68 Arrested, 8 Hurt in New Year’s Gunfire : Shootings: Police say a public information campaign did cut down on the sometimes deadly tradition. But shots still rang out throughout the county.

Betty Green could scarcely believe her eyes and ears when she drove onto her street just after midnight Monday on her way home from a church meeting.

Dozens of men and women, Green’s neighbors, were standing in the street, shooting into the air and taking potshots at street lights, even blasting the limbs off magnolia trees lining West 53rd Street in South Los Angeles. Some of the revelers burned Christmas trees in the fog-shrouded road.

Green, 60, said she sat quaking in her parked car for 10 minutes, then sprinted into her house.

“Some guns went boom so loud the whole house vibrated,” Green recalled a few hours later. “I said, ‘This is too much.’ ”

It was a scene played out--albeit to a lesser degree, in most cases--in many parts of the county, as once again New Year’s in Los Angeles produced outbursts of random gunfire that could be heard from Watts to Beverly Hills. Celebrants, many of them tipsy, shot wildly skyward, into the ground and, occasionally, at each other.

Law enforcement campaigns to end the sometimes deadly tradition, coupled with threats of felony prosecution, apparently did curb the gunfire somewhat Sunday night and Monday morning and led to more arrests. Los Angeles police arrested 37 people on felony charges of discharging weapons in a reckless manner. The Sheriff’s Department arrested 31.

Countywide, at least eight people were injured in the gunfire, two by Los Angeles police officers who say the celebrants, taken by surprise, fired on them with a shotgun. Scores of weapons were confiscated throughout the county.

To curb the gunfire this year, LAPD Deputy Chief William Rathburn said, the department devised a plan that included the deployment of hundreds of officers in cars and on foot, especially in South Los Angeles and the Rampart and Hollenbeck divisions, where police say most of the shooting occurs.

During December, flyers discouraging New Year’s Eve shooting were distributed to schoolchildren and posted in businesses all over the city. The flyers included a telephone hot line that residents could use to identify shooters to police.

All through the day on New Year’s Eve, unprecedented numbers of officers were deployed in two of the city’s largest housing projects, Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs, and in nearby Imperial Courts. The amount of shooting in all three, particularly in the early evening, was significantly lower than last year, most officers interviewed said.

Police said some of the heaviest gunfire this year occurred in the southeast corner of the city. Heavy gunfire was also reported in the Wilshire area and in North Hollywood.

“From everything we can see,” the police media campaign “was largely successful,” Police Department spokesman Bill Frio said. “What we’d like is to have nobody shooting in the air. But it may take years before we can get everybody to stop.” As midnight approached, citizens--and even police officers--sought refuge from the falling lead by staying indoors or parking their vehicles in isolated areas and under freeway overpasses.

Bennie Townsend, 40, of Compton sat with a friend inside a car parked behind his newly painted blue Mack truck, beneath an overpass on Central Avenue in Watts at 11:30 p.m.

Last New Year’s Eve, Townsend said, the truck was hit near the engine and suffered $600 worth of damage. “I can’t see any bullets going through it again--not this year,” he said.

Not far away, in a truck terminal, officers sat in two cars that had been parked close to huge trailers. During the worst of the barrage, bullets could be heard zinging against the trailers and crashing through trees.

“I don’t think that’s good-natured celebrating,” mused Capt. Stephen Gates of the Southeast Division as someone repeatedly fired a semiautomatic weapon nearby. Seconds later, a bullet kicked up gravel a few feet away from the cars.

There were no reports of deaths anywhere in Los Angeles County. In the city of Los Angeles, there were no reports of injuries from errant bullets. One of the men shot by police, Thedeus Jenkins, 18, was hit in the buttocks with shotgun pellets. His companion, a 16-year-old whose name was not released, was hit by pellets in the face. Both were held on suspicion of assaulting a police officer.

The six injuries in areas under the sheriff’s jurisdiction included a 3-year-old girl who was hit in the leg as her father held her in his arms in the Florence area, and a pregnant woman who was grazed in the back as she was tending a back yard barbecue in the Willowbrook area. A Bellflower man was hit in the thigh and ankle by ricocheting bullets his neighbor had fired into the ground.

Most of the arrests in the city occurred Monday morning after citizens called police and reported that their neighbors had been shooting. Police and deputy district attorneys had set up a command post to prepare arrest warrants and process those hauled in.

On one street in South-Central Los Angeles on Monday morning, children ran through the block filling their pockets with spent shotgun and rifle shells. Nearby, a 19-year-old man who spoke on condition his name not be used boasted that he had fired a M-1 rifle and a .38-caliber pistol into the air and at street lights.

“If you’re not shooting a gun on New Year’s Eve, you shouldn’t be outside,” said the young man, standing beside a mound of spent shells and wine bottles swept up by neighbors. “Shooting up in the air? There’s nobody up there. Besides, by the time the bullets get up there, they’re not going to hurt anybody.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, say police officers, pointing out that what goes up must come down. At least five people in recent years have been killed by bullets that hit them on their way to the ground.

Officers say a bullet fired into the air can travel more than a mile and fall to the ground at nearly the same velocity it left the muzzle. That is more than enough speed to pierce a body, even a roof.

The LAPD’s Gates said that traditionally, the shooting is done by normally law-abiding people who have been drinking alcohol.