Police Sweep Suspects Out With Trash in Pacoima : Cleanup: Nine people are arrested, graffiti are erased and refuse is collected in a four-hour operation to revitalize Van Nuys Boulevard.

Los Angeles police swept through a Pacoima neighborhood Tuesday, arresting suspected drug dealers and prostitutes and supervising the collection of tons of trash and the removal of graffiti in a new program aimed at revitalizing a run-down portion of Van Nuys Boulevard.

Nine people were arrested and 17 tons of garbage collected in the four-hour operation by about a dozen officers along Van Nuys near San Fernando Road. Capt. Gabe Ornelas said the sweep is part of an ongoing program to take back the fading business district from criminals and transients and return it to merchants and pedestrians.

“We’ve got to regain the beat,” Ornelas said. “We’ve got to regain the sense of civility along the boulevard. We’ve got to clean up all the vagrants, the loiterers, the junkies, the prostitutes, the pimps, the dealers--I hate to say it--but all the human garbage.”

Ornelas said the goal of the program is to make criminals feel uncomfortable on the street. “We’ve got to plant the seed in these people’s minds,” he said.

Some of those questioned by police said they not only felt uncomfortable but harassed.

But merchants along the strip of beauty parlors, burger joints and industrial shops praised the effort, saying many potential customers are frightened away.

Until Tuesday’s cleanup--carried out by young offenders assigned to perform community service--trash knee-deep in places littered alleyways and gutters, and the sidewalks reeked of urine.

“If you have people of that sort hanging around your business, other people won’t come,” said George Hernandez, vice president of Hernandez Metal, a metalworking shop in a nondescript stucco building fronted by a heavy, locked gate. “Getting rid of them is for the better of the community.”

One beauty parlor owner, who asked not to be identified, said her female customers often are afraid to come to her shop because of the drug dealers conducting their business just outside. “My customers say, ‘sorry,’ and there goes my business,” she said. “There is a lot of danger.”

And there is a lot of sadness. Ornelas said a pregnant woman detained Tuesday morning was rushed to the hospital after she went into labor. She was homeless, Ornelas said, and had come to the neighborhood to buy cocaine.

The cleanup operation was devised by officers who patrol the area on bicycles. After telling loiterers to move on dozens of times during the past several months, they wanted to put teeth into their threats of arrest. “It’s hard to do anything like that when you’re on a bike,” said Officer R. Plourde, who did not want his first name used. “It’s hard to ride with a suspect on the back.”

So Plourde and other officers on Tuesday questioned people whom they had come to suspect of being prostitutes and drug dealers. Police arrested those who had outstanding criminal warrants. Dozens of others were cited for loitering, jaywalking and various minor offenses.

One man suspected by residents of dealing cocaine was questioned. When his record came back clean, he was cited for having a bald front tire on his pickup truck. A companion standing in the street was cited for obstructing traffic.

While the officers were questioning suspects, young men assigned by the courts to perform community service loaded a city trash truck with broken sofas, old tires and other junk cleared from alleys and sidewalks. Orphaned shopping carts were piled onto a truck and returned to grocery stores. A graffiti-removal truck sprayed one building to remove gang markings.

Although business owners praised the program, some of the people stopped by police complained that they were being harassed. “I can’t just sit in my house all day,” one man said. A man handcuffed nearby chimed in: “We are being victimized. I wasn’t doing nothing!”

To both, Officer R. Walker, who also would not give his first name, responded calmly: “We have a problem here. That’s why we’re here.”