Police Seek to Reassure Motorists

Public fear about rising freeway violence is “perception, not reality,” Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton said Tuesday as law enforcement officials tried to calm worries about the recent string of freeway shootings while continuing to search for the assailants.

California Highway Patrol officials said they are concerned about growing public apprehension, fearing that the heavy media coverage may be building upon itself and inspiring copycat attacks.

“We need to try to get ahold of this before it starts snowballing,” said CHP Assistant Chief Art Acevedo. “To be quite truthful and frank with everyone, this is not that highly unusual. This is just a fact of life in the cities of America.”

The shootings have left four motorists dead -- two in Los Angeles, one in Tustin and another in Riverside -- and have generated national headlines. But officials are quick to point out that there is no evidence so far that the actual number of attacks is up.

Among Southern California jurisdictions, only the Los Angeles Police Department has released statistics on freeway shootings in recent years, and its figures show a slight decline in freeway shootings so far this year. The CHP has not tracked such shootings since 2002, nor do many other local agencies.

Bratton compared the uproar to a string of shootings on New York subways in the early 1990s when he was chief of that city’s transit police. Those shootings entered the public consciousness in a powerful and not altogether helpful way, he said.

“There were 19 homicides out of 2,200 [citywide] on the subway, but if you read the paper and listened to the public, you’d think half of them were in the subway,” he said. In Southern California, “freeways are our subways,” he added.

On Tuesday, authorities continued to roll out new ideas for reassuring the public. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced that it has begun patrolling the freeways and would respond to new shootings with mobile forensic laboratories. The ATF’s action comes after the CHP created its own special task force and beefed up patrols by marked cruisers and unmarked vehicles.

Law enforcement experts said such announcements can help give the public the sense that police are taking action -- as long as there is some sense that the efforts are working. So far, authorities have made no arrests in the shootings and admit that they have few clues.

Acevedo said the news media in such high-profile cases serves to help and sometimes hamper law enforcement efforts. Getting the word out about extra patrols, he said, might discourage copycats from acting. But at the same time, heavy coverage of shootings could serve to encourage people who are seeking notoriety, he said.

“The media is a double-edged sword,” Acevedo said. They can “play a real positive role in educating the public on the dangers we face” but also create “an atmosphere of fear that is not warranted.”

Sociologists said it is easy to understand why the freeway shootings have received so much media coverage: They have occurred in a common space shared by everyone who drives. But this also makes it difficult to put the shootings in some sort of perspective.

“So if we are hearing about these incidents constantly ... every time we turn on the TV or radio, it’s going to be difficult for police to counter with the facts,” said USC sociology professor Barry Glassner, author of “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.”

When Bratton appeared Tuesday before the Los Angeles Police Commission to discuss the shooting investigations, he was careful to note that there have been fewer freeway shootings in the city so far this year compared with last year. There were 12 shootings last year as of April 30, compared with 10 this year during the same period. An 11th shooting was reported Sunday. Two people have died in Los Angeles so far this year, compared with one death during the same period in 2004.

The recent shootings, which also have left four people injured, are seemingly random and unconnected. Some victims were black, others Latino and at least two were white.

The incidents first attracted attention March 12, when a 26-year-old Fontana man was fatally shot in the head on the Costa Mesa Freeway in Tustin. More shootings followed on the Harbor Freeway in South Los Angeles and on the Pomona Freeway in Riverside. Then, over the weekend, the San Fernando Valley area was the scene of two additional shootings. On Monday, a motorist was shot on the Antelope Valley Freeway in Santa Clarita.

Bratton called the attacks tragic, but stressed that there were more than 500 killings throughout the city last year and 167 so far this year.

He said he was perplexed as to why the freeway shootings seem to garner so much attention while other crimes receive scant notice.

There was far less media attention in December when people firing pellet guns shot out the windows of more than 35 vehicles along several freeways in San Bernardino County. Although no one was killed in those attacks, the CHP formed a special unit to tackle the issue.

“We put out a bunch of extra units, a helicopter and a plane to deter the action, and ultimately the problem just went away,” said CHP spokesman Tony Nguyen.

Los Angeles first paid close attention to the freeway-shooting phenomenon in 1987, when five people were killed. Those attacks generated international attention and became a symbol of out-of-control crime in Southern California.

In the aftermath of those shootings, a study in Journal of the American Medical Assn. found that shootings were more common on surface streets than on freeways despite public perceptions of a freeway threat.

Researchers tried to determine whether intense media coverage of freeway violence had influenced some of the later shootings. But they concluded that there would be no accurate way to investigate such a connection.

“The way to do it in clinical medicine would be to have intense media coverage of the shootings for 1 million people and no coverage for another million and then determine if one group was more likely than the other to be involved in an attack,” said Patrick W. O’Carroll, one of the authors.

The CHP’s Acevedo believes that intense coverage does attract copycats, something officials said they often see after high-profile incidents.

“You get a bunch of kooks out there,” he said. “We want to make sure these kinds of people don’t have a platform ... for their cowardly acts.”

Still, Acevedo said, it is important for the public to remember how rare these shootings are, given the millions of Southern Californians who share the roads.

“Generally speaking, you are in a greater chance of being injured from a drunk driver on the freeways instead of being shot on the freeway,” he said.

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Times staff writers Lance Pugmire and Megan Garvey contributed to this report.