”

Jazz is among those to agree.

Asked what she would do if the officers succeed in Hollywood, Jazz laughed as she replied: “I’d go to Ventura Boulevard. I’d go to the Valley.”