Task Force Targets Drugs Near School : Law enforcement: It goes after dealers selling from private property. Landlords are pressured to help drive them out.

For students who walk to Esperanza Elementary School on 7th Street at Union Avenue, just getting to campus can be daunting.

Often, they must thread their way through drunken loiterers, prostitutes and drug dealers who crowd the corners near the school and hawk their wares to passing motorists.

But parents, teachers and community activists are joining with law enforcement authorities to try to change all that.

In response to community complaints, the neighborhood surrounding the school has become the focus of an investigation by a 4-year-old narcotics task force consisting of personnel from the city attorney’s office, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Department of Building and Safety.

Known as Focused Attack Linking Community Organizations and Neighborhoods, or FALCON, the task force works in drug-infested neighborhoods, using surveillance and tips from residents and business owners to identify dealers who are based on private property. Then it pressures the property owners to either cooperate with authorities and drive the dealers out or face losing their buildings.

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Program coordinator Mary Clare Molidor of the city attorney’s office said the task force has already begun to work closely with residents and merchants.

“It takes some work to bring in a specific crack house, but if you don’t work with the surrounding neighborhood, it will pop up on the next block,” she said. “Since we can’t be here forever, we like to leave some sort of mechanism behind. Here, they already have a good organization. In some areas, we have to start from scratch.”

Molidor said the task force usually has to persuade residents to work with police and City Council members. In the 7th and Union area, much of this work has already been done by the Westlake Improvement Project, a group of parents, teachers, residents and property owners based at the school.

Several months ago, they complained to City Hall about the conditions children had to endure on their way to and from school. At the request of city officials, the task force joined with residents to work on the problem.

“There are elements of drug traffic dotting the area around the school,” said Rowena Lagrosa, principal of Esperanza , which has students from preschool to fifth grade. “Our kids have direct exposure to all that.”

Kathy Lee, whose family owns commercial property in the neighborhood, says she has seen drug dealers “selling right outside the school fence. It’s that flagrant.”

Students’ exposure to drug sales is only one of Lagrosa’s fears. She is especially worried about unsafe traffic conditions in the area surrounding the school--a side effect, police say, of the heavy narcotics activity.

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Lagrosa said she has seen as many as three accidents a day at 7th and Union.

A little over a year ago, 7-year-old Kimberly Lopez, who lived in the area and attended a nearby school, was killed at the intersection by a hit-and-run driver.

LAPD officials, who only keep track of accidents with fatalities or serious injuries, said the child’s death was the only such accident recorded at the intersection in the last year.

However, the surrounding Westlake and Pico-Union areas, patrolled by the Rampart Division, hold the record for serious accidents in central Los Angeles.

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According to LAPD traffic statistics expert George Callandrillo, the Rampart Division had more serious traffic-related injuries and fatalities than any other division in the Central Bureau in 1994: 83 serious injuries and 21 fatalities. Sixty-five accidents involved pedestrians.

Lt. Charlie Kunz of the Central Division Traffic said drug activity contributes to the neighborhood’s traffic problems.

“Whenever you have street sales, peddlers stand out on the sidewalk with their dope, and when there is an exchange, traffic backs up,” he said.

“Sometimes buyers double-park, forcing traffic to go around them and creating unsafe conditions.

“Buyers don’t take the bus, and in areas where there are illegal drug sales, people are driving cars under the influence of drugs, and they kill people,” Kunz said. “Most hit-and-run accidents involve people who have something to hide.”

Molidor said the task force’s biggest challenge in the area is to halt drive-through drug sales on the street. This makes it more difficult for investigators to link dealers with specific properties, but Molidor said it can be done.

“We don’t have a lot of documentation on specific locations,” she said. “But there is usually some connection to private property, where they hide their stash. We’ll have to examine this connection.”