LAPD Raid Did Little Good, They Say : On 47th Place, Residents Live With Drug Scourge

Nighttime is the worst, said the 39-year-old school custodian and mother of four as she quieted her infant son in a corner of her lightless living room, careful to avoid the window and the possibility of being struck by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting.

Nighttime, she said, is when the crack cocaine dealers come in droves to sell their “rocks” from the porches and yards on her block of 47th Place, an otherwise quiet street of bungalows between Central and Hoover avenues just south of downtown Los Angeles.

Ask them not hang around in front of your house, or at least not to do their business from the porch of an aged, invalid lady who lives on the block, the woman said, and they may go away for a while. Or they may not.

“Every time I come home from work at night I want to cry because I have to come on this street,” said the woman who, like all residents interviewed, requested anonymity.

Last week, 100 Los Angeles police officers--inspired by neighborhood complaints, led by Chief Daryl F. Gates and armed with search warrants and a battering ram--swooped along the street, crashing through windows and walls of 10 houses at one end of the block. They arrested four men--two for allegedly selling cocaine and two for allegedly possessing small amounts of marijuana. Police also seized 74 grams of cocaine, five guns, a police scanner radio and $222 in cash.

In the aftermath of the raids, which police ballyhooed as but “one step in eradicating this neighborhood of dope dealers,” some people who live along 47th Place talked with a reporter about their street and the frightening way it came to accommodate what one narcotics officer said may well be the largest concentration of crack dealing in the city.

They told how in the last two years, Crips gang members called Four Treys have converged on the block each evening from other parts of the neighborhood, apparently attracted to the relatively serene and out-of-the-way setting it offered.

“About two years ago, you could sleep with your door open,” said a woman who lives on the block. “You sit out there now and you are liable to get killed.”

At first there were only a few dealers, and they congregated on one corner. Then they began to move down the block. They started dealing on sidewalks where children play, and then they camped out on porches--apparently because it afforded a shady place to sit. Eventually, residents said, some gang members actually rented houses on the street, increasing the drug-buying traffic. The entrenchment was complete.

Just how many gang members live in houses on the block, and how many merely operate off front porches, remains a matter of contention between police and 47th Place residents. No one, though, disputes that drug-dealing is epidemic.

‘This Is a Gang Street’

“I hate to say it, but this is a gang street and a dope street,” said one resident, a slightly built, middle-aged woman. “But how do I look trying to make these gangsters leave? They’re not even afraid of the police.”

“It has gotten to the point where it is a part of life,” said a 21-year-old tenant.

The residents, most of whom are renters, said the late-night raid a week ago Wednesday was a welcome--but misdirected--attack on the problem. The raiders, several residents said in interviews, in some cases went to the wrong houses, arrested the wrong people and did not seem to understand fully the dynamics of drug commerce on their block. And finally, they said, the raid accomplished little.

Indeed, even as residents shared their story, drug dealers already were returning to 47th Place, brazenly selling their crack for as little as $1 a hit.

Complaints from residents began to pour in to police less than 24 hours after the raid, said Lt. Lindsey Harmon of the Police Department’s Central Division narcotics unit.

Policeman Agrees

Harmon, a 23-year police veteran who participated in the raids, agreed with 47th Place residents that the crack sellers on their block are gang members, but he contended that a gang could not operate there as it does without assistance from at least some residents.

“We have reason to believe that sellers pay some of the people for use of their houses” to stash their cocaine, he said. “If you are in a tight financial situation and someone offers you three or four hundred dollars, it might be better for you” than welfare.

Harmon acknowledged that he has no concrete proof to support such a theory, but he pointed out that undercover officers, during a monthlong investigation that preceded the raid, made “controlled buys” outside each of the 10 houses.

“The seller got the narcotics from inside the house in all 10 cases, every one of them,” Harmon said.

This is where the narratives offered by police and people who live on 47th Place take contradictory paths.

Police See a Victory

Police cast the raid as a victory against, as a department press release put it, “the criminals who are destroying the country and particularly the cities of our nation by engaging in the sales of narcotics.”

The press release noted that one suspect fired at officers as he escaped--no one was hit--and it offered the seizure of the police scanner radio as evidence of the sophistication of the gang dealers.

The residents, however, said the raid missed its target. They said the vast majority of drug sales on the block occur on the porches and in the yards, not from inside houses. There is no doubt that some of the homes are occupied by crack sellers, they said, but they contend that at least five of those went untouched by police last week, while officers raided homes occupied by law-abiding people.

“They broke into my father’s house down the street and I can tell you that he don’t sell no dope,” said one woman, who described her father as a 70-year-old retiree.

She complained that a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old in the house at the time were forced to lie face-down on the floor while police searched the home. The father, who the woman said was not arrested in the raid, could not be located for comment. Another daughter, who lives with him, would not talk to a reporter.

The police press release said a man identified as Jack Davis Palmer was arrested in the house the night of the raid for allegedly having marijuana--less than an ounce--on his person. Harmon said Palmer was later given a court date and released. No cocaine was found.

The same thing occurred at a three-bedroom house that is owned by 105-year-old Martin Jones. Police found no cocaine in the house, but did arrest a man they said had a small amount of marijuana. He was identified as Leonel Lloyd Lewis. The disposition of his case could not be determined.

Jones, a minister who lives in another section of the city, was at the house this week, trying to repair broken windows, window frames and torn-away security bars so he can rent the home again.

His tenant of five years, he said, moved out of the house the night of the raid, after police broke through the windows and handcuffed her.

“She had never been in handcuffs before,” Jones said. “She moved out the same night.”

Asked if he thought the woman was involved in drug dealing, Jones considered the question for a moment and shook his head: “Of course, I could be wrong,” he said, “but I never saw nothing like that.”

He described the woman as an active member of his church who had been a candidate for the ministry until she became pregnant with the first of her two children. He is considering filing a formal complaint against police for damaging his property and raiding the wrong house, he said.

“I know they have to do their jobs,” Jones said, referring to the officers who conducted the raid, “but they don’t have to tear up things like this.”

As he talked, a young man bounded up the stairs of the house and asked Jones if he could rent it. “I got the money, right now. I got it right now,” the younger man said urgently, after Jones told him he probably already had a new tenant.

A short time later, the same man was seen standing in the middle of street waving cash in his hand. Why he was waving money around was not clear. He wore what authorities describe as a classic gang uniform: a black Los Angeles Raiders cap and a blue sweat shirt with blue shorts drooping on his hips.

The man would not answer questions about himself, but he taunted the police.

“They didn’t get nothing (in the raids) but two guns,” he said laughing. “Tell them that they might as well make dope legal.”