Police Barricades Confront Pico-Union Drug Dealers

Frustrated by futile efforts to rid a Pico-Union District neighborhood of drug dealers, Los Angeles police erected barricades Thursday around a square-mile area near MacArthur Park and stationed uniformed officers at most street entrances.

About 20 sawhorse barriers with large signs reading “Narcotics Enforcement Zone, Residents Only” were placed in intersections leading into the Pico-Union District neighborhood three blocks south of the park. Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said 60 officers have been assigned to patrol the area, called the “hottest drug-dealing spot” in Los Angeles by one official.

Federal authorities, who praised the initiative of the plan, said the blockading of the square-mile area is the most ambitious such neighborhood crackdown in the nation.

“What we have endorsed are efforts that try to bring the community back to life, not just sweeps that walk away,” said John Walters, an aide to federal drug czar William J. Bennett.

Residents of the area, gathering to hear Gates and other officials announce the crackdown, dubbed the “Neighborhood Rescue Operation,” applauded the heightened police presence. Many said that other anti-crime programs have done little to solve their problems.

“I’d rather have police at every corner than the five or six drug dealers we have now,” one young mother said. “The problem is out of control here.”

Others who live in the low-income Latino neighborhood said they are regularly accosted by crack cocaine addicts outside--and even inside--their homes. The residents said their main fear now was that police would not stay long enough.

Police will not prevent cars from entering the area. But drivers will have to swerve around the barriers and past uniformed officers--a deterrent that “will put drug dealers and buyers on notice that they will not be tolerated here,” Gates said.

As he spoke, he stood surrounded by more than 100 uniformed officers in an area normally patrolled by drug dealers. The barricades and patrols will be in place indefinitely, the police chief said.

“We will not walk away from this neighborhood,” Gates vowed.

The Pico-Union neighborhood is “a veritable flea market” for drug dealers, Gates said, with 3,000 narcotics arrests and 5,000 other arrests so far this year. There have been 22 homicides in the 27-square-block area since January, he said.

Professionals and college students in expensive cars are often sighted driving through the neighborhood to buy drugs from sidewalk peddlers, police said.

Councilwoman Gloria Molina, who represents the area, said that the decision to erect the barricades came after months of small house meetings with residents, who complained of being held hostage inside their homes.

“The police, the people in this community have done everything we can to stop this,” Molina said. “Hopefully this creative measure, this big sign will tell people that this is going to be drug-free area.”

As part of the crackdown, City Atty. James K. Hahn filed suit Thursday against operators of a Thrifty gas station, which he described as a center of drug-dealing in the Pico-Union District.

The lawsuit, filed under the California Controlled Substances Abatement Act, seeks to force the owners and operators of the station to clean up the problem or face closure. Hahn said police have made 141 drug-related arrests on and around the property during the first eight months of this year.

Barry Berkett, executive vice president of Thrifty Oil Co., said he was “shocked” to hear of the lawsuit because he and his employees had been cooperating with the police and city attorney.

“There is nothing they asked us to do that we haven’t done,” Berkett said, adding that expensive lighting and fencing had been put in at the gas station.

Federal officials said the crackdown by police and city attorneys is modeled after Operation Pressure Point, a 1985 offensive in New York City that cleared a crime-ridden region of the Lower East Side. Since that time, similar--though smaller-scale--efforts have been mounted in Detroit, New Orleans and other cities.

In the MacArthur Park area, Los Angeles police have repeatedly tried a variety of familiar drug-fighting tactics. They have made numerous undercover buys from crack cocaine dealers and arrested them in sweeps. Undercover officers have stood around in prominent drug-selling locations and arrested people who approached them to buy drugs.

In April, merchants and residents held a candlelight march around the 32-acre park to protest increasing crime. Police subsequently assigned as many as four foot patrol officers and eight mounted officers to the park.

Early this month, a two-day undercover operation resulted in the seizure of 43 cars--including a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW--and the arrest of 51 people who allegedly had come to the area to buy drugs. Among those arrested were an accountant, a stockbroker and two parents with young children.

Adolfo V. Nodal, a city cultural affairs official who lives nearby and helped organize the MacArthur Park Community Council, said the area barricaded by police is the base for many of the drug dealers who operate out of the park.

Nodal said that while police have been “incredibly responsive” in patrolling the park, they have had a harder time driving drug dealers out of surrounding neighborhoods. “When they clear them out of the parks, they go to the alleys and neighborhoods around the park,” he said.

This is not the first unusual, ambitious tactic employed by Los Angeles authorities to combat gang or drug activity in a specific neighborhood. There have been massive “Operation Hammer” sweeps through South-Central Los Angeles and other areas and a recent campaign to increase foot patrols in a series of crime hot spots.

Two years ago, City Atty. Hahn went to court seeking to bar members of a Westside street gang from wearing gang attire, associating with each other, leaving their homes between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. and remaining on public streets more than five minutes. The target of his effort was the Playboy Gangster Crips gang, whose members allegedly were peddling drugs and terrorizing a 26-block neighborhood bordered by La Cienega and Robertson boulevards.

But a Superior Court judge later ruled that many of the proposed restrictions were illegal, though he kept in place such provisions as a ban on 23 hard-core gang members from trespassing or defacing private property or littering or urinating on public property.

Hahn’s lawsuit in the Pico-Union District crackdown, filed Thursday in Superior Court, names as defendants the Thrifty Oil Co, which operates the service station, and Best California Gas Ltd., which owns the property. Both are headquartered in Downey.

The suit asks for a preliminary injunction requiring the defendants to take steps to remedy the problems at the service station, including installing additional lighting at the rear and hiring an armed security guard to patrol the premises during business hours.

“If the defendants take the needed actions to help clean up this problem, then the station can stay in operation,” Hahn said in a press release.

Fifteen to 20 other locations in the barricaded area have been identified as “focal points” for drug trafficking--including some mini-malls and apartment houses that are also under investigation, the city attorney said.

“More lawsuits will be filed unless the owners of these properties get the message and move quickly to cooperate with the police and undertake self-abatement actions,” Hahn said.

Molina said that in addition to the heavy police presence in the Pico-Union neighborhood, several community groups have organized crime-watch programs.

Times staff writers Jane Fritsch and Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.