Praise, Suspicion Greet Police ‘Outpost’ : Law enforcement: The LAPD’s experiment at the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts is testing the waters of a new approach to police-community relations.

Lorene Grant, a 59-year-old mother of seven and grandmother of “30-some,” sat outside the front door of her small apartment in the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts recently and gave her assessment of the “neighbors” who moved in next door three months ago.

“Well, they’re getting a little more polite,” Grant said. “Some of them are beginning to recognize that you’re a senior citizen and that they can speak to you without wanting to go upside your head.”

Grant was referring to the contingent of 11 police officers that, since July, has been operating a police “outpost” in a former apartment in Imperial Courts. The three-room office is an experiment in police-community relations that, if successful, could be expanded to housing projects elsewhere in the city.

While the operation still has some critics among project residents, Capt. M. M. (Sandy) Wasson, patrol supervisor for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southeast Division, said that the officers assigned to the outpost have come a long way since last spring when suspected gang members firebombed the office three times to try to keep it from opening.

“The residents are becoming friendlier, they’re talking willingly with any of the officers. They’re even telling them to watch themselves,” Wasson said. “I would expect that from good people. You don’t expect that from gang members or drug dealers but every once in a while they say it, too.”

The city spent about $11,000 to establish the officers in Imperial Courts for a six-month trial period, Wasson said. He said he already has received assurances that the program will be continued at least until spring.

The hope, police say, is that a bond of trust eventually will develop between the officers and project residents, leading to a reduction in crime in Imperial Courts. The project, like many others in the city, has become a haven for drug dealers, largely because its labyrinth of streets makes for easy getaways.

But officers said that Imperial Courts, a 498-unit project located in the far southeast corner of Watts, was chosen for the pilot program not because it is any more crime-ridden than other city housing projects.

Rather, they said, it was selected because it is relatively small and manageable, and an apartment was available there for police to use.

No statistics are available to measure the impact of the program thus far. Wasson, however, said the effort has paid off in the form of anonymous tips that helped solve the fatal shootings in Imperial Courts of 7-year-old Kanita Hailey, who was hit by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting Aug. 2, and Enrique Ayala, 28, a snack vendor who was killed a month later at the edge of the project.

Still, there is no consensus among residents about how the experiment is going.

At one end of the spectrum are people like Lorene Grant who seem, for the most part, pleased with the program. Grant praised the officers, for instance, for installing security lights outside their outpost. She said the lights discourage youths from gathering on her lawn at night.

Other residents view the operation with suspicion.

The two groups seem to break down along gender and age lines. Older women tend to like the idea or at least are willing to withhold judgment to give the officers more time to prove themselves. Some men, especially younger men, said the outpost only made it easier for police to harass them.

A frequent complaint from more than a dozen men interviewed was that officers try to chase them off the streets when they are doing nothing illegal.

“Their favorite question is, ‘You got a house?’ ” recalled a 50-year-old Vietnam veteran who did not want to be identified. “When you say ‘yes,’ they say ‘then get in it.’ ”

Once, the man said, he refused to comply with an order to leave from in front of a friend’s apartment. He said an officer then handcuffed him and took him into custody on suspicion of possession of cocaine. He had no cocaine, and police found none on him, but he spent two days in jail anyway, he said.

“If you ask me, it’s just like Russia,” the man said. “Who wants to see a police car riding down the street every time you look up?”

Wasson declined to comment on the man’s complaint, but he said that, in general, many of the men who are seen in and around the project don’t live there, but use the complex as a hangout, sometimes to deal drugs.

Last week, city officials unveiled a trespassing ordinance designed specifically to roust non-residents from all of Los Angeles’ 21 housing projects. People caught in the complexes who cannot satisfactorily explain why they are there will be warned not to return. If they come back within 30 days and are caught, they are subject to arrest and a six-month jail sentence.

But crime prevention is not the only aim of police stationed at the project. They also are there to do some simple fence-mending.

That’s a key concern of Officer Myrna L. Lewis, a nine-year Police Department veteran, who has been assigned to the outpost since July. While other officers spend most of their time patrolling the project or taking reports, Lewis, a state-licensed family counselor, may spend her time doing such chores as picking up litter in an effort to show residents that she, too, is concerned about the community.

An outsider walking through Imperial Courts, among the pastel-colored rows of box-like apartments, might view the community much the same as other low-income areas.

But amid the signs of poverty and neglect, children play and laugh in yards, and adults who sit on their stoops or gather in parking lots return greetings.

Nevertheless, tension rises when the subject of police is broached. Even people who seem enthusiastic about the increased police presence are cautious about how much and what they say.

“Some residents don’t want to talk to the police and they don’t want to be seen around police because people will think they are telling on someone,” Lewis said.

For the last several weeks, Lewis has spent much of her time meeting with project residents and city recreation workers to establish a youth sports league in Watts. Eight soccer teams, four of them from Imperial Courts, are scheduled to take the field this month.

Lewis also attends meetings of the residents’ advisory council, publishes a one-page newsletter and makes herself available as a sort of all-around answer woman.

She described what she does as “kind of a community-outreach type thing.”

Gwen Johnson, a mother of four who has lived in the project for 12 years, praised Lewis for arranging to move her teen-age son’s school bus pick-up site from outside the project, where he was in constant danger of being attacked by gangs, to a spot inside Imperial Courts.

Lewis said it took her just a few days and a handful of phone calls to the school district to accomplish the task.

“She’s police, don’t get me wrong,” Johnson said. “But she is also like a neighbor.”

Johnson’s feelings about Lewis, however, don’t necessarily translate into satisfaction with other police officers. A few weeks ago, she said, officers from the police anti-gang unit stopped her son a few feet from her apartment as he was on his way inside to get dressed for work. She said the officers, who also were questioning two adults, had her son “jacked up” against a wall.

Johnson said she complained to a sergeant at the Southeast Station and was assured that it would not happen again.

Similar stories were told by other residents.

So far, the greatest setback suffered by the program came when Kanita Hailey was shot.

Witnesses have complained that a police patrol car was less than a block away when the shooting occurred, but did not immediately chase the car carrying the gunman and allowed him to get away. After a crowd gathered and people loudly voiced their anger about that, the residents contend, officers attacked them with batons, breaking one man’s arm.

Police have denied the accusations. At the request of Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, the city’s civilian Police Commission has ordered the department’s Internal Affairs Division to investigate the matter. That investigation is incomplete, Wasson said.

Though he believes that police acted properly, Wasson was clearly frustrated by the incident.

“It’s like we took three steps forward and two back,” he said.