Residents in Porter Ranch Band Together Against Crime : Citizen action: Operation PROTECT is using volunteers and watchful neighbors to combat a recent rise in robberies and burglaries. The effort may become a model for nearby areas.

Many residents along the lush fairways of Porter Valley Country Club hardly know each other.

After all, they moved to the maze of quiet, meandering streets to seek refuge from the crush of urban life.

Police say that penchant for suburban solitude is part of what made the tony neighborhood east of Tampa Avenue an attractive target for criminals: Since 1988, the number of burglaries, robberies and auto thefts has more than doubled.

Although the actual number of crimes is low compared to citywide averages, it is high enough to have galvanized frustrated residents into the first anti-crime group in the Porter Ranch area.

Two months after Operation PROTECT (Porter Ranch Organized to Eliminate Crime Together) was formed, organizers claim to have significantly reduced crime in the area. Even so, they are discussing sequestering themselves behind security gates.

“My first reaction was to move, but then I thought, ‘I’m going to fight before I get pushed out,’ ” said Becky Lohnes Leveque, who organized Operation PROTECT after a series of burglaries in her neighborhood.

Leveque’s indignation was echoed in conversations with other residents who have learned firsthand that the urban ills they thought they had escaped have been creeping into their suburb. Sherilyn Jackson’s car was stolen. Two armed men tried to force their way into Debby Volz’s house. Burglars stole about $15,000 in jewelry and electronics while Judith Huegli shopped at the neighborhood market.

At Operation PROTECT’s first meeting in October, about two-thirds of the 500 people in attendance said they had been victimized in some way in recent years--a surprising revelation to Los Angeles police.

“We looked at the numbers, and compared to the rest of the city and the division, it didn’t look that bad,” said Senior Lead Officer Rick Gibby. “Then we found out that these people have a reason to be concerned. Compared to three years ago, crime is actually up quite a bit. They went from just about nothing to quite a lot.”

For example, residential burglaries between January and November were 206% higher than in the same period in 1988, from 29 to 89. Robberies increased 533% from 3 to 19 and auto theft increased 115% from 32 to 69.

But already, Gibby said, Operation PROTECT volunteers and extra police patrols have reduced crime in the area bounded by Tampa Avenue, Wilbur Avenue and Rinaldi Street by acquainting residents with their neighbors and making them more aware of what goes on along their streets.

In November, residential burglaries dropped from the month before by 87% from 16 to two, auto thefts dropped 71% from seven to two and robberies increased from two to three during the same period.

Much of that reduction has been caused by residents watching their streets more carefully and reporting suspicious activity to police. Huegli, for example, saw an unfamiliar van parked near the end of her cul-de-sac. As she drove closer, the van pulled away. She followed it long enough to get the license number and reported it to police.

For their part, police have made the neighborhood a regular part of their patrols. Gibby said patrol cars may not have cruised the neighborhood regularly enough because it was not considered a high-crime area.

Struck by the group’s success, Gibby said police plan to use it as a model for organizing residents in other parts of the north San Fernando Valley. “Hopefully we can move right on down the hill,” Gibby said. “No part of this city is completely crime-free.”

The crusade began two years ago with Leveque. While the family was vacationing in Yosemite National Park, someone smashed a dining room window with a baseball bat and stole her 15-year-old son’s baseball card collection worth about $5,000. The crime is unsolved.

A few months later, the same son was home alone studying when two burly men tried to break in. He ran upstairs to call police, and the men fled at the sound of a helicopter overhead. They were never caught.

The last straw came over the Labor Day weekend, when a neighbor’s house was burglarized early one morning as the family slept upstairs. “That was it,” Leveque said.

She organized a community meeting in October that was attended by about 500 residents. During the meeting, Leveque asked people to stand up if they had been robbed or burglarized or had cars broken into or homes vandalized. “By the time I was finished, two-thirds of the room was standing,” she said.

At the meeting, residents decided to form a Neighborhood Watch committee and a homeowner association as well as study the feasibility of secluding the community behind security gates.

The first project has been completed, the second is under way and the third is being discussed informally, but the costs and logistics may be prohibitive.

“Every single person wants a gate,” Leveque said. “They’re the wave of the future.”

Gibby, however, figured it would probably cost considerably more because guards would be needed to staff the gates 24 hours a day. Without guards, Gibby said, gates are less effective because gardeners or pool cleaners working in the neighborhood might inadvertently let others in.

Within a few days after the meeting, 47 residents had volunteered to serve as block captains. One of them, David Hirsch, said that as he walked through the neighborhood he found that many people knew their neighbors only by sight, a characteristic that makes it easier for criminals to slip through neighborhoods unnoticed.

“The people on the cul-de-sacs know each other pretty well,” Hirsch said. “They know each others’ names and have each others’ numbers.

“But on the straighter streets, people don’t know each other very well. We’re trying to organize house meetings to try to bring people together, to get them to know each other and watch out for each other.”