Decision Time in Mean Streets of South L.A. : Residents Want More Protection--but Will They Pay More Taxes?

In parts of South Los Angeles, the common wisdom goes, the only ones getting rich are the dope dealers and the people who sell window bars.

In stores and living rooms, on sidewalks and street corners, ordinary people are getting knifed and shot and robbed. Sensible women walk buddy-system to the grocery store, even in daylight; few are foolhardy enough to go after dark.

If you run a business, they will rip the first proud dollar you earned off the wall, from the place where you taped it up. You put up a six-foot chain-link fence to protect yourself and your business and, one night, they’ll take that, too.

There are palm trees here, and pastel bungalows set on small green yards. The sunlight shimmers and the smog settles across South Los Angeles, just as they do on the prosperous boulevards of West Los Angeles.

But life has to be lived differently here. In parts of South Los Angeles, it seems that almost everyone knows somebody who has been murdered or attacked. A woman walking along Vernon Avenue with a friend says she heard one day that her mailman had been mugged. And one night, when she was waiting at a stoplight, a man burst from a phone booth, smashed her car window and grabbed her purse.

The second woman’s neighbor had been held up on her own porch, by teen-agers with guns. “If you wanna keep what you’ve got, you gotta keep behind bars, or they’ll knock your brains out for it . . .,” she said. “You feel like you’re a prisoner in your own house.”

The woman had sidled out onto her concrete front porch, something she doesn’t do much these days.

And gradually, she lowered her voice to a whisper, lest those boys next door hear her. They deal in rock cocaine, and they know she knows it.

Almost every night in these parts, near the western edge of Watts, it’s shooting and dope-dealing and carrying-on, she says. People have been shot in broad daylight on her street.

She works only a couple of blocks away--you can see the building from her sidewalk--but she still drives her car there and back, and hustles straight inside when she gets home.

“Lotta times I say, maybe I should move, but I talk to people and they say they have it in their neighborhood too, so why bother? I bet it’s like that where you live, huh?”

But it is not.

An estimated one-sixth of the city’s residents live in the four South Los Angeles divisions of the Los Angeles Police Department. But that 43-square-mile area last year accounted for 45% of the city’s homicides, a third of its rapes and more than a quarter of its aggravated assaults. “People have no concept” of what life is like in South Los Angeles, said civil rights attorney Melanie Lomax.

“If the stuff that happens in South-Central--the gangs terrorizing people and drive-by shootings--if that stuff happened in any other portion of the city, there’d be revolution.”

There may be a revolution of sorts. Come June, voters here will decide whether to set a stunning precedent when they vote on a measure to tax themselves extra to add up to 300 police officers to those four beleaguered divisions.

Already the dispute is divisive. Although there are zones of prosperity, opponents argue that this is a poor part of town (the 1980 census figures show a median income of barely $11,000), where two-thirds of the residents rent the houses or apartments they live in.

In an area where drug dealers flaunt beepers and car phones, many ordinary residents cannot afford the $10 a month for a home telephone; they make their calls from the corner markets.

For the third time in a month, Ray Weaver Jr. had been awakened at an ungodly hour by a call from police--someone had broken into Weaver’s Express Auto Body Shop in South-Central Los Angeles.

The burglaries have cost his insurance company about $30,000; he’s spent $5,000 out-of-pocket to make the place more secure, plus the lost work. One prospective customer said he didn’t feel safe leaving his car. “We’re losing business all around,” Weaver said.

“I’d be willing to pay whatever is necessary; it costs me more not to have proper protection. No question on my part--I’m definitely going to vote for whatever extra taxes it costs for the police protection I need.”

Welcome Sight

A black-and-white patrol car is often a welcome sight. Around here, no one asks the policeman to please park his car farther down the street, or to use the side entrance.

At 77th Division--an aging building where the wall map in one office is so dated it shows the city without the Santa Monica Freeway--Patrol Captain David J. Gascon said, “There is no place in the city like South-Central . . . and probably no place in the city where we are so welcome by the citizens.”

But there are never enough police officers, and residents know it. So many routinely call in “man with a gun” for less serious problems, just to ensure they’ll get police.

Southwest Los Angeles furniture store owner Virginia Taylor Hughes opposes the tax measure as she campaigns for City Council in the 6th District. But a group she founded, Merchants 4 Community Improvement, supports it. And so does her brother.

William Taylor has had a dozen $75 batteries stolen from his moving-truck fleet in the last three months. There is a new fence in front of his business; thieves dug up and carted off the first two six-foot-tall chain-link fences.

“On one hand, I feel I ought to have what I’m already paying for (police), but if it would save me money in the long run, I’d be for it.”

Pat Cameron had not heard of the measure yet; his head was still spinning from what happened at his record and tape store on Monday, when two men came in and one of them pulled a gun.

The quiet, Caribbean-born man “pulled my own gun and started firing,” hitting both men and ducking the bullets that were shot back at him. A spider-web of broken glass still marred his front window.

‘Really Hard’

“It’s really hard to live here, not to mention (for) business,” he said. “Man, if I didn’t have a gun, no alarm could have helped me--and no police, unless they were standing right here.”

Johnnie Thompson, 26, has never been shot at--that’s why she moved from Compton to Central Los Angeles, because she feels it is safer. “Every time I turned around (there), someone was getting shot on the street.”

But she is still careful; her children, 3 and 8, never leave her barred apartment alone.

“More cops would be nice, too,” but her rent is $450, and another baby is due in June, and she knows that her landlord will raise her rent if his taxes go up.

The crime problem is doubly hard on the area’s substantial Latino population. Many are illegal aliens, and they fear the police as much as they do the criminals.

At a house near Watts, where baseball trophies fill the mantelpiece, a Latino woman who lives down the street from a burned-out house where drugs were once sold said her children sometimes find drugs in the backyard, where dealers have dropped the evidence during a chase.

They moved here in 1977, and it has only gotten worse. Recently she was robbed of $15 in a grocery parking lot, and her son was robbed by local boys. “When it’s dark, we don’t go out for anything.”

Late Is Out

So dangerous is it at night that businessmen like Tom Tang, who has owned Peterson’s Hardware for seven years, have to open on Sundays, just so their customers can shop during daytime hours.

And he wouldn’t stay open late anyway. “When the clock shows 6 o’clock, we close the door--we don’t work in the dark.”

In the last six months he has had four break-ins, with losses of $3,000. “Every time something happens, someone gets caught shoplifting, we call in to the police; it takes like an hour to respond, and sometimes they don’t even want to send anyone here. . . . We really feel frustrated.

“I don’t like the city raising the taxes in order to give us more security, but we’ll have to see.”

Jo Ann Hall’s husband goes a little further. Not only does he insist that she close up her Central Avenue deli at 5 p.m., but he built her an inch-thick Lucite barricade and a special lazy Susan which allows her to pass the food out without allowing anyone to reach in.

And she hasn’t had a problem. She doesn’t have “those gang machines”--Pac Man and the like--in her store. “I know the crowd they bring. I want people in my place to feel like they’re safe walking in here.”

Worth a Try?

At the Bethel AME Church, the Rev. Edgar E. Boyd is hearing both sides from his parishioners. And he is thinking the tax measure might be worth a try to deal with a critical problem before “we could conceivably have a blood bath on every corner.”

“We need to give law and order back into the right hands, and if there aren’t enough hands . . . if it costs us a little bit more, fine,” he said. “. . . And then there’s that emotional savings too, the peace of mind from having a black-and-white in the area, and knowing they can get a response in a few minutes instead of maybe one or two days.”

A few blocks away, Henry Collins Jr. and his wife, Marie, both retired, are already on the warpath against the measure.

“It’s unfair to pit one district against another,” said Mrs. Collins.

It is “a Pandora’s box” of inequity, says her husband, that could eventually mean good city services only for the areas that can afford it.

Angry Still

Nearby, on a street of small, well-kept homes, Rohelia Beal is still as angry as the day her mother called her in to see Councilman Robert Farrell propose the special police tax measure on television.

“I thought, ‘That man is a little crazy,’ and I guess I went a little crazy too,” she said. She has been calling friends and neighbors to rail against it--and found most of them already are too. “We’re being penalized for what someone else (the criminal) is doing.”

The drug dealers are able to spend big and live high, “but those aren’t the people who’d be paying the tax.”

Besides, said her sister, Dorothy Williams, the criminals “aren’t afraid of the police” anyway.

CRIME BY POLICE DIVISION Four Los Angeles Police divisions--listed in bold and followed by an asterisk--where voters will vote in June on higher taxes for additional police officers have more serious crime, higher population density and relatively fewer officers than most police divisions in the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles. In assigning officers, LAPD also considers such factors as the size of the division.

1980 Area in Pop./ No. Police Division Pop. Sq. Miles Sq. Mile in Division Newton* 103,769 10.0 10,377 232 77th* 150,523 11.8 12,756 260 Southeast* 108,641 10.3 10,548 234 Southwest* 143,991 10.5 13,713 239 Pacific 178,926 24.4 7,333 264 West LA 197,362 64.0 3,084 217 Van Nuys 255,230 35.1 6,566 461 West Valley 265,673 52.2 5,090 226

Agg. Auto Division Homicides Rapes Robberies Assaults Burglaries Thefts Newton* 76 140 1,817 1,829 3,430 2,705 77th* 116 248 2,826 2,530 4,111 2,534 Southeast* 75 219 1,869 1,776 2,705 1,453 Southwest* 68 176 2,701 1,754 3,628 3,328 Pacific 25 128 1,329 878 3,668 3,898 West LA 15 73 1,067 452 3,248 2,398 Van Nuys 18 139 1,150 1,120 5,004 3,841 West Valley 26 85 688 704 4,462 2,350