Operation MacArthur : Police Announce Strategy to Retake Crime-Plagued Park

Los Angeles police on Thursday announced their largest operation in recent years in crime-plagued MacArthur Park. Nearly 80 officers moved in to try to ferret out both drug users and a small army of illegal street vendors.

During the planned monthlong operation, officers will man an around-the-clock mobile command post set up on a patch of dirt at the southern edge of the park and its picturesque lake.

Police, including some on horseback, will also patrol the alleys and streets in a four-block area around the Westlake-area park to keep the drug sellers and users from re-establishing their activities nearby.

“We have to reclaim this area street by street, alley by alley,” said Lt. Mike Schaffer of the Police Department’s Rampart Division. “We’ve allowed so many (drug users) to get into this area, it’s going to take a long time to clean out.”

The scope of the operation underscores the frustrations of police, who have been unable to clear the park of crack cocaine users despite a series of sweeps and stepped-up patrols over the last several years. Although arrests in the city’s most crime-ridden park have increased 43% this year, the number of crimes there has increased 24%, police said.

“We can’t allow the good residents of this area to be pushed out and frightened,” Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said at a press conference Thursday at the command post, a police van outfitted with communications equipment. “We’re here. And we’re going to continue to be here.”

The park, which is divided by Wilshire Boulevard, is in the heart of Southern California’s 500,000-strong Central-American immigrant community and one of Los Angeles’ busiest commercial districts. On weekend afternoons, sidewalks along the park’s eastern edge on Alvarado Street are crowded with pedestrians.

Police say they are also targeting the illegal vendors, mostly immigrant women, because they block the sidewalks around the park and sometimes act as lookouts for drug dealers, a charge advocates for the vendors deny.

The crackdown on the vendors created chaos this week as the women scrambled to pack up their wares of roach poison, fresh mangoes, sandwiches and other items as teams of police officers and county health inspectors arrived to issue citations and make arrests.

Even as Thursday’s press conference was under way, a group of four men and women furtively sold Mexican-manufactured cigarettes and insecticides across the street, only a few feet from the busy intersection of 7th and Alvarado streets.

“I’m just trying to earn enough for my tortillas,” said Julian Argueta, 43, who kept his supply of cigarettes in a black plastic trash bag, ready to run if police appeared. “Why are the police doing this?” he asked. “I only want to work. . . . I have a wife, and rent to pay.”

Argueta was selling cigarettes for $1.25, making about 25 cents profit per pack. He said he usually clears $8 to $15 a day.

Police said they notified street vendors of the impending crackdown by passing out flyers. After word of the police action spread among the vendors earlier this week, a group of nearly 100 met with City Councilwoman Gloria Molina at her City Hall office on Tuesday. Molina said she told the vendors they would simply have to find someplace else to sell their wares.

“At one time, we wanted to be sympathetic to their needs, but it’s gotten out of hand,” Molina said. “They are now part of what constitutes the problem. . . . The taco trucks and the vendors, they bring all the density of people into this area.”

Except for a handful of inconspicuous vendors on 7th Street, the park seemed to be clear Thursday of most of the dozens of vendors who usually work the area. Also absent were the groups of haggard-looking crack users, who on most days populate the benches at the park’s southeastern corner, smoking their cocaine pipes in broad daylight.

Reveling in the unusual quiet, Victoria Ortiz, a 60-year-old Salvadoran immigrant, prepared to take a stroll around the park’s lake with her three grandchildren.

“Look, the park is clean,” she said. “It’s been months since I’ve been here. I’m usually afraid of this place.”

Some merchants along 7th Street said they were especially pleased by the removal of the illegal vendors.

“It’s fantastic. I hope (the police) stay for a long time,” said Artemio Dominguez, owner of Angela’s Market. “It hurts my business to have all of these vendors selling tacos, soft-boiled eggs, tamales.”

Like many other merchants, Dominguez associates the street vendors with drug use and street crime.

“People don’t come here because the criminals rip off their necklaces and purses,” he said.

Some immigrant advocates were critical of the crackdown, however.

“They’re not going to go back to where they came from,” Linda Mitchell of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights of Los Angeles said of the vendors. “The only thing they’re going to do with more enforcement is cause more suffering.”