Today’s Agenda

A dozen years ago, we’d barely heard of it: crack cocaine. A new word, crack, attached to cocaine-- a powder winked at, tolerated, joked about in movies (for instance, Woody Allen sneezing a box full of “cocaine” all over the room in “Annie Hall”).

The initial stories about it were from New York. No one really understood that those newspaper photos from Times Square, of ragged men huddled over butane lighters, their hands cupped over their crack pipes, heralded the coming plague.

First the leap to Los Angeles, then a hiatus while the rest of the country stared smugly at the coasts, calling it “an urban problem,” nothing to do with the suburbs or the heartland. Then crack was everywhere--city and country, hamlet and town. It degraded each person that it touched and diminished the quality of life for everyone, except perhaps the makers of burglar alarm systems.

In today’s special page on some of those lives, Julie and Mark Dunn of Los Angeles describe what an encampment of crack users and dealers has done to their neighborhood. In their Gripe, they tell us how they’ve tried every avenue for help in getting rid of this drug nest in the alley--their City Council office, police (over and over and over), the Department of Public Works, various social agencies. All for naught.

Yes, a patrol car does come by once in a while and chase away the dealers and users, who reappear at the other end of the alley and move back in. Yes, an occasional dealer is arrested, only to reappear, free, a few hours later.

If committed homeowners and residents can’t get action against well-documented crimes right behind their houses, what can people with fewer resources do?

Also on the page are Answers to the Dunns from City Councilman Mike Hernandez and a spokesman for the Department of Public Works. Both describe how hard it is to deal with this sort of problem. Both offer more help in the future. We’ll be following up.

Sexual harassment in the workplace was one of the big news topics of 1992. This year, California’s schools will grapple with new laws mandating disciplinary action against student-on-student harassment. In Platform, students, teachers and administrators talk about how they define harassment, about the dividing line between “playfulness” and “intimidation.”

The link between literacy and sobriety isn’t immediately evident, but it’s there. A program at L.A. County’s Antelope Valley Rehabilitation Centers, the subject of Making a Difference, pairs resident tutors with residents who need literacy training. The result: more people completing the program, more staying sober afterward.

The Testimony interview last month with Ruby Ross, who’s given so much of her energy to registering voters in South Los Angeles, brought a big response from people wanting to help. One person who took personal action, Beth Quillen Thomas, writes about it for Getting Involved. Her parting advice: “We must make 1993 a year in which we choose to make a difference in this city.”