A Summer of Discontent : Simi Valley Seeks ‘Remote and Centralized’ Place to Please Out-of-School Youths Who Are All Revved Up With No Place to Go

It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday in Simi Valley, and Todd MacNamee and three friends standing in a pizza parlor parking lot are in a familiar quandary about how to pass the night.

“There’s nothing to do, really,” said MacNamee, 21. “Just stay home and watch TV or stay out here sitting on our cars.”

Because so many Simi Valley teen-agers and young adults this summer have chosen to hang out in parking lots, this city has found itself in a quandary of its own.

The City Council has appointed a special subcommittee to search for ways to allow the youths to socialize peacefully, after one gathering of 200 erupted in violence, residents complained about the noise and merchants fretted that the hooliganism was hurting their business.

Since a police crackdown last month on parking lot hangouts, the teen-agers and young adults have scattered into smaller groups. But the problem of what to do after dark might well continue to foster uneasiness and irk the town’s elders unless some alternative emerges.

No ‘Startling Answers’

“There’s no question that we have a problem,” said Simi Valley Police Lt. Dick Thomas. “There are just a lot of kids, and it needs to be dealt with. . . . I don’t have any startling answers.”

The subcommittee, composed of Mayor Greg Stratton, Councilman Glen McAdoo and nine others representing the local school district, the business community and the youths, met for the first time last Tuesday.

“We optimistically hope to have something for the kids by the fall,” Stratton said.

But what that “something” will be seems anyone’s guess. The City Council last month denied a request by the youths to use the parking lot of Simi Valley’s City Hall as a gathering place. Possibilities being explored by the special subcommittee include school district property, an industrial area or a public dead-end street that would be remote enough to allay residents’ concerns about noise but not so far away that youths would not go there.

“Finding a place that is remote and yet centralized is perhaps contradictory,” McAdoo said. “But it must be done. I want to see this work because no city has ever been able to pull this off before. If we can do it, it will be unique.”

Problem of Insurance

Some of the roadblocks are already evident to the subcommittee. Liability insurance could be prohibitive. Members say a gathering place probably would have to be supervised, perhaps by off-duty police or private security guards.

City officials, police, business representatives and residents seem to agree that most of the youths have good intentions and that much of the trouble has been sparked by out-of-towners. But there remains an uneasy sense that what has happened in the past several months is unacceptable.

The City Council is expected to consider on Monday a police request to buy 80 signs warning that loitering in shopping center parking lots is illegal. The Police Department cannot arrest youths for “hanging out” in lots without the posted signs, which will be sold at cost to merchants at 23 parking areas throughout the city, Thomas said.

In the past, police had waited for businesses to complain, then told them that signs would have to be posted before action could be taken.

“We’ve definitely taken a shift,” Thomas said, “only because we’ve recognized that it has become a problem.”

A special police tactical team began concentrating on parking lot hangouts July 17 and made 28 arrests during its first four nights of operation, Thomas said. The crackdown, he said, was only partly in response to the July 4 melee involving about 200 youths in the Burger King parking lot on Cochran Street.

A fight apparently sparked that disturbance, and by the time police had arrived, scores of youths were fighting and some had been knocked down by cars, slashed with broken bottles and pelted with rocks, police said. One police officer was slightly hurt before the incident was over, and a 17-year-old local boy was arrested.

Yet police speculated that visitors from Northern California were to blame for much of the trouble. Of the 28 people arrested by the special task force, 15 were adults and 12 were from outside Simi Valley, Thomas said.

Nonetheless, the noise emanating from that same Burger King parking lot in past weeks has been enough to roust some residents from bed.

Peggy Kondo, a 51-year-old fashion designer, lives near the Burger King, which is adjacent to a Target store parking lot that also has been a popular hangout. “I did call the police one night when the car stereos were really loud,” she said. “The deep bass is really irritating and I couldn’t sleep.”

The Target store and at least three other shopping centers have posted warning signs in their parking lots.

Police suspect that the posting of signs in the lot outside the Vons supermarket and Thrifty drug store on Tapo Street in February may have marked the beginning of the youth unrest that has surfaced this summer.

‘An Uneasy Truce’

“For 15 years,” Thomas said, “that lot on Tapo was Simi Valley’s version of Van Nuys Boulevard cruise night. The kids came and did their thing, whatever that is. . . . It was an uneasy truce.”

But the new owners who had taken over the shopping center last year almost immediately began complaining to police about trash, noise, drinking and intimidation of their customers from the large groups that gathered on Sunday nights, Thomas said. After the youths were evicted from the Tapo lot, they discovered the Target and Burger King parking area, among others, he said.

Once the kids started hanging out at Target beginning in the early evenings, the store began having problems.

“The people that were gathering would not leave, and we were getting complaints from customers about loud noise and about bad language, about them not being able to get to the store without going through all this and feeling threatened,” said Mike Metter, San Fernando Valley district manager for Target.

But what was a problem for one business apparently became a source of profit for another. Since its founding in 1983, Magnum Patrol, a private security firm, has thrived on the “crowd control” business, said its president, George Stuart. The firm’s first major assignment was monitoring the Sycamore Plaza shopping center in Simi Valley, where large groups of youths were gathering, drinking and playing loud music long into the night, he said.

On a recent Saturday night at Sycamore Plaza, it took a gathering of only six youths standing near their cars to draw the security guards’ attention. Two of the guards approached the young people and asked them to stand clear of traffic.

The youths said they were about to move on anyway, although they did not like nomadic “partying.”

“We just want a place where we can sit around and not be bugged,” said one of the youths, 16-year-old Angela Decazos.

Several hundred youths would find such a place at three large house parties that night, but only for a while. Police were called upon to break up the parties. From one of the houses, on Phyllis Street, sharply dressed youths spilled into the street. More than 50 cars lined the street in both directions.

Resort to Cruising

In the end, young people resort to cruising the streets to look for large groups of their peers. Many are members of mini-truck clubs who like to show off their vehicles.

A gathering of four young people outside the pizza parlor on Stearns Street and Los Angeles Avenue grew to 15 in a matter of minutes.

“They’re good kids,” said Chuck Bresler, 67, owner of Chuck Burger, adjacent to the pizza parlor. But, in the same breath, he pointed out an unoccupied building where broken windows often had to be replaced.

Such is the dilemma facing Simi Valley and its elected officials. Most of the youths don’t want to make trouble, but when a group becomes large, it is likely to become unruly, said Sgt. Arch Morgan, the police task force’s field commander.

“The City Council has to meet us somewhere,” said David Michael Burger, 23, one of the youths outside the pizza parlor. “Having the police patrolling us is taking them away from their jobs . . . they’re busy running all over town watching a bunch of kids.”

Burger and the other youths debated how to solve the problem, but a consensus did not emerge. Some suggested big gatherings could work if the youths on their own could control drinking and clean up the trash. Others were more cynical.

“To get that to happen is almost impossible,” Todd MacNamee said.

Nevertheless, the town seems committed to try to find a solution.

“The kids of Simi Valley definitely need a place to socialize,” said Karen Lindeen, 30, a Chamber of Commerce member. “We needed a place to socialize when we were younger . . . and if it can be done reasonably, peacefully and intelligently, then we’re all for it.”