Wheels of Justice : Police on Bikes Fight Crime at Housing Projects

Residents of Aliso Village say the cops who patrol their city-run housing project are on a roll.

Drug peddlers are being pursued by bike pedalers across playgrounds, beneath clotheslines and up sidewalk steps at the city-run housing project southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

Housing Authority police are riding $900 mountain bikes that can be maneuvered across courtyards and between apartments so quickly and quietly that they have been dubbed “stealth fighters” by residents.

“Instead of car chases, we have bicycle chases now,” said Breavon McDuffie, president of the 590-family Pico-Aliso residents advisory council. “The kids selling drugs are on bikes these days, so the police should be (on bikes) too.”

Suspected lawbreakers have a tough time keeping an eye out for the cycle cops.

“It’s not fair,” complained a 17-year-old after the Housing Authority bike police crept up and cornered him and several buddies loitering the other day in a carport next to the Santa Ana Freeway.

Since the first of the year, the dozen-member bike squad has been assigned to low-income housing complexes in eastern Los Angeles, Watts and the harbor area.

Since then, reports of violent crimes and felonies have decreased in those areas by about 23%, according to Skip Staal, the officer in charge of Housing Authority police statistics.

Officials hope to win federal grants to buy more bikes so the patrols can be expanded to projects in other parts of the city, said Lt. Walter McKinney, supervisor of the patrol.

Use of bicycles by police isn’t new, of course. Los Angeles officers have ridden them for years at the beach and began randomly using them last year for street patrol work at several stations. But they were never considered for housing project work until last year, when Housing Authority Police Chief Roger Chandler read a story about Seattle bike patrols in The Times.

After watching his own officers pedal through alleys and narrow apartment corridors, Chandler has pronounced bicycles “the most effective law enforcement tool I’ve ever come across.”

Members of the bike squad are taught how to chase down and tackle fleeing suspects, much like cowboys during rodeo calf-tying events, said Officer Dave Crivelli.

“People are real surprised and shocked when we catch them,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of thumbs-up signs when we ride into the inner areas of the projects, places we couldn’t get to in a car.”

A pursuit a few weeks ago in the Jordan Downs project in South-Central Los Angeles had all the excitement of a movie car chase.

Shorts-and-helmet-clad officers were chasing a man with a gun when he pulled off 103rd Street and ducked into the project, said Officer Richard Isaacs.

“We took off after him and one officer, Noah Sepetjian, hit a curb and did a somersault. Another officer, George Holt, fired at the suspect in self-defense and then dropped his bike and chased the guy over a 10-foot brick wall,” Isaacs said.

A third bike cop, Steven Judd, joined in the fray and helped arrest the suspect after hastily stowing his wheels in a resident’s apartment, Isaacs said. There wasn’t time to lock the bike the normal way: with handcuffs to the nearest post.

“I thought it would be a challenge riding through Jordan Downs at night on a bike,” Holt said. “But I feel safer on a bike than in a car.”

Gang members are starting to react when they see officers such as Richard Elizondo race up steps on a 21-speed bike. And their reaction has been surprising.

“When I got a flat tire from a piece of glass the other day, gang members came up and and said, ‘We’ll change it for you, Officer King,’ ” said Debra King, the lone woman on the bike squad.

That’s enough to get a cop pumped up.