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Police Push to Take Back Streets From Drug Sellers

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

From her Harbor City apartment, Alice can see for miles. Her view includes the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro and the twinkling lights of the Unocal Refinery in Wilmington.

Closer to home, the sights are far less appealing--graffiti on the sidewalk; drug dealers in the street, flagging down cars and passing out crack cocaine like candy; gang shootings; children, some as young as 8, handcuffed and carted off in police cruisers.

But Alice doesn’t want to talk about what she sees. Nor does she, like most who live near the intersection of 252nd Street and Marigold Avenue, want to give her last name.

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“I can’t tell you,” she said. “I live by myself. I have to think of my life.”

The Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division says the corner of 252nd and Marigold, and the blocks that surround it, make up the busiest--and most dangerous--drug-dealing area in the Harbor Division, and one of the busiest in the city. Since the beginning of the year, 205 narcotics arrests have been made at 252nd and Marigold alone. A recent sting operation in the neighborhood, in which police posed as drug dealers and buyers, netted 54 arrests in four hours.

“It’s a cesspool,” said Capt. Joseph De Ladurantey, the division’s commanding officer.

So last week, the police tried to turn the tide. For four nights, half a dozen officers barricaded a four-block area and stopped every car that came into the neighborhood--not to make arrests but to give residents like Alice some peace.

“We’re not here to take people to jail,” said Don Linfield, the officer in charge of the operation. “We’re here as a suppression effort. We’re just making our presence known, to let these people (gangs and drug dealers) know they don’t own the streets anymore.”

The blockade was the first step in what De Ladurantey said will be a months-long effort to restore order to the community, “to take back the sidewalks and the streets and give them back” to law-abiding residents.

He acknowledges that it will not be an easy task. The dealers have a tight hold on the Marigold Avenue neighborhood--so tight, police say, that dealers have ordered residents to lock their dogs indoors at night so they can skip through the back yards and alleys to avoid getting caught. And the fearful residents have complied.

One resident, who gave his name only as Nelson, said drug dealers used to hide their guns under his car and threatened to burn his house down if he or his family gave them any trouble. Gunfire, he said, is common

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“You hear gunshots; it’s like being on a farm, you hear chickens,” he said.

De Ladurantey expects it to take months of intermittent police crackdowns for residents to feel comfortable enough to walk outside at night.

The neighborhood blockade was similar to a recent crackdown in the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles, although tiny in comparison.

In the Pico-Union blockade, up to 160 officers barricaded a square-mile area. They posted 20 barriers with large signs reading “Narcotics Enforcement Zone, Residents Only.” Some residents reported that drug dealing declined in the area but picked up in outlying blocks.

In the Harbor City crackdown, police used sawhorse barriers and yellow police tape--but no signs--to block off the junctions of 252nd and Normandie Avenue and 252nd and Petroleum Avenue.

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