Three Square Miles

It’s like this in the City of Angels. A young couple are kidnaped from a drive-in movie. She’s raped and murdered; he’s beaten senseless.

And it’s like this in the City of Angels. A 15-year-old boy, looking for a haven in a video game store, is shot to death by two other kids, ages 14 and 16.

And it’s like this in the City of Angels. A girl, just 16, is gunned down at a birthday party by gang bangers looking for trouble.

A guy with a knife goes crazy in a shopping mall. A nut starts shooting into a crowd of Christmas shoppers.

Six killings in one weekend, 18 in another. A pregnant teen-ager shot in the abdomen. A passer-by paralyzed by a stray bullet.

“Even animals don’t kill like this,” a priest says.

He’s talking about the young woman kidnaped from the drive-in, but he could be talking about any of the murders that have turned a funky, laid-back city into a killing field.

What’s going on here? What’s happening?

You get all kinds of answers. The easy accessibility of drugs and guns, economic deprivation, an exploding minority population seeking turf, a growing disrespect for law, a faltering belief in God, a high divorce rate.

And maybe it’s this too, a colleague said. L.A. is a town without community. It’s too big, too sprawling, too out of control.

“You ought to go to Sierra Madre,” he said. “Now there’s a community.”

“The character of the people make a difference,” Irvin Betts was saying. “We’re from a different time and a different place.”

Betts is the police chief in Sierra Madre. We were in his office in a vine-covered, adobe brick building that looks more cottage than cop house.

I came to him first because a check of old clips told me Sierra Madre had the lowest crime rate last year of any city in L.A. County.

There were only two murders there in 1988. By contrast, there were 736 in Los Angeles.

“The people are involved in this city,” Betts said. “When they see something going on that shouldn’t be going on, they don’t mind speaking up.”

Betts is a balding, white-haired man with a grandfatherly manner that belies the Idaho steel running through him.

“We’re working hard to keep our little town an island of serenity in a sea of chaos,” he said, smiling slightly at his own metaphor. “Every council meeting is heavily attended and it seems almost everyone is on an ad hoc committee of some kind or another.”

Betts isn’t certain other places would tolerate what the police do to keep Sierra Madre safe, like stopping people for no reason and asking them where they live and what they’re doing.

“We get criticized for that sometimes,” he said, shrugging almost unconsciously, “but most of the time it’s ‘Thanks for checking, neighbor.’

“We have the same reaction to graffiti in Sierra Madre that L.A. has to a drive-by shooting. What the community will tolerate is what you’ll have.”

Sierra Madre has a population of 12,000 people living in three square miles at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.

There is a kind of Norman Rockwell quality to the place, a sweetness that belongs to that other time and other place Betts was talking about.

Even scarred by fire that took out a chunk of its shopping district, there is serenity to life along the quiet boulevard and on the flower-adorned, tree-shaded side streets.

I saw a man get out of his car to help a blind girl cross the street. A kid ran to the rescue of an old woman with three dogs who had gotten herself entangled in their leashes and was about to be jerked to the ground.

I saw an old man pedaling his bicycle slowly down Baldwin Avenue, and I saw a child picking a bouquet of toyon berries that cascaded over a wooden fence.

I’m told people stroll the streets after dark in Sierra Madre and walk home from the movie theater without fear of getting caught in the cross-fire of a gang war.

I thought about that as I drove through town. I thought about community and I thought about Chief Betts’ parting words. “The police aren’t going to save L.A.,” he said. “What’s going to save L.A. is the people wanting their neighborhoods back.”

I sense that happening sometimes. Those candlelight parades and gatherings of adults on street corners taking license numbers, scaring the dealers away. But the displays of bravado are here and gone like spring rain, and the dealers are back, doing business as usual.

We’ll never be a Sierra Madre. We’re too big. But we could be something better than we are. One thing’s for damned sure. We’re not a city of angels anymore.