Crackdown Will Target Hollywood Gangs

In response to two highly publicized violent crimes at Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue in the past week, it was announced Thursday that more than 20 more Los Angeles police officers will be deployed to the area to crack down on gang violence and increase felony arrests.

Starting tonight, the entire 15-member staff of the anti-gang CRASH unit of the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Bureau will be moved into the Western Avenue corridor, where gangs have increasingly congregated in recent years, Councilman Michael Woo and Deputy Police Chief Glenn A. Levant said Thursday.

Woo will spend $2,200 from his office budget to pay 15 CRASH officers to continue overtime patrols every night next week.

An unspecified number of other officers, some in plainclothes, will join the effort and remain for at least three weeks, officials said.

“This area of Hollywood and Western has been one of the worst areas in my district for a long time,” said Woo, who is expected to run for mayor next year. “This will be the most intense concentration of police resources coming to this part of Hollywood during my seven years on the council.”

The intersection, which has become a well-known nightly hangout for drug dealers and gang members, garnered more publicity Saturday when two motorists were hit by bullets fired from a dilapidated apartment building. Three days later, a teen-ager was kidnaped at the intersection, raped and set afire.

“The 98% or more of people living in apartment buildings and the business people in the area are law-abiding people who are concerned about their safety,” Levant said. “What we’re attempting to do here is remove specific felons who we have reason to believe either loiter there or use the Western corridor.”

Levant and Woo declined to call the effort a sweep, in which large numbers of suspects are rounded up and arrested. However, they said they hope significant felony arrests will be made along the Western Avenue corridor between Franklin Avenue, south to the Santa Monica Freeway.

Levant declined to give exact numbers and locations of the scheduled deployments. Levant--who is among six finalists seeking to succeed Chief Daryl F. Gates--said the intensified effort will continue for three weeks, at which point it will be re-evaluated.

Woo said that longer-range plans are being developed to follow the crackdown. Repair units were being dispatched to fix street lights shot out by gang members, he said, and attempts will be made to set up Neighborhood Watch groups in gang-infested apartment buildings.