Inglewood to Curb Use of Pay Phones in Drug Deals

A pay telephone at the corner of Century Boulevard and Prairie Avenue in Inglewood rang six times Tuesday evening before it was answered. “Who’s that?” the anxious male caller asked at the other end. There was a pause, and then the line went dead.

Seven people lingered around the row of phones Tuesday as Angelo Aguiar, who manages a fast-food restaurant across the street, stood nearby. He said incoming calls are not unusual at the popular late-night gathering place. He told of frequent drug deals he witnesses, telephone credit cards that are rented for $1 apiece, prostitutes and drug users that hang out nearby.

“The phones are bad news,” he said. “In the summertime there are people six or seven deep lined up at the phones. These are people that live in the streets and live for dope.”

In certain Inglewood neighborhoods, pay telephones are a popular alternative for those who cannot afford the monthly fees for residential phones. But city, police and phone company officials acknowledge that, along with the many legitimate callers, there are an increasing number of drug dealers who use the pay phone as a business tool.

The Inglewood City Council Tuesday night launched a program aimed at discouraging drug dealers from running their operations from pay phones. The plan, introduced by 3rd District Councilman Jose Fernandez, urges private property owners to restrict certain phones to outgoing calls to short-circuit drug deals. Many pay phones on public property have already been converted to one-way calling.

“There are a significant number of street dealers that use pay phones as a means of communication,” said Capt. James T. Butts of the Inglewood narcotics section. “One-way calling can definitely aid us in displacing their actions.”

Police said some dealers set up shop at a pay phone night after night and wait for buyers to call in their orders. The pay phone provides extra security because it is more difficult to trace to the dealer than a cellular or residential phone, while allowing mobility and a convenient location, police said.

Butts said restricting the phones won’t eliminate drug-dealing, however. “They’re going to find another place.”

Fernandez said much of the loitering and drug dealing takes place outside liquor stores, coin laundries and other private properties where the city has no jurisdiction over the phones. Fernandez’s emergency resolution, adopted unanimously, calls on the city to notify business owners of the one-way calling option and encourage those with a loitering problem to request the service from their telephone company.

“We don’t have the resources to put a policeman next to every pay phone, but this will discourage the dealers,” Fernandez said. “The number of transactions will decrease. The dealers will have to use other phones in Los Angeles or Hawthorne.”

In a pilot program at three problem pay phones over the past two months, Fernandez said, there was a noticeable reduction in loitering after one-way calling was introduced.

Julio Enrique Rosa, who manages a convenience store on Myrtle Avenue, said he supports the plan if it will help to end the loitering outside his store. He said the phones require weekly repairs because of the rough crowd of street people they attract. “We lose a lot of business because people are afraid to walk by those phones,” he said.

Pacific Bell officials said they endorse the city’s plan because it does not restrict all pay phones, such as those inside businesses that are used to accepting incoming calls, and is not so drastic that it proposes removing phones that are relied on by residents.

Pacific Bell can block incoming calls by removing the bell in the phone or programming the central computer to block the line, said Pacific Bell area manager Bob Rodriguez. After the phone is converted at no cost, a repair worker will put a notice on the phone advising users of the restriction, he said.

Pacific Bell officials said there are several hundred pay phones throughout Inglewood, although they said competitive considerations prevent them from specifying the number of Pacific Bell phones and those run by private carriers.

General Telephone Co. officials said 200 of that company’s more than 40,000 pay phones across the state are restricted.

Last year, GTE officials converted 20 phones in Venice Beach near Ocean Front Walk and Horizon Avenue, and police there say the number of complaints of late-night drug dealing at the phones has dropped.

“People used to be making calls all night long and they’d receive calls back,” said Patrick Shields, assistant watch commander at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Pacific Area station. “. . . The one-way phones seem to have curbed the problem, so the people can at least live down there now.”

In Long Beach, city officials began investigating a one-way calling plan last week to prevent what Councilman Wallace Edgerton called “the proliferation of these small-time punk dealers.” Police there estimate that as many as three-quarters of all drug deals are arranged on pay telephones.

“Everybody wins from this,” Fernandez said. “The people win because the phones are returned to them. Everybody wins except the drug dealers.”