Trespassing Ordinance Targets Drug Dealers, Gangs in Projects

Los Angeles officials Thursday unveiled a new trespassing ordinance designed to help rid the city’s 21 housing projects of drug dealers and gang members, the majority of whom, officials say, live outside the projects but use them as havens.

Also Thursday, Gary W. Squier, executive director of the Housing Authority, disclosed that the city already has begun building an eight-foot wrought iron security fence around the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts to help keep out non-residents. That project, which Wednesday was the site of a news conference to announce federal financial aid for eight city housing projects, will become the first in the city to be completely enclosed.

The new ordinance, which was approved by the City Council last month and took effect Thursday, will allow the arrest of any trespasser ejected from a housing project within the previous 30 days by Housing Authority or city police.

When they first encounter police, trespassers will be given notice that they will be subject to arrest if they return. After the 30-day period, the process will begin again.

Conviction on the trespassing charge carries a maximum six-month sentence and a $1,000 fine.

The measure will be used in the projects instead of a state trespass law that allows arrest only if a person refuses an officer’s order to leave a site, said City Atty. James K. Hahn at a news conference at the Aliso Village housing project just east of downtown.

“Before, you would ask them to leave, and being smart, they would,” Hahn said. “Then they would be back in 15 minutes.”

The ordinance, Hahn said, will not be used against those who can prove they are visiting project residents, something some Aliso Village residents said they feared.

“They already make anyone who doesn’t live here leave,” said one woman who lives at Aliso Village. “Whenever my boyfriend comes over to visit me, they tell him he has to go.”

Bob Smithson, acting chief of the 50-member Housing Authority Police Department, said such complaints are invalid.

At the news conference, Hahn and City Councilman Richard Alatorre said the new ordinance was drafted after project residents came to city officials desperate for help in ridding their complexes of outsiders.

Anita Moore, president of the Aliso Village Residents Advisory Council, said the problem of non-residents and crimes they commit was a chief concern of the project’s residents when they were polled earlier this year.

According to Hahn, between 40% and 60% of the more than 3,000 people questioned this year by Housing Authority police because they were suspected of committing crimes did not live in the project where they were detained.

The projects have become favorite hangouts of drug dealers and other criminals “from as far away as Chino,” Hahn said, because they are “open with a lot of places to run and hide and few roads where police can come up on someone unnoticed.”

That fact prompted officials to devise a plan to fence the complexes, but the plan has met stiff opposition at some projects from residents who fear the intent is to keep them inside. Squier said no fences will go up where the majority of residents do not want them.

The Jordan Downs fence, he said, will be locked at night but will have “access entrances” for emergency vehicles and residents who need to get in or out “just like apartment complexes in Orange County or anywhere else.”

Squier could not say offhand how many projects have approved fences but rattled off the names of seven, including Aliso Village. Moore confirmed that the project’s residents approved the fencing three months ago but said some are having second thoughts.

“We’re going to have a re-vote,” she said. “Too many people have been coming up to me saying they don’t like the idea anymore.”