Lights, Foot Patrol to Boost MacArthur Park Security

For police officers, city officials and community leaders who gathered in MacArthur Park on Monday to announce daily police foot patrols and installation of lights, the new programs were evidence of a continuing “revitalization effort.”

For habitues of the 32-acre park just west of downtown, however, it was business as usual.

Groups of men huddled around the gamblers on one side of the park and winos were in their habitual corner on the other.

Still, Nancy Munoz, a county mental health employee who works across the street, was back in the park, eating lunch with two friends. So was Jo Darling, a local senior citizens’ program director.

Both used to avoid the park, they said.

“This is the second time I’ve come in a week. Nobody’s accosted me,” Darling said, sounding surprised.

They said they feel safer now because of the daytime foot-patrol officers assigned two months ago by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division to the once elegant park with its bronze statues, green lawns and scenic lake at Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street.

“We want to abate the crime in this area and make this park safe for all people to use,” said City Councilman John Ferraro, whose district includes the neighborhood.

Over the last decade, the park has increasingly become a magnet for homeless and unemployed people migrating westward as the downtown area redeveloped. It has developed a reputation for being the site of gambling, drug dealing and assaults.

At the same time, sandboxes and swings are filled every day with hundreds of children and their parents from the immediate neighborhood, many of them immigrants from Central America.

‘A Better Place’

“We’re trying to make this a better place for the community,” police Cmdr. Jim Chambers said.

Even as he spoke, Police Officers Joe Spadafore and Gary Feauto, assigned to the foot patrol, were arresting two unidentified youths for drinking.

Ferraro also announced installation of a new lighting system for the park. A local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union based in the neighborhood had volunteered to help the city Parks and Recreation Department redo the park’s lighting system, he said.

Lights installed in 1968 keep “shorting out,” said Sheldon Jensen, parks assistant general manager, making the area more inviting to criminals.

Saving of $150,000

Parks and Recreation will provide the equipment and union members will install it, Jensen said. The city will spend $25,000 and save about $150,000 in labor costs.

The MacArthur Park revitalization effort started about three years ago, when the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, which borders the park, “adopted” the park and initiated a “public art program,” according to Al Nodal, Otis/Parsons Gallery director.

Otis/Parsons started to erect sculpture in the park, including, so far, art deco entrances, two stepped pyramids in the children’s area and a “poetry garden” where poetry in languages common to the neighborhood are played through loudspeakers in a newly created seating area.

As part of the public art project, Otis/Parsons worked with Ferraro’s office to create a community council two years ago to advocate neighborhood improvements. But despite a trash cleanup and a three-kilometer run in the park last year, Nodal said, “security and lighting in the park were the two main issues if we were going to change the reputation of the park.”

Two Spanish-speaking officers are assigned to park duty between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. daily. According to Rampart Capt. John White, the patrol has made 200 arrests in two months, though he could not specify the crimes involved or give crime statistics for the area.

“It is safer,” said Ray Avile, a Parks and Recreation Department employee assigned to MacArthur Park maintenance. “All your dope dealers by the (Gen. Douglas) MacArthur statue, Rampart’s been hittin’ them pretty good.”