IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD : Venice: A high-profile beach community gets serious on safety?

A community’s reputation as Los Angeles’ hurly-burly beachside backyard generates an idiosyncratic vitality and economic benefits that Venetians treasure. Venice’s famed canals are being fixed, repairs to Venice Boulevard are complete and a $425,000 tree grant secured by the community promises a landscaping bonanza. On sunny days when they share their beach community with more than 100,000 visitors they may fret about scarce parking, but a bigger worry is what to do about what Venetians characterize as scarce policing.

During recent summers, the Los Angeles Police Department has provided 25 officers to patrol the area. Merchants and residents compare that to the more than 100 off-duty police who patrol the Coliseum for football games. They have asked the city for permission to hire their own armed off-duty police to patrol the boardwalk year-round.

There’s local precedent for such a plan. Last November, after tenants in Venice’s Oakwood neighborhood argued that LAPD and private security consultants failed to control rampant gang and drug activity at their federally funded apartments, the management company contracted with the Nation of Islam to provide security for the apartments. The unarmed patrols have helped to push crime out of the 16 apartment buildings they guard, but residents say that, at the very least, more police coverage of the entire neighborhood is needed.

Venice population: 40,040

Population by race and ethnicity:

Anglo: 65%

Black: 8%

Latino: 24%

Asian: 3%

Other: less than 1%

Median income:

Venice $35,418

Los Angeles $30,925

Note: Numbers do not add up to 100% because of rounding. Source: U.S. Census data, programmed by Times analyst Maureen Lyons.

COMMUNITY ACTIVIST

Diane Bush, member of the Venice Action Committee

People in other areas of Los Angeles come to Venice to play. My complaint and my request has always been, for the past six years, is give us two of the cops from (each) district and we’ll have enough cops on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. The logic of the bureacracy makes us very angry. Everybody expects to be safe wherever they go and yet the representatives of the different council districts look at us like we’re crazy when we say we want two of their officers. It’s pretty hard to ask these merchants who are not making very much money in this recession to cough up $6,000 to $10,000 a month for security. People are not going to enjoy themselves in Venice if they don’t feel safe; we just happen to be lucky that there hasn’t been any horrendous incident.

RESIDENT

Steve Heumann, Resident of Oakwood for four years, operator of several Venice boardwalk businesses

(In Venice and the Oakwood neighborhood) you need social and educational programs. We have homelessness, we have drugs, we have lack of education and jobs, we have racial prejudice. What’s going on at the boardwalk is a lot simpler issue. The boardwalk is a destination for people to go to recreate, but the neighborhood of Oakwood is a community with all the social intricacies that any community might have. Police aren’t the only solution to problems here; they would be a partial solution to some of the problems.

PROPERTY MANAGER

David Itkin, Vice-president of Alliance Housing Management, which manages 15 federally subsidized apartment buildings in Oakwood neighborhood. Contracted minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam for unarmed security services.

The Nation of Islam, who’s doing a great job when they’re there, are not there around the clock and seven days a week. When they’re not there certain (criminal) elements start to congregate and do their thing. So far it hasn’t gotten out of hand, but who can say what’s going to happen next week.?

I think if you ask the people in the Oakwood area, “Would you now vote for more funds to the police?” probably they would say yes. If you asked the people who live over in Marina del Rey who haven’t had these problems and who can afford private security, they probably would still say no.

People I know in Marina del Rey are putting security systems in their house because they can afford it. They’re having some kind of armed response. Maybe some of that money could also be used for the good of everybody and put some of those funds into the city police.