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City Seeks to Bar Parolees From Trouble Areas

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Times Staff Writer

Veteran Los Angeles County probation officer Robby Robinson is new to the suburban streets of Lancaster. But in three weeks, he has learned to respect the big-city troubles plaguing its worst neighborhoods.

In two hours of work Wednesday, Robinson and a pair of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies threatened suspected teen crack dealers with arrest, served a gun-possession warrant on a member of a graffiti crew, had a run-in with a knife-clutching drug addict, and broke up a possible prostitution deal in a liquor store parking lot.

“This reminds me of when I used to work in South-Central,” Robinson said. “You turn every corner and there’s something going on.”

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That’s what worries civic leaders in Lancaster, a fast-growing, family-friendly city 70 miles north of Los Angeles where children still enter their best-looking chickens at the annual fair.

In recent years, urban crime has become a fact of life here. To combat it, prosecutors and city officials propose making the roughest areas off-limits to parolees and probationers, an ambitious plan that has civil libertarians on edge.

The idea, under review by the city attorney, will be considered by the City Council next month. If approved, the program would be implemented in August in a 20-block test area behind the local sheriff’s station. It’s the same neighborhood Robinson cruised Wednesday afternoon.

Signs posted around the neighborhood -- bordered by avenues H-8 and I to the north and south and Cedar and Fig avenues to the east and west -- would tell parolees and probationers to keep out. They also would be barred from renting or owning property in the area, although current residents would be exempted.

Violators would receive a warning on the first offense and face arrest on the second.

The measure would work in conjunction with stepped-up code enforcement, a new Neighborhood Watch program and a proposed law to impound lawbreakers’ cars. If successful, the Lancaster Community Appreciation Project could be replicated in other drug- and crime-plagued neighborhoods.

“It’s a very novel idea,” said Anne Aldrich, a spokeswoman for the city. “But the solutions in these neighborhoods require very open-minded thinking.”

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The American Civil Liberties Union believes the strategy is unconstitutional. Ben Wizner, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, said that although he had not reviewed the draft of the Lancaster plan, it appeared to violate the 1st Amendment right to association and a court-established right to travel.

Those rights can be limited by lawmakers, Wizner said, but the courts have ruled that such limits must be narrowly defined.

As proposed, the Lancaster plan could apply to any parolee or probationer -- not only a local drug dealer, but also someone from Mendocino County busted for writing bad checks. However, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. David Berger said deputies would use common sense when enforcing the law.

At 94 square miles, Lancaster is a sprawling city, and for many residents, crime rarely impinges on their walled-in subdivisions. But that’s not true in other areas.

Cheap rents often attract drug abusers. So do cheap drugs. The Antelope Valley is a major production center for methamphetamine, and officials say speed can be bought on the street here for a quarter of the price it costs in Los Angeles.

Lancaster also is home to Los Angeles County’s only state prison. The families of inmates often move here to be near their loved ones, and they bring their problems from “down below.” Many of the active gangs here, the 18th Street gang and the SanFers, for example, have their origins in South Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley neighborhoods.

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Berger, who heads a special program to combat drugs, prostitution and parolee problems in town, is the architect of the new strategy.

The proposal, he said, would keep criminals out of residential neighborhoods where they have no business being by making their presence a violation of their parole or probation. That way, instead of forcing deputies to go through the complications of proving a drug violation, he said, “The issue will be very simple: You were there, and you weren’t supposed to be.”

But Wizner of the ACLU said he worries that other municipalities could take up the idea.

“In the end, parolees might have no place to go,” he said.

In recent years, the ACLU has challenged several gang injunctions, with limited success. The injunctions limit gang members’ activities in certain neighborhoods, but do not necessarily make those areas off-limits. Wizner said this was the first he had heard of an attempt to keep parolees and probationers out of a California neighborhood.

Similar ideas have been tried elsewhere, however. In 1996, Cincinnati barred those convicted of drug offenses from certain “drug exclusion zones.” In 2002, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the ordinance ran afoul of the 1st and 14th amendments.

On a mattress-strewn street like Cedar Avenue in the heart of Lancaster’s proposed target area, the messy practicalities of daily police work seem worlds away from the analytical realm of constitutional law.

Deputies patrolling there last week chatted with repeat offenders and others, trying to gather information on a rumor of a series of rapes. Deputy Chris Keeling swapped information with a woman whose son he had helped send away for 19 years for armed robbery.

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At the beginning of their patrol, deputies were approached by Bernice, a 32-year-old parolee wearing a pink halter top and skintight biker shorts, and looking haggard and disoriented. A few hours later, she and a man in a pickup truck were being patted down on the other side of the neighborhood after police thought they saw a proposition take place.

Berger noted that Bernice was still wearing her admission bracelet from a recent stint in county jail. Such an incident, he said, might no longer be happening here come August.

Some residents in the area’s better-kept streets appreciate the new attention given to their neighborhood but disagree with Berger’s methods.

Amanda Roldan said ex-convicts have to live somewhere. Often, she said, neighborhoods like hers are their only choice.

“I have kids, and I don’t want their life being ruined by [neighbors] who’ve made bad life choices,” said Roldan, 23. “But I think some people get out of jail, they’re having a hard time, and they just need a place to live. It’s affordable here, you know what I mean?”

Herlinda Humphreys was more enthusiastic about the proposed ban. She said she has watched her Gadsden Avenue neighborhood go downhill for 26 years, and she would be happy to keep out the parolees.

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“Discriminating against people who got in trouble?” she asked. “Well, they should have thought about that before they got in trouble in the first place.”

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