Police Open Shop in Trouble Area

With graffiti-marred Sun Valley Park serving as a backdrop, Los Angeles police opened a storefront substation Friday in a troubled neighborhood where two men were shot dead last month in a gun battle.

The substation, at the rear of the Sun Valley Chamber of Commerce office on Sunland Boulevard, will be staffed five days a week by two Spanish-speaking officers, Police Capt. Glenn Ackerman said. The officers will spend about two hours a day in the office and two hours on car and foot patrol in the neighborhood, he said.

“We want to reclaim this area and this park for the decent community members,” said Ackerman, who noted that rampant drug dealing in the park made last month’s shooting “the tip of the iceberg of what is going on there.”

The number of arrests made in and around Sun Valley Park last year was “two to three times” higher than other areas in the Police Department’s North Hollywood Division, he said.

‘Build a Bridge’

Another goal of the office will be to “build a bridge” between the police and many Spanish-speaking community members, some of whom bring to the United States a distrust of police, Ackerman said.

A handful of residents and businessmen watched as Capt. Clifton Hodge and Charlotte Burdette, president of the local chamber, which donated space for the office, cut a ribbon to officially open it.

One of the onlookers was Gilbert Webb, 75, who said he has vivid memories of the Feb. 11 shoot-out. It was shortly after Webb and his wife had parked their car at a nearby shopping center where they own a bridal shop, about a block from the site of Friday’s ceremonies, that the gunfire erupted.

After a drug deal went sour in the park, one man fatally shot another in the shopping center and then returned to the park, where he began firing indiscriminately, police said. Two plainclothes officers patrolling for drug activity chased the man back into the shopping center, where he was killed when the officers returned his fire, police said.

Webb would later find that the side windows of his car had been shattered by bullets.

“Had we been there two or three minutes earlier, we would have been shot,” Webb said.

Webb said he thinks the new police office “will be a tremendous lift, by controlling all these unsavory characters” who wander the park.

The two Spanish-speaking officers, Ruben Derma and Louis Vargas, were moved to the office from their regular patrol assignments, Ackerman said. They will stay “as long as it takes. At this point, that could mean indefinitely.”

The neighborhood bears at least one physical reminder of the shooting. Manley Marks, owner of the shopping center, erected a $3,000 wire fence around an adjoining parking lot where part of the gun battle took place. The fence, which prevents easy access from the park to the shopping center, is padlocked.

The locked fence may be a battle scar, Webb said, “but we can live with it.”