Police Task Force Conducts First Sweep of Skid Row Crime Pockets

Leo Rubio, balancing himself on a broken swivel chair, was taking in the sun at 6th Street and Stanford Avenue on Skid Row Tuesday morning when a swarm of 20 police cars, city maintenance trucks and other vehicles suddenly pulled up.

The 40-year-old Cuban spent the next several minutes scrambling to protect his possessions--the chair, bedding and a wooden stool--as maintenance workers threw them in the street.

A Travelers Aid Society outreach worker asked him, “How long have you been here? How did you get here?” and reporters and television cameras crowded in.

“No-no-no-no!” Rubio cried helplessly. “What are they doing?”

It was the first “Central City East Crime Sweep,” combining the efforts of the Los Angeles Police Department and several public and private agencies, against what were described as high-crime pockets, particularly drug trafficking, in Skid Row.

Rubio’s corner was the first of 10 to 12 street sites targeted by the new task force for twice-daily visits over the next two months. “We want to remove the crime element from the area,” Central Division Sgt. Jack Hoar, who coordinated the sweep, said, “and refer those that need referrals . . . to the proper service providers.”

No arrests were made Tuesday morning, although five people, Hoar said, were given referrals to local service agencies.

The 40-odd people in the task force and the press easily outnumbered the eight homeless men, including Rubio, sitting with a makeshift collection of lean-tos, clothing, even a camper shell along a chain-link fence. About a dozen others scattered as the convoy arrived.

Rubio tried to answer Travelers Aid worker Emmett McGuire’s questions--saying in broken English that he had been living at that spot for four months--as he unsuccessfully tried to save his belongings from the orange-vested maintenance workers.

Finally, he wandered up and down with a pink bedroll, the only thing he salvaged. “Why?” he asked the men, who never answered.

That corner, Hoar said, is one of several “divisional hot spots, either for narcotics, street robberies, thefts, and break-ins on vehicles.” Neither he nor Central Division Capt. Julius Davis, however, supplied any statistics.

The police and maintenance workers were assisted by the city Fire Department, the county Department of Public Social Services, private groups such as Travelers Aid, and the Central City East Assn., a local merchants’ group.

“I take no drugs,” Rubio said. One end of the settlement was used by drug takers, he noted, but people living closest to the corner, like himself, were “persons that only like drink.”

A businessman on Stanford Avenue, Bill Merry of W.R. Merry Seafood Co., said the corner had become increasingly crowded in the last month, since the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency shut down a park that had been a local homeless hangout, a block away.

“I think this is great,” said another businessman, Robert Kim, a wholesale importer, adding, “I just don’t feel safe.”

Nancy Mintie, director of the Inner City Law Center on Skid Row, criticized the sweep, saying she feared “crime and enforcement of anti-drug laws is being confused with homelessness.”

The removal of the street people’s possessions, she added, was “an unwarranted intrusion of police into people’s lives. . . . For these people, their possessions are all that they have, and often their only link to survival.”

Asked where he would go, Rubio said, “I don’t know.”