Gang Extortion Spurs Effort to Make Street Vending Legal

Extortion of street vendors by gang members illustrates the need for legalization of sidewalk sales in Los Angeles, said representatives of the Street Vendors Assn., a 500-member group of peddlers.

“The gangs know that the vendors, the way it is right now, won’t go to the police,” said Angelica Garza, coordinator of the Street Vendors Assn.

Dozens of street vendors in the Pico-Union district have paid as much as $10 a weekend in “protection” money to 18th Street gang members, whose practice of extortion has spread to conventional businesses as well.

All street vending is illegal in the city. Many homeowner groups and merchants complain that vendors’ pushcarts and portable stands create noisy eyesores that lower property values and allow unfair competition.

The bans on vendors, however, are often ignored, and some community activists are stepping up calls for the sidewalk sales in the city to be legalized.

“The extortion (of vendors) is a perfect example of why vending needs to be legalized,” said Martha Arevalo, a spokeswoman for the Central American Refugee Center. “Legalizing street vending gives the ordinary street vendor power, because he’s not afraid to go to the police out of fear he’s going to have his stuff confiscated.”

In January, 1992, the City Council approved a compromise plan to legalize and regulate sidewalk sales in designated areas of Los Angeles. But a year later, an ordinance to implement the plan has not come back to the council for final approval.

A preliminary version of the ordinance is being reviewed by City Councilman Mike Woo’s office and the Central American Refugee Center, which provides assistance to the Street Vendors Assn.

Arevalo said the city has dragged its feet on the matter.

“It just seems like there’s been one obstacle after another,” Arevalo said. “I really just think the city is dragging its feet. I sincerely don’t know why it’s taking so long.”

Woo, however, dismissed vendors’ concerns that plans to legalize vending will languish in the city’s bureaucracy.

“As far as I’m concerned, the City Council has signaled its intent to go ahead with this experiment,” said Woo, who has sought to legalize vending throughout the city.

Woo attributed the delay to a backlog in the city attorney’s office and the complexities involved in drawing up the ordinance. His staff members said they expected a specific proposal to come back before the council early this year.

“It is my hope that it will resolve the otherwise unending struggle of street vendors trying to make a living, and business owners who feel the vendors are taking away their business, and the police and other bureaucrats who feel caught in the middle between competing economic forces,” Woo said.

Legalizing the practice would also free law enforcement officials to concentrate on gang and drug problems affecting Pico-Union and other areas, said Garza.

However, vending would still be banned in unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, such as East Los Angeles and Lennox.

Vending is often a way of life in the countries many vendors come from, and in some big cities, such as New York.

For the thousands of vendors who fan out across Los Angeles, extortion is but one occupational hazard. If they are not being robbed of their meager earnings, the vendors say they are harassed by some police officers enforcing bans on the sidewalk sales. Then there is the weather. When it is raining or overcast, the poor and the tired can become the hungry.

“This is the only means we have to make a living,” said Marcelo Avalos, 29, who sells corn on the cob out of the back of a truck. “It’s out of necessity that we’re here” on the streets, he said.

Pushcart vendor Carlos Castro agreed. Castro, 30, sells snow cones, or raspados, and fried pork rinds, called chicharrones, because he has been unable to find steady work.

“I would rather be doing something else,” said Castro, a Peruvian immigrant, as he positioned himself in front of a Lennox school awaiting a crush of schoolchildren. “But I haven’t been able to find anything, and this is honest work. I’m not out stealing or selling drugs or anything like that.”

The competition for customers is fierce. In Lennox, a 1.25-square-mile unincorporated community near Los Angeles International Airport, there are about 30 paleta (flavored ice on a stick) and snow-cone vendors, not including the more traditional vendors in ice cream trucks. There are an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 vendors in the city of Los Angeles, according to the Street Vendors Assn.

In addition to the occasional brush with the law, vendors face other dangers. A man selling snow cones from a pushcart in South-Central Los Angeles was shot to death last summer in an apparent robbery after he resisted attempts to take his money.

Many vendors tell of being assaulted and robbed of their earnings--crimes that often go unreported to authorities. Last summer, Castro was mugged three times, twice at gunpoint.

“I just gave them the money,” he said. “I didn’t think it was worth the risk.”

Consider the vendors on 6th Street in Pico-Union, a magnet neighborhood for Central American immigrants. The sellers there ply their trade at an informal flea market, peddling everything from counterfeit cassette tapes to baby clothes.

The street vendors have been reluctant to report the extortion because sidewalk sales are prohibited and many of the peddlers are in the country illegally, police said.

Los Angeles police started conducting high-profile foot patrols in the neighborhood last month with the hope that the weekend patrols would establish trust with vendors victimized by the gangs.

“The foot beat can establish a rapport with these people and let them know that they can come forward,” said Terry Wessel, a gang unit detective in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division.

Officers on the foot beat are not enforcing the vending ban, police said, alleviating a chief concern of vendors. The patrols will continue for an indefinite period, said Sgt. Gerry Sola.

“We’ll keep it there as long as the problem needs to be addressed,” Sola said. “Temporarily, the (extortion) problem has gone away. That was one of the things we hoped to accomplish.”

The patrols have been welcomed by the Street Vendors Assn. and the vendors. One man, who sells used clothing on the street, said a strong police presence in the neighborhood is sorely needed.

“I like having the cops here,” he said. “I feel safer when they’re around.”