Gates Orders a Task Force for Northridge Housing Project

Police Chief Daryl F. Gates on Friday ordered the formation of a police task force to patrol the crime-ridden Bryant-Vanalden area of Northridge.

Quickly responding to a request by Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, in whose district the neighborhood is located, Gates said he would direct police officials in the San Fernando Valley to develop a plan for a task force to “alleviate the problem of violence and crime that is plaguing that small community.”

The unit will be drawn from a citywide pool of officers, Gates said in a written statement. “The task force will be maintained until the problem is reduced to a level consistent with crummy conditions in the rest of the city,” the statement said.

In a letter to Gates, Bernson took his strongest swipe yet at Mayor Tom Bradley, accusing him of siding with communists by opposing his controversial plan to evict low-income Latinos from the area.

“The mayor has sided with radical political groups such as the Communist Labor Party, People’s World and the Coalition for Economic Survival in opposing community efforts to rid the neighborhood of crime and slum conditions,” Bernson wrote.

Anger Over Mayor’s Stance

Bernson is still fuming over Bradley’s decision last month to oppose the councilman’s proposal to clean up the Bryant-Vanalden area by making it easier to evict tenants and replace the existing apartments with a gated, middle-class community. Bradley’s opposition appeared to doom the plan, and Bernson earlier this month decided to delay a final vote by the City Council on his proposal.

Deputy Mayor Tom Houston Friday called Bernson’s letter to Gates, “a letter out of the 1950s. It just smacks of McCarthyism. And, Bernson should be ashamed of himself.”

Houston pointed out that a majority of City Council members have expressed reservations about Bernson’s plan.

In his letter to Gates, Bernson asked the police chief to “give Bryant-Vanalden the same consideration as Nickerson Gardens,” a crime-ridden housing project in Watts where the Police Department has a task force. Bernson said the three-square-block area in his district accounts annually for as many as 50% of the homicides in the department’s Northridge-area Devonshire Division.

“We truly have a concentration of crime in one area,” he said.

Houston would not commit the mayor to supporting a police task force in the Bryant-Vanalden area. He said the mayor’s office will study whether the area’s crime rate, when compared with other areas of the city, warrants a task force.

Gates’ action follows earlier police efforts to beef up patrols in Bryant-Vanalden amid complaints from residents of surrounding neighborhoods.

Police have a “special problems unit” of eight officers that often goes into the troubled area, Capt. Mark Stevens of the Devonshire Division said this summer.

In late August, Stevens announced that he had ordered additional patrols on weekends and at night, and that a lieutenant had been assigned full-time to coordinate periodic sweeps by narcotics and traffic units.