Police Honor 9 Officers in Foothill Narcotics Unit

A group of northeast San Fernando Valley narcotics officers, honored Thursday at an awards ceremony, said they oppose using barricades to curtail drive-by narcotics traffic, as is being done in Sepulveda.

“There will never be a need to put up barricades to keep out drug dealers in Pacoima and other areas of the Foothill Division,” Sgt. Cary Krebs said. “We have found we can rid the neighborhoods of drug dealers by being out there day and night busting people.”

Krebs heads a narcotics unit composed of nine officers who Thursday were awarded medals by Police Chief Daryl F. Gates during the Los Angeles Police Department’s 11th annual Recognition Day ceremony in Studio City.

They were among 105 police officers and civilian employees honored for bravery in acts ranging from battling drug traffic to calming a suicidal woman to attempting to save a drowning woman who had driven a Jaguar car into her Brentwood swimming pool.

Krebs’ unit, the only one of its kind in the city composed of patrol officers instead of detectives, has arrested nearly 1,000 dealers since its inception almost two years ago.

“We don’t need barricades,” said Mike Cherry, one of the officers in the Foothill narcotics unit. “If Van Nuys and Devonshire did what we did, we’d all drive drug dealers out of the Valley.”

It was police officers from the Devonshire Division who proposed in November setting up roadblocks around a 30-square-block area in Sepulveda. The barricades were erected late last year with the support of the Los Angeles City Council, which voted to keep them up as long as police deem necessary.

At the time, Devonshire Police Capt. Mark D. Stevens said the barricades were necessary because traditional police methods, such as foot patrols, had failed to stem the tide of drive-by drug traffic.

The barricade concept--believed to be the first such effort on a large scale in the country--has not prompted any organized opposition in Sepulveda.

Police credit the roadblocks with dramatically reducing crime and have used them in parts of South-Central, Koreatown and Pico-Union as well.

But Krebs said Thursday that the “supermarket atmosphere” in which drugs are openly sold in some areas of the city can be eliminated by assigning undercover officers to arrest drug dealers.

Not all the awards went to officers fighting drug traffic.

Sgt. Jim Staugaard and management analyst Karen Frick of the North Hollywood Division were recognized for hiring a homeless man as a Police Department janitor and loaning him money to buy food.

Roosevelt Weeks, the man they helped, said he feels fortunate to earn $351 a week in take-home pay as a department custodian. “I had 42 cents and no place to sleep when they helped me,” he said.

Twenty-seven officers received medals for acts of bravery and service. Officer Karen L. Kubly, the only woman to receive a medal for bravery, had used Spanish she had learned in the Police Academy to calm a 67-year-old intoxicated woman until her partners could grab the woman from the edge of a Hollywood apartment roof.

And Officer John Lopata was honored for diving into a Brentwood swimming pool to rescue an 81-year-old woman whose blue Jaguar had sunk to the bottom. The woman died despite Lopata’s efforts.

“To me, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary,” said Lopata, who moved to Los Angeles from Chicago in 1970. “I didn’t even tell my wife about it.”