Many Laud Police for Drug Raid on Dalton Ave. : Law enforcement: Despite political and legal repercussions, residents say tranquility has returned to the neighborhood in the two years since officers struck at cocaine dealing and gang activity.

The Los Angeles Police Department squad car eased to a halt a few yards beyond the apartment house at 39th Street and Dalton Avenue, where Francisco DeLeon, his brother and a group of friends were struggling to move an old cedar dresser into the building.

The two officers gazed out the window, exchanged a few words between themselves, grinned and then continued down the block. DeLeon looked puzzled.

“I don’t know anything about this place,” he said when asked whether he knows the history of his new, two-story apartment building. “It’s just another neighborhood to me.”

To others, the corner of 39th and Dalton represents far more.

Two years ago, it was the site of a sensational raid by the Police Department that, in the eyes of many, has come to symbolize law enforcement excesses in the escalating war on drugs.

More than 30 officers were disciplined for smashing furniture, breaking windows and scrawling such slogans as “LAPD Rules” on walls. Four officers are scheduled to go on trial next month on criminal vandalism charges. The case has touched off a feud between Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

In the 3900 block of Dalton, a stretch dominated by single-family homes, most residents say they are glad police raided the two apartment buildings at the end of the street, where unsavory types once congregated.

Although the raids may still be whipping up a political maelstrom in City Hall, residents say that peace has been restored to their neighborhood, once polluted by drugs and gang activity.

“It’s a lot quieter now,” said Tim Mitchell, 19, leaning against the stairway railing on his front porch, a few doors from the raid sites. “Before, there was a lot of traffic. You could hear gunshots and the car tires peeling after a drive-by.”

Signs of the neighborhood’s resurgent tranquility and sense of community are everywhere, from the small children in neon T-shirts roller-skating past towering palms to the mothers and grandmothers trading gossip on porches overlooking manicured front lawns.

Standing outside his home, Dalton resident Brad Smith surveyed all this while his Rottweiler puppy, King Tut, rooted around a neighbor’s yard.

“There were a lot of drugs being sold (on the corner of 39th and Dalton),” Smith said. “I would drive by and people would flag me down. They would even offer my mother drugs.”

As conditions improved and new tenants moved into the repaired units, Smith said, interest in the August, 1988, raid all but disappeared.

“We read the papers, and everybody talked about what happened for a while, but then people quit paying it any mind,” said Smith, 27, a chunky man with close-cropped hair and a gold earring. “It’s faded. People just went back to doing what they were doing.”

Dalton resident Carolyn Williams said that violence had become so routine that she developed agoraphobia--a fear of open spaces. Even now, Williams said, she finds it difficult to venture outside her pink condominium across from the Dalton apartments.

“One night,” she recalled, “they shot through my window, like, eight times. I was so afraid I didn’t know what to do. I just had a nervous breakdown.”

A soft-spoken woman with pleading eyes and a slightly matted jheri curl, Williams said she is finally recovering, but a backfiring car can still send her scurrying for cover.

Like many Dalton residents, Williams quietly cheered the police raid. Never mind the civil liberties talk, Williams said, she stands by the officers.

“They weren’t at fault at all,” she said.

Farther up the street, in a sun-weathered clapboard house, a 72-year-old grandmother insisted that she prayed the police onto Dalton Avenue.

“Every night, I asked God to save the people living in those apartments,” she said. “I said, ‘Lord, if you can’t save them, then get them off this street.’

“Now, I thought it was awful the way the raid was done,” she said. “I didn’t want them to do any damage to the apartments. I just wanted them to get the dope and the drug dealers away from here.”

In the raid’s aftermath, police said they netted 20 rocks of crack cocaine, a small amount of marijuana and a rifle. One person was arrested on suspicion of possessing cocaine and seven others on suspicion of conspiring to sell it.

For outraged community activists, the trauma to Dalton residents and the damage to their apartments--so severe that Red Cross officials provided disaster relief--far outweighed the officers’ catch. The activists demanded a police investigation, which resulted in 38 officers being disciplined for damaging property and lying to investigators.

Of the four officers charged with criminal vandalism, two are supervisors and could face jail and fines.

James Moore, unlike most of the neighborhood’s residents, wants to see them all convicted.

“My sisters were some of the people they took into custody,” Moore said. “They were living in the apartments they raided. The cops were wrong. They didn’t have any right to do what they did to those apartments.”

Moore said his sisters were among 55 neighborhood residents who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Police Department and won $3 million in an out-of-court settlement.

Moore and his family blame racism for the raid.

For all their indignation, Moore’s relatives conceded that they have been paying little attention to the continuing political and legal fallout from the raids.

They are not alone.

“It was so long ago, and now nothing seems to really be happening,” said a woman who asked to remain unnamed. In August, she and her seven sons moved into an upstairs flat in one of the buildings that police raided.

Soon after, people would come by asking to buy drugs.

“They left after we told them that this wasn’t the same place any more,” she said.