Controversial Teen Post Chief Offers Safe Harbor

The Los Angeles police officers responding to a call of “shots fired” arrived at Frampton Avenue in Harbor City just in time to spot a line of teen-agers--dressed gang style in khaki pants and white T-shirts--hurrying into a drab yellow office building.

As Sgt. Danny Contreras told it later, he had no idea on that Saturday night that the building where the young men fled was the Harbor City Teen Post. So when the suspected gang members ignored orders to come outside, Contreras and two patrolmen drew their guns and prepared for a dangerous entry.

Slowly they pushed open the glass office door. Then, anxiety gave way to surprise.

Sure, there were the nine young Latinos they had been pursuing. But standing in their midst, in a room barely larger than a mini-van, was an unimposing middle-aged man with slumping shoulders, a slight paunch and a thinning flat-top haircut. This incongruous little man glared at the officers’ pistols and demanded: “Hey, could you storm troopers put those things away before somebody gets hurt?”

Jarring introductions are nothing new for John Northmore--Harbor City Teen Post director, veteran social worker and honorary godfather to Harbor Area teen-agers for nearly 30 years. Contreras, the new sergeant on the graveyard shift at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Harbor Division, said that when he returned to the station that night, he learned that he was not the first officer to find himself on the receiving end of an acerbic Northmore greeting.

“They told me (Northmore) walks a tightrope,” Contreras said later. “He tries to help the gang members from Harbor City and he tries to cooperate with the police. It seems that sometimes he helps them more than he helps us.”

Many in what Northmore calls the Harbor Area’s “Establishment”--police, school officials and other social workers--say that Northmore goes too far to gain acceptance in the barrio, coddling street thugs instead of pushing them to reform.

But the 50-year-old social worker also has a legion of supporters, including some police officers. And William Elkins, special assistant to Mayor Tom Bradley, describes Northmore and a handful of cohorts as heroes for continuing to help the denizens of some of the city’s meanest streets.

Elkins was director of the local Teen Post program in its glory days of the mid-1960s, when 150 Teen Posts were in the vanguard of the county’s War on Poverty and the flow of federal money seemed without end. But now, just six such youth service programs remain, and the directors often must use their own money to pay for supplies.

Through fat times and lean, Northmore has persevered, regularly working 70-hour weeks for an annual salary of $21,600. He has counseled, tutored, chauffeured and befriended hundreds of young people. His commitment has won him a place of respect among the mostly Latino residents he serves.

Incidents, such as the Saturday night “raid” by Sgt. Contreras, just add to the local Northmore lore, for friend and foe alike. The incident ended innocuously enough, when officers discovered that the reported gunshots were only firecrackers. All nine youths were questioned and released.

But Northmore was still a little irked last week, wondering why the officers didn’t just holster their guns and ask him to bring the teen-agers outside. “It is beyond belief they didn’t know this was a Teen Post,” he said.

But Teen Post or no, LAPD officials said Northmore had improperly told the officers that they could not pursue suspects into his office. “He seemed to think it was like holy ground in there,” said Harbor Division Capt. Joe DeLadurantey. “He tried to restrict our entrance to the Teen Post, and we had to tell him, ‘You don’t do that.’ ”

The principal combatants don’t seem to be harboring a grudge, though. Northmore mailed Contreras a copy of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and Contreras said he is enjoying the gift. “I should have read it a long time ago,” he said with a laugh. “I’m always open to suggestions.”

Those who work with young people in the Harbor Area are bound to run across Northmore sooner or later. When he is is not on the job inside the tiny Frampton Avenue cubicle, he often can be found cruising the streets around Harbor City’s Normont Terrace housing project in his 1976 Buick Skylark.

And he spends hours responding to telephone calls, day and night, whether he is at the Teen Post or at the Long Beach home he shares with his 87-year-old mother. Teen-agers and adults alike call--for a ride to the hospital, advice on dealing with the Immigration and Naturalization Service or maybe a small loan.

Northmore has been even busier than usual recently as a traditional gang rivalry in the South Bay has burst forth in a new round of violence. Four young men have been killed in at least two dozen drive-by shootings in Wilmington and Harbor City in the past two months, a level of violence even gang veteranos call the worst they have ever seen.

It was against that backdrop that on a Saturday evening last month, just after 8 p.m., the phone calls to Northmore really began to roll in. Caller after caller wanted Northmore to know that a team of LAPD officers had lined up young men on a street across from the Normont Terrace project.

The eight officers from LAPD’s Metro Division had been sent to the Harbor Area in an attempt to quell the series of drive-by shootings. The officers’ commander said later that more than a dozen gang members had congregated that night in front of a house owned by an older Harbor City man, who had sworn vengeance for the murder of his teen-age son.

When Northmore arrived, many of the youths were kneeling on the pavement with their hands behind their heads.

Northmore said the young men were mostly good kids who were being needlessly “jacked up” by police unfamiliar with the neighborhood. When one officer refused to give his name, Northmore recalled, he told the officers: “All you are is Chief (Daryl) Gates’ Gestapo. When you can’t find the right asses to kick, you decide that every black and brown male between 10 and 30 is a gang member.”

Police Capt. Patrick McKinley said Northmore was inflaming an already tense confrontation. When Northmore refused to back off, he was arrested for interfering with the police officer and carted off to jail. Released on $250 bail, he is due to appear in San Pedro Municipal Court on July 19.

“I feel they are my sons, my family; both gang kids and non-gang kids,” Northmore said, explaining his frequent run-ins with the authorities. “If I appear to be too close to the police, maybe the kids say, ‘John is a rata (fink)’. I am totally ineffective if they look at me as being a rubber stamp or a clone for the Establishment groups, whether it be the school, the police or whatever.”

At Narbonne High School in Lomita, Principal Pat Donahoe said Northmore undermines his own authority by cozying up to gang members.

According to Donahoe, the veteran social worker acts as an advocate even for the undeserving. The principal told of the time Northmore asked the school to pay for a science notebook for a teen-ager who claimed he could not afford one. Donahoe did a little checking and found that the boy regularly brought snacks to class that cost more than the book he said he could not afford.

“I would just like to see him tougher with them some of the time,” Donahoe said. “I think he backs them to the point he is actually doing a disservice in some cases.”

Northmore has fought the transfer of several of “his kids” out of Narbonne because he believed they would be in danger from rival gangs at other schools. Donahoe completed the transfers anyway, saying they were a last resort to get troublemakers off the Narbonne campus.

Northmore denied that he is too soft on gang members, saying he finds it more effective to save his harsh words for private times, rather than embarrassing young people in front of their peers.

DeLadurantey agrees that the social worker could use more discipline, but the LAPD captain also said, “Life would be more difficult if John Northmore were not in the community.”

DeLadurantey noted that, in Northmore’s seven years as Harbor City Teen Post director, he has driven dozens of clients to court and to meetings with their probation officers. Dozens more have turned themselves in on the social worker’s advice, and police officials said he was of similar assistance in earlier years, when he was regional director for 20 Teen Posts in the area.

If Northmore has developed a philosophy in working with teen-agers, it is: Keep them busy. Believing that boredom means trouble, Northmore keeps a drawer full of tickets to events of all kinds--Dodger games, boat shows, museums and amusement parks. He gets restaurants to donate meals, boat captains to offer fishing trips and airlines to give free excursions.

On Friday, he drove to San Francisco with three teen-age boys who had just graduated from Narbonne. Northmore used a letter-writing campaign to get a hotel, restaurants and tour operators to provide a free weekend for the boys to honor them for finishing high school.

“They were kids who didn’t get A’s, they just got by with Cs,” he said. “We had to go to summer school a couple of times, but they made it. They finally made it!”

The trip is important for Northmore too. He expects the trio to quickly get on with their own lives and, although they will return for visits, it is the last time they will be together like this, like father and sons.

Northmore knows that he lives in an era in which many frown on such a gentle approach with troubled teen-agers, favoring instead confrontational counseling and police sweeps.

Sometimes he feels like the last of a breed.

Yet despite that--and the high blood pressure and panic attacks that have led him to tranquilizers--he said he cannot imagine quitting.

“I don’t know what else I’d do,” Northmore said. The community “is kind of my family. I go to their weddings, I go to their baptisms. I go to their funerals.”

Many of the little ones call him “Grandpa.” And the Teen Post is still their refuge.

“It’s a place to come when you are bored, or if your parents are in a fight, you can come here,” a teen-ager named Miguel said last week. “He is with us in good times and bad.”