City Studies Law to Sever Phones Criminals Use

In what is considered the first action of its kind in the county, the City Council on Monday will consider a law that would require removal of pay telephones used for drug sales, prostitution or other illegal activities.

The move to regulate such phones found to be a “public nuisance” is part of a statewide law-enforcement trend seeking to curb crimes transacted with pay telephones and pagers.

While they promised to work with law enforcement officials, telephone industry representatives said that removal of the phones should be the last resort for reasons of both public safety and fairness.

“We want to cooperate as much as possible to keep the phones there,” Pacific Bell Sales Manager Ellen Bates said, while pointing out that 20% of all calls to 911 emergency lines statewide are placed through pay telephones.

“It’s not the phone that causes crime,” she said, “it’s an attraction.”

Another Pacific Bell representative said removal of pay phones causes a particular hardship in such areas as Santa Ana, where many low-income citizens without residential service rely on them.

Officials for other pay telephone companies--about 50 compete in the county market--agreed and said they are ready to cooperate with authorities but would prefer to use such methods as security guards or blocking incoming calls to curb problems at particular telephones.

“Once they remove the public telephone, the crowd or the bad element just moves down the street,” said Wayne Tully, vice president of Pacific Coin Co. which operates about 200 pay phones in Santa Ana. “All they have done is chase the problem around the corner.”

Under the proposal, the city would monitor citizen complaints and police records to determine whether a phone is a public nuisance. If the property owner or phone company declines to correct the problem, the city would hold a hearing to have the instrument removed for one year.

Police spokesman Lt. Robert Helton said the nuisance goes beyond the use of the phones by drug dealers to arrange sales or prostitutes to schedule appointments.

“We have drinking in public, we have urination, we have a lot of noise and problems that are created by a congregation of people that may or may not be using the public telephone,” he said.

Helton stressed that the city would be sensitive to the community’s needs for public telephones and not seek removal of a unit until a case is well documented.

“We are looking at the real aggravated types of situations, and our intent would not be to take away a telephone from someone in the public who needs it to make an emergency call,” he said.

Heidi Maddox-Ross, co-owner of a flower shop at the intersection of Westminster Avenue and Harbor Boulevard, said she was pressured by police last summer to remove the two telephones outside her business.

“The hookers had moved and in came the drug dealers,” she said of the suspected criminal activity outside her shop, an area also plagued by auto thefts, muggings, a stabbing and a gang-related drive-by shooting.

“The police came to me and said, ‘Look, Heidi, you have to remove the phones. We are constantly busting people here,’ ” she said.

But the phone vendor, Pacific Coin Co., told her it would cost $500 to terminate her contract and instead offered to have her business patrolled by security guards.

“I am assuming . . . that everything seems to be working just fine,” she said of that program, now 3 months old.

Tully, the Pacific Coin official, pointed to that as an example of how the companies, when given a chance, are willing to work with business owners and police.

Phone officials said several strategies can be used short of removing phones, such as moving them to areas with better lighting or where there is more pedestrian or vehicle traffic; blocking incoming calls, and changing from a touch-tone phone to pulse dialing so beepers cannot be reached.

California Pay Phone Assn. board member Ken Scott, a San Diego-based pay phone vendor, said some of those tactics were used last year in Los Angeles as part of a pilot program to curb drug dealing in MacArthur Park.

He urged Santa Ana officials to work with phone vendors before taking drastic steps.

“Attack the problem instead of all of us being victimized by it,” Scott said. “By taking all the pay phones off the street, you kill the messenger. We are allowing ourselves to be intimidated by these idiot drug dealers.”