Little Support for Gates’ Comment : Drugs: Police chief’s statement that casual users should be shot draws much criticism in crime-ridden Rampart section of Los Angeles.

Flavia Lopez and Maria Castillo, two Roman Catholic nuns at Our Lady of Loretto parish, were praying Thursday for the soul of Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Although their turn-of-the-century church and school sits in a high-crime zone, with drug addicts and dope dealers sharing the sidewalks with schoolchildren, the sisters were distressed by Gates’ highly publicized comment that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.”

“It’s terrible for him to say that,” protested Sister Castillo.

“It’s un-Christian!” Added Sister Lopez: “Only God can take life from us. Not anybody else. Not Chief Gates. The police should respect life.”

Sitting just west of downtown, the city’s Rampart district is home to an open-all-hours drug trade surrounding MacArthur Park. It is the scene of drive-by shootings and Latino, Filipino and Korean gang warfare, a neighborhood where law-abiding citizens like Sisters Lopez and Castillo have learned to live with crime all around them.

In short, it would seem to be a place where Gates’ provocative suggestion, made in testimony Wednesday before a U.S. Senate panel in Washington, might be expected to find a sympathetic audience. It did not.

The day after Gates’ statement found many people who live and work in Rampart--some of them even police officers--in disagreement with the chief. In interviews, they expressed outrage, anger and fear that the city’s top law enforcement officer would want to hurt--rather than help--people who smoke marijuana and commit other so-called victimless crimes.

Indeed, of about 20 people contacted at a college campus, a Braille institute, a video arcade, outside the shops along bustling Vermont Avenue, and at the Catholic church-school complex on Union Avenue, only one--a pool hall manager--supported in any way Gates’ remark that casual drug users be executed.

Even Gates’ lone supporter attached qualifications. The pool hall manager, who identified himself only as Nham D., did say that hard-core drug dealers should be shot on the spot, but added that recreational pot smokers should be spared the firing squad.

“If it’s a serious drug dealer, why not?” he asked.

In running the Vermont Billiards this summer, the 24-year-old South Vietnamese immigrant described the frustrations of keeping the drug market out of his 20-table pool room.

“If it’s a heavy user, just shoot him,” he said. “And shoot to kill.”

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the first anniversary of the Bush Administration’s war on drugs, the police chief said his harsh statements were targeted at those “who blast some pot on a casual basis,” rather than heavy, needle-in-the-arm heroin junkies.

In an interview outside the committee hearing, he said “‘we’re in a war” and even casual drug use “is treason.”

Starsky Hovsepian, who has run the College Arcade on Vermont for 10 years, said it is treasonous to suggest that weekend pot smokers be put to death.

“A kid uses a little, so you kill the kid?” Hovsepian asked. “If somebody walks against a red light, do you kill him too?

“What about the Constitution? What about constitutional rights?”

Roger Martin once managed a hotel near MacArthur Park, where the drug dealers were so persistent that they broke the hotel windows, climbed fire escapes and scaled the building--anything to get inside to sell their wares. “It got so bad,” Martin said, “I had to have an Uzi in the office.”

He said his cousin was stabbed to death by a drug dealer on Labor Day last year. He said police cars cruise by every day, but the officers seldom get out and deal with the problems. “They’re only sightseeing,” he said.

What they should be doing, Martin insisted, is arresting the drug dealers. Stop the big-time supplier, he said. “You do away with the heavy dealers, and that’s when the casual users will stop, too,” he said.

At Los Angeles City College, Oyegeko Ottoman, 34, a second-year electronics student, said he experimented with marijuana in his younger days. Today he sports dreadlocks and wears rainbow-colored slacks, and he said he shuns drugs.

And his sentiments about chief Gates echoed those of the two nuns from the Our Lady of Loretto school.

“Gates shouldn’t play God,” he said. “He didn’t make man. So he shouldn’t kill man. I say love and peace.”

Even at the Rampart Division police station, where beat cops battle daily with the impact of drugs and the endless calls for service at burglaries, street robberies and auto thefts, officers seemed hesitant, flabbergasted and, in some cases, downright unwilling to back up their chief.

“That’s a pretty strong statement he made, but it’s only his point of view,” said Officer Rene Silva. “It’s not mine.” Silva was raised in Rampart. He remembers a time when he rode his bicycle through the neighborhood on his way to play at MacArthur Park.

He said he has worked as a police officer in Rampart for 22 years. And today he would not even consider riding a bike through this part of town.

Still, he is opposed to trying to end drug abuse by killing those who abuse drugs the least.

“This is a drug war we’re in here,” he said. “Oh yes. And sometimes it seems like what we’re doing to combat it is just like shoveling sand into the ocean.

“But the chief, he’s speaking out of desperation. Drug users ought to be dealt with, and severely, but I don’t think that far.”

Standing at the police station counter next to Silva was Paul Malevitz. In his regular, 9-to-5 job, he works as a high school teacher, and he is well aware of how some troubled youths stumble onto and experiment with drugs, like marijuana and speed.

But Malevitz also moonlights as an LAPD reserve officer, and here he has witnessed firsthand how even casual drug use, by increasing the demand for more drugs, can fuel the crime wave. He believes Gates must have been merely thinking out loud when he testified at the congressional hearing.

“It’s like if a little boy had a birthday wish,” Malevitz explained. “It’s like the boy wished that all the bad people would go away.”

The view from Rampart on Thursday was that things aren’t that simple.