Drug Barricade Tactic Resembles Effort in N.Y.

The problem drugs were heroin and powder cocaine in January, 1984, when the New York Police Department tried a new tactic in an area of Manhattan’s Lower East Side that was considered the city’s worst narcotics “supermarket.”

In what was dubbed “Operation Pressure Point,” a four-block by eight-block area was saturated with more than 200 officers, some working undercover but most still in uniform--enough to station an officer at virtually every corner. “They made car stops, strictly enforced traffic laws and conducted ‘stop and frisks’ where appropriate,” Sgt. Peter Sweeney said.

And they stayed for eight months.

The New York crackdown is the closest thing to a precedent for a law enforcement campaign begun Thursday in Los Angeles, the “Neighborhood Rescue Operation” in which police took the extra step of erecting barricades at entrances to a square-mile area near MacArthur Park. Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said 60 officers would patrol the area indefinitely.

Looking back at Operation Pressure Point, New York police view it as a long-term success on the Lower East Side, but of far lesser value in other neighborhoods where it was later tried. The key factor in long-term success, they said, went beyond police work--it was the ability of a community to transform itself.

In the Lower East Side, Inspector Alfred James recalled, “the area was ripe for gentrification. There was a lot of money to rebuild.”

A year after the police influx began, business rents had doubled, artists had discovered the area and real estate brokers were interested in once worthless properties--a dilapidated 16-story building formerly used as a “shooting gallery” by addicts sold for $3.5 million.

But police hardly pretended that they had eliminated drug dealing. Although there were more than 2,000 arrests the first month of Operation Pressure Point, many dealers had simply moved elsewhere, gone indoors or developed new tactics to avoid detection. Police did claim more success, through arrests and car seizures, in deterring suburbanites from driving to the area to buy drugs--a problem Los Angeles officials say is severe near MacArthur Park.

“People would drive in from Queens, (New) Jersey,” James said. “We gave out a message to those people.”

But the conditions were different, he said, in an area of Harlem where Operation Pressure Point II was conducted from March, 1984, through April 1985.

“We made 12,000 arrests up there, but we didn’t have the same impact,” James said, explaining that the drug buyers tended to be local and could walk two blocks outside the police zone to find their drugs. In addition, there was no gentrification to displace the “bad elements” once the massive police presence ended.

In New York, the strategy of flooding an area with uniformed officers ended when the nature of the drug problem changed in 1986 with the arrival of low-priced “crack” cocaine.

Police decided to put their drug-fighting resources instead into “T.N.T.,” Tactical Narcotics Teams, which are essentially undercover operations to make buys from, and arrest, pushers in selected violence-plagued neighborhoods.

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Allatore said officials here are under no illusion that police saturation can do much more than give a hard-hit community temporary relief.

“It will work for as long as they’re out there,” Allatore said, predicting that young drug “entrepreneurs” will “go underground or move their business elsewhere.”

Allatore also noted that the use of barricades is not new for Los Angeles police. Two years ago, he sponsored an ordinance that allowed police to barricade streets to cut down on a somewhat less serious problem--the heavy “cruising” of cars through certain neighborhoods.