The Issue: Using Abatement Laws to Stop Drug Trade : FOR: JAMES K. HAHN

The city of Los Angeles was among the first to use a 1972 state anti-drug statute to target crack houses or drug-infested apartment buildings as public nuisances. In February, the city used the abatement law against a Van Nuys mini-mall where cocaine is sold. A Superior Court judge told the mall owner to hire security guards and install a tall fence and high-powered lights and told a doughnut shop to close between midnight and 4 a.m. or hire separate guards. If the measures don’t eliminate drug dealing, the mini-mall could be boarded up for up to a year

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Q. What do abatement proceedings accomplish?

A. They allow us to focus our law enforcement activity on specific locations. When we became the first city . . . to file a narcotics abatement lawsuit, . . . it grew out of frustration over having a location that might be responsible for, say, 100 narcotics arrests over a period of a year.

Obviously, continuing to make arrests there doesn’t do anything about the problem. After filing an abatement action against the owner, . . . who was helping to facilitate that drug dealing, we end up with zero arrests there the next year. (An abatement) can have an impact . . . in a much more dramatic fashion than continually rolling up scores of arrests.

This whole process is also appealing because it presents a lasting solution to some of these problems.

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Q. How do abatements work?

A. Well, it’s grounded in the older concept of a public nuisance. The government . . . and private individuals . . . have the ability under the law to abate nuisances. We’ve usually thought of those as . . . a smelly pile of garbage on someone’s front lawn (or) red-light abatements, where we went after bars and hotels for vice activities like bookmaking or prostitution.

We believe that narcotics traffic and all of the attendant problems create a public nuisance. So we file a case in court . . . asking that the nuisance be abated. We usually attach a list of recommended conditions that we want imposed on the property owner. If the court grants that abatement, those conditions are imposed.

If the property owner does not comply, . . . it can result in the property actually being closed for a period of up to one year. We have filed approximately 17 abatement actions against property owners. We have been involved, however, in abatement proceedings involving over 200 locations.

In most cases, what we’re attempting to achieve is voluntary compliance by the property owners. I think it’s our success on the court cases that enables us to get success on a voluntary basis.

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Q. How do you respond to critics who say this process unfairly shifts the responsibility for eliminating drug dealing and other illegal activities from the police to property owners?

A. I think the responsibility is a shared one between the property owner and the public agencies involved in law enforcement. If the property owner is ignoring or, even worse, facilitating, criminal activity . . . clearly they could be held responsible for that.

Many property owners complain that what they really need is more of a police presence, but obviously we can’t post officers 24 hours a day at someone’s apartment building because it’s being used by drug dealers. It seems much more efficient to require the property owner to evict those tenants or take other measures, such as putting in additional lighting, requiring an on-site property manager or, in some situations, even hiring their own private security.

Along with the rights of property owners come certain responsibilities and those responsibilities include maintaining your premises in a safe condition.

In the case we just filed against the mini-mall in Van Nuys, Mr. Kim, the doughnut shop lessee, complains that, “Hey, I’m the one that calls the police all the time!’ or ‘Why are they wanting me to shut down my business? That’s going to hurt me financially.’ Well, the information that we had from the police was that the drug dealers were using his doughnut shop as the place to hang out. Because it was open 24 hours, it was a convenient place for them to sit and congregate and make drug deals.

So, even though he’s calling the police all the time, he’s also providing . . . a safe haven for these drug dealers. We can’t put a police officer there 24 hours a day, so it might be better if . . . he is not open 24 hours a day.

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Q. If the police make 100 or more drug-related arrests and it hasn’t solved the problem, how can you expect the owner to?

A. There’s steps they need to take. I was just out at Blythe Street this week and, you know, there’s a real lesson there in what happens to a property owner who is not careful about who they let into their apartment building. One gang member was let in, the gang member started to deal drugs, others came, the unit was destroyed and then other tenants left . . . and then those units . . . became destroyed and occupied by other gang members.

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Q. If that mini-mall does all the things the judge suggested--the lights, the fences, the security guards and so forth--wouldn’t that create a visual blight in that neighborhood?

A. I hope it doesn’t create a visual blight. We think better lighting should enhance the appearance of the neighborhood. The lighting also should be appreciated because the darkness tends to enable the drug dealers to hide their drugs and to hide in the shadows. The property owner can put up attractive fencing. We don’t want to turn this into an armed camp. On the other hand, what we’ve got now clearly is unacceptable.

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Q. Does the process distinguish between building owners who are innocent victims and those that in some some way foster or facilitate the drug dealing?

A. We want to work with that innocent owner. We don’t want that case to go to court. The Police Department will meet with that owner and, if they’re really serious about wanting to clean up the problem, suggest some ways that have proven effective in the past.

Our success isn’t measured by going to court and getting an abatement.

We had a problem in the Cadillac-Corning area of the Westside with a drug-dealing gang a few years ago. We were working with some property owners and got some stipulated injunctions on buildings. In addition, we filed a gang abatement in that area against the street gang. The gang has never re-established itself there.

Our approach is we want to work with the property owner in a cooperative spirit. If that spirit isn’t forthcoming, we do have other remedies that are available to us, like the abatement laws.

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Q. Doesn’t this process avoid dealing with the actual problem--drug dealing or prostitution or whatever--and just chase a phantom around the city?

A. We’re trying to deal with the underlying problem in a whole host of ways in this society. But we think that, if you can clean up one piece of property that is . . . bringing down the whole neighborhood, at least you’ve cleaned up that neighborhood.

Maybe it’s pushed off to somewhere else, but we’re going to keep following that phantom around the city until we have enough resources to keep it on the move and maybe move it out completely.