A Walk in the Park : 3rd District: Canoga Park recreation site is free of drug dealers, but it now serves as a debate battleground for candidates Joy Picus and Laura Chick in the council race.

Lanark Park is a rarity in the war against escalating criminal activity in the city’s public spaces. It is a place where the good guys won.

But the 19-acre park, now free of drug dealers after an intensive cleanup effort, remains a battleground as candidates in the 3rd District City Council race struggle to prove each is the toughest crime-fighter in the Valley.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus, 62, has repeatedly invoked the Lanark Park success story to assure West Valley residents that she can stem the rising tide of inner-city ills lapping at the doors of suburbia.

“We took Lanark Park back from the drug-dealers,” Picus proudly told a Woodland Hills crowd April 14.

Former Picus aide Laura Chick is unimpressed. She says the park in Canoga Park is an isolated victory for the rule of law in a region that is becoming more crime-ridden each year. “It’s a smoke screen Joy Picus uses to convince people that things are OK,” the 48-year-old Chick said in an interview.

It appears the debate will only get more intense as the June 8 election approaches. Polls show crime is high on the list of concerns of Valley voters. Just this week, Picus endorsed a controversial proposal that would ban gangs from Los Angeles city parks.

Only three years ago, Lanark Park was overrun with drug dealers feeding the habits of a passing parade of motorists looking for crack cocaine and other drugs. Its ball diamonds were deserted and nervous neighbors avoided it.

“It was a graveyard,” L.A. Police Officer George Aguilar recalled recently.

At one juncture, police said 80% of the crime reported in the neighborhood was committed in Lanark Park.

City officials targeted Lanark Park with an innovative, multi-agency cleanup program, designed not only to pump new police resources into the area but also to work with local apartment owners to clean out the nests of drug dealers in their buildings.

The campaign included street barriers to stop the flow of drug users, new street lights and volunteers to write down the license numbers of drug purchasers. Apartment building managers were instructed by city officials on how to evict drug-dealing tenants and a federal grant was obtained to revive the park’s sports programs.

Now the park is once more considered safe by police.

“It’s been a 360-degree turnaround,” said John Perez, the park’s recreation director.

He and others give Picus top credit for helping to lead the fight. “Joy Picus was the backbone of the program,” Perez said.

“I didn’t do all the fine details,” Picus said. “But I did take a very, very hands-on approach.”

But Chick contends Picus has cynically used the success at Lanark Park to obscure the fact that life in the 3rd District is much less safe now than it has ever been.

“Her touting of Lanark Park is a desperate ploy to try to get people to forget what’s really happening,” Chick said. “The truth is that people are very frightened and they have every reason to be frightened because it is much less safe in the Valley now.”

Chick disputes the accuracy of recent widely publicized reports that major crime in the Valley in the first quarter of 1993 was down across-the-board from where it was for the same period a year earlier.

Chick said such figures do not reflect a tendency on the part of some crime-weary victims to not report minor criminal incidents.

That view is also endorsed by Dennis Zine, the Police Department sergeant who won 20% of the vote in the primary. “I listen to the police radio, and crime is not down,” said Zine, who recently endorsed Chick. “If you look at gang violence it’s out of control. I think there’s a lot of unreported activity going on out there.”

Earlier this week, the Police Protective League interviewed Chick and Picus and expects to announce its endorsement soon.

The improved safety at Lanark Park has been a political bonus for Picus in the midst of several ugly incidents of street crime that have complicated her bid for a fifth term at City Hall, political observers agree.

In the weeks preceding the 3rd District primary election April 20, a 17-year-old Reseda High School student was gunned down on campus, a 2-year-old girl was mistakenly shot to death in Balboa Park and a pregnant woman was killed outside a Sherman Oaks automated teller machine.

Headline-grabbing street mayhem can add to an incumbent’s headaches at election time. “The neighbors around Balboa Park were outraged,” Picus groaned recently as she recalled the 2-year-old’s killing.

“When major crime events occur in the middle of the election it can have a negative effect on an incumbent’s campaign--no question about it,” said Rick Taylor, a Los Angeles political consultant.

“No one blames the incumbent directly, of course,” said Taylor, who ran the 3rd District primary campaign of Zine, who finished third. “But it does increase the feeling that the incumbent is not doing something about the problem. And that increases the momentum for change.”

Meanwhile, Picus has toughened her stand on street crime.

Only this week, Picus joined her council colleagues who proposed to make it illegal for gang members to congregate in the city’s parks, a measure patterned after a law that has been in effect in the city of San Fernando.

“I would like to replicate that,” she added. “My feeling is that the proposed law is a tool that will help us get the gangs out of the parks.” The Los Angeles City Council is scheduled to vote on the proposed measure.

Picus also has recently endorsed a plan by Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti to make graffiti-writing a felony and to require the parents of youths convicted of painting graffiti to pay fines of up to $1,000.

Chick, however, opposes part of the Garcetti plan, saying a better approach would be to require the parents to participate in graffiti cleanup programs with their convicted children.