Shared Rage : Neighbors Unite for Crime Fight

For Carson resident Gloria Estrada, the impetus came about eight weeks ago. A succession of shots broke the quiet of her neighborhood one Sunday evening. The shots were aimed at a young couple sitting in a car.

Estrada said she realized that the shooting was a departure from the car break-ins, the graffiti, the vandalism, the displays of public drunkenness and the transients that had been bothering the neighborhood.

“We have two grandchildren and I want it as safe as it was for my kids,” she said.

She revved up a Neighborhood Watch group.

For Compton upholsterer Hermon Jackson, the impetus came after the appearance two years ago of young men standing on neighborhood street corners, playing loud radios and selling drugs. “It was kind of blatant,” he said.

He, too, organized a Neighborhood Watch group.

In the Haven Heights area near Main Street and Imperial Highway, Dorothy Craig said increasing crime had reawakened a Neighborhood Watch group abandoned for years.

In the old days, “when a neighbor spoke, the children listened,” she said.

“No more,” chimed in a companion.

Leaders Share Outrage

Sharing an urgency about crime in their neighborhoods, Jackson, Estrada, Craig and about 50 other people from Compton, Carson, Gardena, Hawthorne, Lawndale, Inglewood, San Pedro, Redondo Beach, Athens, Los Angeles and other areas braved Tuesday night’s rain and wind for a special meeting at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

The meeting, sponsored by the Carson sheriff’s substation and the Inglewood Police Department, was intended to help Neighborhood Watch leaders get to know one another, share their outrage and learn how to increase their effectiveness.

The meeting mixed the technicalities of a briefing with the fervor of a revival.

“The gang members are laughing at us,” said Robert A. Ferber, a Los Angeles deputy city attorney. “The gangs are educating your kids and giving them their values. They are laughing at you.”

He said gangs should be treated much as organized crime families, and said local prosecutors should have the same tools for infiltrating local gangs that federal prosecutors have used against the mob.

‘Take a Judge to Lunch’

Xavier Carter, chaplain of the Inglewood Police Department, also was blunt.

“The community has tolerated all of the garbage,” he said. “We usually don’t get involved unless it happens in our home or in our neighborhood. Then we want all the lights to turn red and take care of our problem. That is not how the system works.”

He told the group they should take their concerns to judges. “Take a judge to lunch,” he urged. “They will obey you.” Many politicians ignore crime issues until election time, he said. “Then they come to you.”

Albert H. MacKenzie, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, spoke about plans for a state ballot initiative to streamline court procedures, making criminals’ punishment more certain.

Judicial ‘Gridlock’

Among California procedures that contribute to judicial “gridlock,” he said, are lengthy jury selections and extensive preliminary hearings that can last months. He said no other state routinely has preliminary hearings as lengthy as California’s.

Lt. Judith Lewis of the Sheriff’s Crime Prevention Unit said anti-gang efforts must begin as early as the fourth grade.

She said that Neighborhood Watch members should go beyond crime reporting to “getting neighborhoods back in the business of being neighborhoods.”

“In a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business,” she said. “Unfortunately, we are in an urban society.”

Her suggestion appealed to Joan Crear, who lives in the Athens neighborhood near El Segundo Boulevard and Vermont Avenue.

Crear said the meeting bolstered her “sense of empowerment in terms of community people coming together to work on solutions.”

“I can go back to my community unafraid,” she said. “These are like-minded spirits. You can get the opinion that everyone is bad, but it is a small group of people who are terrorizing the community.

“Sometimes, negative things can be positive. Neighbors are speaking to neighbors. We are going back to the idea of a neighborhood.”

Crear said she hopes that neighborly involvement stemming from efforts against crime will spill over to nonviolent concerns such as “how we raise kids.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Carlos Jaen of the Carson sheriff’s substation sent the group home with the advice to include as many people as possible in their Neighborhood Watch groups.

“Safety is in numbers,” he said. “If your whole block is organized, the gangs won’t pick you out.”