Policing the Sounds of Silence : Redondo Beach Takes Loud Car Speakers

Tom Leetch, 19, was doing as teen-agers do, cruising along the Esplanade in Redondo Beach on Saturday night, swaying to tunes that blared from the three-foot-long speakers he had installed in the back seat of his Thunderbird.

All of a sudden, the lights and siren of a traffic cop ruined his party.

Leetch left Redondo Beach with a traffic citation that could cost him up to $150. He also left without the key components of his mobile music machine.

In a crackdown on teen-age revelry on the beachfront street Saturday night, Redondo Beach traffic officers began addressing the noise problem closer to its source by removing the high-tech speakers from offenders’ vehicles and seizing them as evidence.

In Leetch’s case, the explanation from the officer was simple: “You are not permitted to have those things cranked up. . . . Because you do, I’m taking them from you.”

The crowds attracted to the Esplanade, a four-lane thoroughfare that dead-ends at the sea, has been a thrumming source of annoyance for years, residents of the strip say.

At sunset on warm evenings, the asphalt is clogged with high-performance motorcycles, late-model pickups and souped-up cars. As the teen-agers cruise back and forth and back and forth, the only thing louder than the revving engines is the pounding of their stereos.

“It’s gotten so you can hear the cars coming, not by the sound of the motor but the sound of the bass,” said Scott Lee, the bar manager at Millie Riera’s Seafood Grotto on the Esplanade.

Added Don Tallman, who lives in the street’s 1400 block, “The people here are ready to revolt. The stereos sound like a bunch of mini-explosions. All you hear is boom, boom, BOOM, BOOM and bub-boom, boom, BOOM, BOOM! We can’t entertain because they drown out our dinner conversations.”

On a recent Friday, Tallman said, “We couldn’t even hear our TV.”

Last Tuesday, Tallman led a delegation of frazzled residents before the Redondo Beach City Council. The council responded to their complaints by authorizing the crackdown that began Saturday night.

City traffic officers have tried in the past to keep the boom-box volume down by citing drivers under a new provision of the state vehicle code making any amplified sound that can be heard more than 50 feet from a vehicle a moving violation, said Traffic Lt. Ken Kauffman. But it hasn’t worked.

“We advised, we warned, we issued tickets and we got no compliance,” Kauffman said. “We had to come up with some way to make an impact.”

Saturday night, they did.

After pulling over the violators and issuing citations as in the past, police sprang their surprise, confiscating speakers from half a dozen drivers. The drivers had the option of removing the units themselves or allowing two eager police cadets armed with screwdrivers, wire cutters and wrenches to have the honor.

Once removed, the speakers were hauled into the back of a pickup truck and taken to Redondo Beach police headquarters. The speakers will remain at the department until violators show proof that they paid their fines.

The crackdown is set to continue for several weeks, and police officials say it may extend through the summer if the volume on the Esplanade is not turned down.

“As the school year comes to an end, students start to get that party mentality,” said Lt. Jeffrey Cameron, one of those assigned to the crackdown. “If there isn’t some party at someone’s house to go to, they create a party on the road.”

Traffic officer Kauffman said the idea of confiscating speakers was passed along to his department by police in the San Diego suburb of National City, who developed the tactic two years ago in an attempt to cut down noise along a local boulevard that has attracted youthful cruisers for generations.

“It’s worked well,” said Capt. Tom Deese of the National City police. “We have very few repeat offenders.”

If a violator is caught twice, the police petition the court to have the speakers deemed a public nuisance and destroyed. The seizures have been upheld by judges in San Diego County, although Redondo Beach police said they expect local challenges to their new policy.

In National City, the department initially was flooded with speakers, Deese said.

“When we first started the program, we had speakers everywhere,” he said. “We had speakers in the hallway. We had holding cells we couldn’t use because they were filled with speakers. We had people writing reports on top of speakers because there were speakers covering the tops of their desks.”

Since then, however, the department has gotten a handle on the situation and has earmarked a single holding area to accommodate the evidence.

Not surprisingly, the teen-agers who were forced to drive home in silence from Redondo Beach Saturday night grumbled about what they considered police harassment.

“This is stupid, man,” said Leetch, a visitor from Chicago who heard from friends that the Esplanade was the place to go. “It’s totally unreal. It’s not like it was so loud that I couldn’t hear an ambulance.

“I didn’t come down here for a big hassle. I’ve probably got the cheapest stereo on the road and I’m getting hassled for it. Some people have 400 watts. I have 45.”

Officers agreed that Leetch’s unit was tame compared to others they encountered.

Tro Demirigian, pulled over for driving a pickup truck that was too low to the ground, had coffin-sized speakers tucked into the back of his truck. They were not connected, however, so the 19-year-old from Torrance was able to take his $5,000 sound system home.

Demirigian said he recently disconnected the 800-watt speakers after receiving noise citations from police officers in Hollywood, Torrance and Redondo Beach. He still has a reminder of his noisier days, though. Demirigian’s license plate reads: HEER ME2.