Crackdown : Law enforcement: Using a 1989 city law, officials are targeting landlords to evict troublemakers and clean up properties in which drugs are suspected of being used or sold.

Ten police officers raided the shabby, one-bedroom bungalow near downtown Long Beach. One undercover detective slipped into the alley to buy two rocks of crack cocaine. The others broke the door down afterward, arrested one man and searched the meager rooms.

A bare mattress, two vinyl car seats and a hot plate furnished the apartment. Wet underwear hung over the tub. Police found at least four more rocks and a pipe.

“This is what your modern crack house looks like,” said Lt. Richard Jones, head of the Police Department’s 24-member drug investigation team. “They deal out of it until they get caught and then move somewhere else.”

Despite months of investigation, the bust that night on Cereza Way was small. But the police won’t stop with the arrest of the lean man who lived in the bungalow. Now they’re looking for his landlord.

The goal of Jones’ team is to prevent drug dealers from apartment-hopping through Long Beach. Using a city law passed in 1989, officials are working to clean up hundreds of buildings in which they suspect drugs are being used or sold.

Police tell the landlord to evict troublemakers and clean up the property, or else the city will shut down the building.

Since February, the Police Department’s narcotics section has identified more than 350 apartments and other residences in the city that have been used for drug sales.

Last month, in its largest case, the city gave David Gomez, the owner of 12 alleged crack houses, until Aug. 4 to clean up his buildings. If he does not comply, officials can deny him use of his property for up to a year;he will have to pay to relocate his tenants, and the building will be closed.

If police make more than one drug-related arrest at a building, serve a search warrant there or receive four drug-related complaints, the landlord is served notice by Sharon J. Jackson, coordinator of the Police Department program to make landlords responsible for what happens on their property.

A public hearing is held, and if the drug traffic is not stopped, Jackson requests that the city shut down the property.

“The majority of the people I send letters to I will never have to send to a public hearing,” Jackson said. “It’s not my objective to have 200 public hearings.”

Closing down buildings creates a new set of problems, she said. “Any time you have an abandoned building you have a potential for it to be taken over (by drug dealers).” Jackson’s goal is to work with the owners to solve the problem.

Most property owners who receive notice immediately try to improve their property, she said.

The city has held hearings for three landlords in addition to Gomez but has never closed a building. Jackson said the other owners made improvements to get rid of the drug traffic. She said she occasionally checks up on them to make sure the problems haven’t resurfaced.

An apartment building in the 1900 block of Myrtle Way, for example, was repainted and filled with new tenants after the owner’s hearing in late 1990. But tenants come and go, and neighbors said they occasionally still have trouble with people loitering outside the building or playing loud music into the night.

“The neighborhood has been going downhill,” said a woman who has lived on Myrtle Way with her husband and son for 13 years. “They fixed up some of those apartments but you still have the gang members, the drugs.”

A few of the houses on the street have trimmed lawns, rose bushes lining the walk and Neighborhood Watch signs in the window. But others have weeds growing high around them. One house on the corner is boarded up and splattered with graffiti. All of the buildings are heavily barred.

People who live near the bungalow at 426 Cereza Way said that, since the arrest earlier this month, fewer strangers have hung around that building. But they believe that drug dealers are working out of other apartments nearby.

In stark contrast to the desolate house at 426, the tiny house next to it clearly holds a family. Children’s laundry hangs across the porch posts. Three toddlers answer a knock on their door and scurry onto the porch when their mother joins them.

“Before the police came, a lot of people came through the back alley,” Berta Reyes said. “After that, it was quiet.”

But down the block, a man who asked that his name not be used for fear of his safety, said strangers in the alleys still offer to sell him drugs.

“I’m always talking to my children: ‘Don’t go outside,’ ” he said.

Since Chief William C. Ellis took over the Police Department four months ago, the narcotics section has changed its approach. Where it once spent 90% of its energy pursuing major drug traffickers, it now spends 90% of its time on the street-level narcotics trade, said Jones, the head of the narcotics section.

“We as a department and the city administration have bought into the concept of community-oriented policing,” Jones said. “John Doe at 4400 East 4th Street doesn’t care about a major drug trafficker if he’s got a guy on his corner with a handgun selling dope.”

In four months, the section has seized more than three pounds of cocaine, 115 pounds of marijuana and 1 1/2 pounds of speed. In addition, on Wednesday, officers seized 55 pounds of cocaine and 100 pounds of marijuana from three houses in Lakewood, El Monte and Gardena.

“That’s pretty significant when you’re shuffling around from street deal to street deal,” Jones said. “We’re seeming to have some kind of impact.”

A focus on street crime requires countless hours of investigation because officers must prove there is “consistent activity” at a building before the court will issue a search warrant, Jones said.

An average investigation takes about two weeks, not counting the time officers spend testifying or Jackson spends tracking down building owners.

“The time involved is astronomical,” Jones said.

Some landlords believe that the time is ill spent. Property owners face cumbersome laws when they try to evict tenants, they said, adding that police should be targeting the dealers themselves.

“There are a hell of a lot owners who are worse than (Gomez) is who don’t even care,” said Luis Pinel, a member of the Hispanic Apartment Management Assn. who recently began managing Gomez’s property. “I personally think he’s being used.”

Gomez declined to comment, referring questions to Pinel.

Police estimate that between Jan. 1, 1990, and April 30, 1992, officers responded to more than 2,400 calls at Gomez’s 67 properties citywide and made 175 drug-related arrests.

At 12 of his properties, police responded to more than 1,200 calls and made 134 drug-related arrests. Problems there have cost the police department more than $217,000 and 6,204 hours of work, officials said.

Jackson said that since Gomez’s May 26 hearing, the narcotics section has received additional complaints about his properties on Lime Avenue. In the next few weeks Jackson will begin checking on Gomez’s progress in cleaning up the properties.

Pinel said that since May, he and Gomez have evicted people from 35 units and begun improving the 12 buildings by replacing window screens and graffiti-covered trash bins.

His neighbors on Lime Avenue said the alleys around the buildings appear cleaner. But when the police cars leave the area, the traffic in and out of the buildings continues, they said.

Pinel said he has evicted tenants from four of Gomez’s 29 units between 326 and 349 Lime Avenue, and repainted the doors and window frames on many of the buildings.

“The outside looks great now,” said Doug Round, who manages MJM Apartments, a neighboring apartment building filled predominantly with senior citizens. “It’s what’s going on inside that’s the problem.”

Round and several MJM residents say they are disturbed night and day by the whistling and horn-honking the drug dealers use as signals.

“I was afraid to even look out the window for fear I’d be shot,” said Charlotte Schneider, who moved from an apartment that faced the alley to one on the other side of the building. “They were out there in the alley all the time making sales.”

But the neighbors acknowledge that some improvements have been made.

“When the police are around, the neighborhood is so safe you’d think you were in Disneyland,” Round said. “Maybe if they get the little guys the big ones will leave.”