100 Officers Ram, Storm 10 Suspected Rock Houses

More than 100 officers using search warrants and a tank-like battering ram stormed 10 suspected rock houses in a block-long area of South-Central Los Angeles as part of a major cocaine raid, Los Angeles police announced Thursday.

Several neighborhood residents complained about the violence of the raid conducted late Wednesday night. But police defended their actions as necessary in the continuing battle to quell the city’s burgeoning drug problem.

At least two shots were fired at officers preparing to enter one of the heavily fortified houses with the aid of the six-ton battering ram. No one was hit, police said. The people who fired the shots, along with several suspected gang members, escaped, detectives said.

The raid resulted in four arrests and the seizure of several ounces of cocaine, some marijuana, five handguns and about $600 in cash, according to investigators.

Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who watched the raid, estimated that it took three minutes for his officers to enter and secure all 10 of the houses in the 1100 and 1200 blocks of East 47th Place. Lt. Lindsey Harmon of the Police Department’s Central Bureau narcotics unit said undercover officers had made cocaine purchases at each of the houses during a monthlong investigation.

“The dope moved from house to house,” Harmon said. “It was like a shell game--which house is it in today?”

Shattered glass and scattered belongings at three of the houses named on search warrants gave evidence Thursday of the violence of the raid. Some residents of the run-down neighborhood protested that police had been needlessly forceful.

“It was a nightmare--the nightmare on 47th Place,” said a 26-year-old woman who lives next door to the house hammered by the battering ram.

The woman, who declined to give her name, said she was sitting in her living room about 11 p.m. when “all of a sudden, the windows started breaking. . . .

“All these guys started appearing everywhere,” she said. “I told them, ‘We’re clean. We’re clean.’ They just told me to stay calm.”

The woman said that neither she nor any of the other occupants of her house--one of those named on a warrant--were arrested. She said she had only moved into the house last week. Police, who had been watching the house for some time, “should have known that,” she said.

Henrietta Barber, 64, spent much of Thursday morning sweeping up broken glass at her house, located near the house hit by the ram. Barber’s house also was named on a warrant, and she said a young man was arrested there during the raid.

“But I don’t see why they had to do all this,” Barber’s daughter-in-law, Karen Barker, 42, said as she helped clean up the mess. “They handcuffed all of us and I didn’t do anything.”

But a 53-year-old woman who lives across the street from where the raid was conducted voiced support for police.

“I think they’re dealing drugs here, and I’m against that,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Mrs. Parks. “The police should come and clean it up. But some of the good have suffered with the bad.”

Harmon responded that police are forced to smash the windows of houses they are raiding as a “diversionary tactic” to freeze the occupants and delay their attempts to seize weapons, get rid of contraband or flee arrest.

Harmon also said that suspects who were handcuffed were all in houses where undercover officers had made narcotics buys. They had to be detained, Harmon said, until police could determine whether they were suspects in the drug operations.