In This Part of Town, Predators Are Learning to Fear the Hawks

Suzanne England saw the two gang members closing in on her, one brandishing a knife and threatening rape, and she screamed for the police.

“Then I realized, ‘What am I doing?’ and shouted for the Hawks,” recalled England, a slender 5-footer who would have been no match for the youths even had they been unarmed.

The Hawks, as members of the Ivar Hawks Neighborhood Watch group are called, heard the call of their fellow member and bolted into action.

According to plan, some Hawks turned on house lights while others yelled for each other out their doors and windows. Still others sprinted outside and confronted the gang members, chasing them away long before the first police car could arrive.

After the incident three weeks ago, a shaken but unharmed England identified the assailants as being affiliated with a local Latino gang that had been brazenly terrorizing the Hollywood neighborhood for months. Police say they are investigating.

And so it is that another victory has been chalked up to the Hawks, a group that patrols from Cahuenga Boulevard to Vine Street, and from Yucca Street to Franklin Avenue, just below the Hollywood Freeway.

There are about 6,000 police-affiliated Neighborhood Watch groups throughout Los Angeles, many of whose members meet over coffee and cookies and peek through their windows looking for signs of trouble.

And then there are the Hawks, who spend hours out on patrol, guard street corners, question anyone who seems out of place--and make citizens’ arrests.

The Hawks and similar groups such as the Hollywood Beat Keepers and the Hollywood Sentinels are urban pioneers in a burgeoning movement in which residents have taken to restoring law and order in their crime- and drug-plagued neighborhoods, with great success and with the blessing of police.

Hawks go further than most, if not all; since they began last April, they say, they have made 16 citizens’ arrests and won convictions in every case. Neighborhood Watch groups making arrests “are few and far between,” according to Officer James Cypert of LAPD’s Crime Prevention Unit. He said he knows of only one other Neighborhood Watch group in the entire city that is as aggressive.

Since last year, Hawks have rid their neighborhood of nearly all the drug dealing, prostitution and other vice that had blighted it.

“These people are our eyes and ears on the streets,” Capt. Rick Batson, commander of LAPD’s Hollywood Division, said last week. “They create a presence in the neighborhood, and they prevent crime.”

As England recounted her misadventure at a meeting of the Hawks last week, Batson sat quietly across the room, listening. When asked what he thought about her faith in the Hawks over police, he was anything but defensive.

“We can’t get there nearly as fast as they can,” Batson admitted.

Batson said LAPD relies on such groups to maintain a presence in their neighborhoods, to deter crime and to defuse potentially violent situations until officers can get there. Many times, he said, Hawks have provided eyewitness accounts that allow police to make arrests that stand up in court and lead to convictions.

What’s more, Batson said, Hawks have shown a rare level of commitment by testifying in court in the cases, most of which were filed against drug dealers arrested by Hawks’ members in the first place.

Turning to the dozen or so Hawks at the meeting, who were readying themselves for another night of patrol, Batson said: “Whether you guys believe it or not, you have made a tremendous difference in your neighborhood. . . . We’re behind you all the way.”

Batson said he witnessed the genesis of the Neighborhood Watch concept while stationed in South-Central Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Since then, the number of such block clubs has grown tremendously, from 2,516 in 1984 to 4,823 in 1987 to about 6,000 today, statistics show.

But Batson said the Hollywood watch groups are different in that they are very visible and active, like modern-day militias that not only band together in a time of need, but also help unify neighbors into cohesive, sociable units.

England, a photographer, agrees, saying she spent years living on her street without ever having met more than a few neighbors. “If I had shouted for help that night,” she said, “and the Hawks weren’t around, I don’t think anyone would have come out.”

The three established Hollywood groups, and as many as nine others in their embryonic stages, have been so active and successful that they are regarded in police circles as a national model, Batson said.

“It is these people in Hollywood,” Batson said, “that have really taken off with the idea and made it work.”

The watch organizations are becoming so prevalent in the Hollywood area that an umbrella group, United Streets of Hollywood, was formed. It first met in September, 1989.

Laura Dodson, president of the umbrella group and founder of Beat Keepers, said the various watch groups are just now beginning to trade tactics and “testing which methods work better than others.” She said her group avoids citizens’ arrests, preferring just to maintain a visible presence.

Clay McBride, founder of the Hawks, says he and a few others started their group last April after seeing the success of the Sentinels and Beat Keepers, two larger groups that in 1988 began operating near De Longpre Park and North Argyle Street, respectively. Sentinels have been successful in cleaning up the park, and last month took part in a tree-planting ceremony aimed at creating a living symbol to their fight against drug dealers who once ruled their neighborhood.

Drug dealers at first were the impetus for the Hawks too, McBride said.

“It was kind of a common consensus” that something had to be done, McBride said. “We just had such a drug problem here, it was like valet parking,” with a line of cars extending around the block.

Currently, there are several dozen “hard-core” Hawk members, nearly all of them long-term renters that live on sloping Ivar Street.

There are homemakers, suit-and-tie types, bearded longhairs and ex-Marines in the ethnically diverse group. There is one martial-arts expert, McBride, who created the Hawk logo for the group’s T-shirts and buttons, and a store owner, John Lee, who provides coffee and snacks for members on patrol.

There is also Maria Bernardi, a 64-year-old former women’s world wrestling champion, and a ham radio operator, Jorge Villarreal, who provides a critical link to the dozens of gang-weary Latinos who live on the street and speak little English.

A night spent patrolling with the Hawks last week was uneventful, although members did succeed in driving two beer-guzzling adolescents away.

Most patrols are like that, “uneventful, and boring,” McBride said, which is just fine with the Hawks, who say they’d rather deter crime by their presence than jump into a potentially violent situation.

Police agree. “We don’t encourage citizens’ arrests. It takes a highly trained professional to go out into an arrest situation,” said Lori Blackwell, a police service representative in the Crime Prevention Unit.

Sometimes, as in England’s case, intervention is necessary. In another case three months ago, a shoplifter bolted out of Lee’s store and headed up Ivar Street with his loot. Lee cried “Hawks,” as members are instructed to do, and the suspect was gang-tackled before he got halfway up the hill.

“This guy could not believe what he got himself into,” member David Fitzgerald said. “He walked into a hornet’s nest” and was later arrested.

Fitzgerald and other members say they are careful, however, to weed out members looking for confrontation and violence, “those with a Charles Bronson/Rambo mentality.”

There have been acts of retaliation against the group for its actions, with several members having had their car windows shot out and threats made against them. The Hawk insignia, posted above a street corner store, was recently firebombed.

There is always a potential for danger, and members said there is always fear lurking somewhere in the back of their minds. McBride recently had his face bloodied after coming to the aid of a neighbor being harassed by six gang members.

Police say one of their biggest concerns is keeping the Neighborhood Watch groups intact after an initial crime wave dissipates. Hawks appear to have enough enthusiasm and camaraderie to last for years.

Nina Greenberg, a field deputy for Councilman Michael Woo, said the neighborhood groups are making a big difference in Hollywood, not only in controlling crime but by providing a feeling of community.

Sentinels and Beat Keepers sponsor Boy and Girl Scout programs, camping trips and art programs that will help keep youngsters away from drugs and gang activity, Greenberg said. And Hawks are trying to organize a community association that will monitor such issues as residential parking and earthquake preparedness.

“How Neighborhood Watch is changing is that these groups are really going back to that old-fashioned sense of community and family, of what a neighborhood is all about,” Greenberg said.