LAPD’s Foray Against Drugs Gets Mixed Welcome, Including an Anti-Police Song

It was moments into the Los Angeles Police Department’s latest anti-drug offensive in the neighborhood around 8th Street and Normandie Avenue--the barricading of intersections in the drug-plagued area--and already some residents had struck up Tuesday what one dubbed the “welcome wagon” band.

While the driving bass line from an anti-police rap song echoed from a sound system in a graffiti-scarred Normandie Avenue apartment house, and some residents sang along, City Councilman Nate Holden and a handful of plain-clothes officers stood across the street and waxed optimistic as the latest attempt to wrest the neighborhood from the grip of drug traffickers and gang members got under way.

The three-week pilot program--similar to recent operations in the Pico-Union area and San Fernando Valley neighborhoods late last year--will involve officers on foot and in patrol cars from the Wilshire Division station. They will concentrate on the barricaded, six-block area bounded by 7th, 9th and Irolo streets and Mariposa Avenue.

“I think most of the residents here are supportive of us and of this program,” said Police Capt. John Murtz, the song in the background making for an ironic sound track to his address. “From the evidence we’ve seen, we’ll be successful in keeping out graffiti and people who don’t belong in this area.”

Holden and Murtz, who called the neighborhood “the No. 1 area for street narcotics” in the Wilshire Division, said uniformed and plainclothes officers will patrol the area from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m. the next morning in an effort to scare off the traffickers.

“The criminal element thinks they are in control here,” said Holden, the 10th District councilman who represents the area. “We want to show them that they are not.”

But some residents, fearing that their neighborhood would be transformed into a police state, questioned the city’s motives.

“We don’t want them confusing (innocent people) with the drug dealers or the gang bangers,” said Frank Donis, 17, the disc jockey spinning the thunderous rap song that blared from his apartment. “They’ll do that. They’ll stop us in the street, or coming home, and say, ‘Where are the drugs?’ ”

Other residents looked forward to the imminent crackdown.

“It’s like the drug dealers have built up goodwill with the users,” said Lance Robbins, who owns one building in the neighborhood and manages two others. “We hope the police can break that goodwill.