Watts pool ruffians marking their territory

The long list of rules posted at my neighborhood public pool seems to outlaw everything except Marco Polo:

No running on the deck.

No climbing or jumping from fences or lifeguard structures. No foul or abusive language.

No horseplay, wrestling, dunking, pulling, pushing or splashing in the water. No snapping towels, playing throwing games or horse-and-rider.

No smoking, eating, drinking. No swim equipment or toys. No street clothes. No shoes.

That same set of rules governs every Los Angeles Recreation and Parks pool. But a bunch of knucklehead young men in Watts didn't get the memo.

On Sunday at the city's 109th Street Pool, they were running, wrestling, splashing, dunking, using foul language and swimming in street shorts. And when the pool manager intervened, they punched him, then tossed him, a locker room attendant and the lifeguard into the water.

The lifeguard? The closest thing to God at a public pool? That's unfathomable to me.

The Watts pool has been a management headache for years. It has armed guards and security cameras. Plywood barriers have been erected along the roof of its locker room building to keep swimmers from launching themselves off it and into the pool.

Still, overcrowding, gang tensions and bands of unruly teens have made it such a dangerous place that many local families steer clear. Now, most of its visitors are youths from local housing projects.

"It's too ghetto," said Serena Gulley, 23, whose family lives across the street. Too much horseplay, foul language and trash talk among gang members, she said. "They think the rules don't apply to them."

That attitude helped sparked Sunday's attack, first reported by my colleague John Mitchell. The melee started, he wrote, when a group of men in their 20s and 30s went on a rampage after they were asked to leave the cloudy pool temporarily so it could be cleaned.

"They wanted us to know this is their pool, and we just worked there," the pool manager told Mitchell.

I visited the pool Thursday, a day after it reopened. There was an LAPD car parked on the street, two armed city guards patrolling the perimeter and a half-dozen beefy guys in black T-shirts hired to keep order. I counted about 50 people -- mostly young boys -- swimming, but the pool is so small, even that seemed crowded.

I could imagine what it felt like Sunday, with 200 people jostling for space on one of the hottest days of the year. Add to that the grumbling of adults who were charged $2.50 to enter, then told to wait on the deck while the pool was cleaned.

Donny Joubert, a youth leader at the Nickerson Gardens housing project, on Friday characterized the chaos as horseplay that got out of hand . . . the kind of thing that might be OK in someone's backyard pool but is outlawed on city-run turf.

"The older cats want to throw the kids in the pool, and you can't do that," Joubert told me. They didn't listen when the lifeguard tried to intervene, because "nobody wants to be told nothing."

"So the pool gets closed and nobody swims."

The shutdown disappointed a community proud of its recent drop in crime and its improving relations with police.

One local leader argued that the pool should stay closed; it's a liability.