Police and Health Inspectors Put Heat on Ice Cream Vendors

To many observers, the scene outside Montague Street School on Tuesday afternoon would have been classic Americana: Laughing children gathered around a white ice cream truck buying Popsicles, candy and gum with their milk money.

But where some might see a Norman Rockwell idyll, others saw a safety and health hazard; two Los Angeles children have been killed in the past month while darting across the street to reach ice cream trucks.

And so police and eight county health inspectors fanned out Tuesday to eight East Valley schools in an action police dubbed “Operation Meltdown”--a crackdown on ice cream vendors.

Authorities inspected 25 trucks at the eight schools. Sixteen drivers were cited for traffic or vehicle code violations, such as parking illegally, or failing to carry a drivers license or vehicle insurance. Nineteen of the trucks had no county Health Department permit, nine were dirty and three were selling illegal unpackaged food.

Los Angeles Police Sgt. Dennis Zine said the action was designed to raise awareness among ice cream vendors of the laws that govern their operations.

At Telfair Avenue School, Spanish-speaking children, usually customers, turned into translators as police talked to two confused vendors who did not speak English.

Health inspector Reid Davidson later gave both trucks a clean bill of health. He said the food on such trucks rarely poses a health hazard.

“I don’t remember one case of food poisoning from ice cream trucks in 20 years at the Health Department,” he said. “There is not that much that can really go wrong except the ice cream would melt and then they wouldn’t have a saleable product.”

When officers arrived in the neighborhood of the Montague Avenue School, they cited Francisco Aguilar Merlos for parking his truck less than 100 feet from an intersection and for failing to carry insurance or an operating permit.

As children groaned that there would be no ice cream today, Merlos wept in his clean truck at what he said was the latest obstacle to earning money for his wife, three sons and parents in El Salvador.

Merlos said he earns only from $15 to $20 a day selling goodies to children, but has been forced to pay Latino gang members money to “protect” his truck.

He appeared devastated that he was now also in trouble with the law.

“Why is this happening? It is so unjust. I am trying to work, to eat,” Merlos said, alternating between rapidly spoken Spanish and heavily accented English.

He banged his head against the steering wheel in frustration. “I am going back to my country. I don’t like it here any more.”