Little Fights to Keep Alcohol Away From Where Trouble Brews

Robin Little is chairwoman of the San Fernando Valley Alcohol Policy Coalition, on which are represented law enforcement, alcohol policy experts, homeowner groups and the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. It seeks to influence policy decisions on the sale of alcoholic beverages. Little was interviewed at her Van Nuys office by staff writer Richard Lee Colvin.

Q. What’s the purpose of having a San Fernando Valley Alcohol Policy Coalition?

There’s a county policy coalition, and it wanted to try and decentralize becausA. County is so huge. What’s interesting is that the community concerns are quite similar. When you look at South-Central, they have problems with too much availability of alcohol.

Q. When you talk about availability, what are you talking about exactly? Not prohibition, right?

The Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control uses a ratio of outlets per population. Because it’s done countywide, you can have individual cities that are over-concentrated.

When someone applies for a license for an AM-PM or 7-Eleven, we look at how many licenses exist in the immediate area. Then we go to the Los Angeles Police Department and say, “What’s the crime rate in this area?” If we feel that there are already enough outlets and there are problems with crime, then we have gone to conditional-use permit hearings before the city to protest.

Q. Which applications do you protest?

Many times we don’t protest the licenses of restaurants that have short operating hours, because we feel it’s not going to add to the crime in the area. We’re looking at high-risk settings. We’ve certainly protested every application at a gas station.

Q. You mentioned high-risk settings. What do you mean by that?

Moderate consumption in low-risk situations is accepted. We’re not going into people’s homes and saying you can’t sit down and drink three beers and watch the Redskins. It’s when you get out of your home and get into your car and you abuse one of your children or you get into an argument with one of your neighbors.

Q. People have responded to the existence of the policy coalition as a mechanism for voicing their concerns about these issues, haven’t they?

We’ve really been focused, and we’ve been able to respond quickly. Like with the ABC funding issue. We spent a lot of energy on that, trying to get the funding restored.

What frustrates me is that we are often reacting, not setting agendas. It’s like the decoy issue.

Q. Explain the decoy issue.

The 1st Court of Appeal in San Francisco ruled in January that law-enforcement agencies could not use minors as decoys to go in and enforce the law regarding illegal sales to minors.

The California Grocers Assn. brought a suit claiming entrapment. Their attitude is, “We are all good business people, and if the police send in some guy who is 6-foot-2, who’s 19 but looks 25, how are we supposed to know?”

Q. The availability issues that the coalition has focused on have often arisen in the northeast San Fernando Valley, where there tends to be an over-concentration of outlets. But selling to minors has been a problem across the Valley, hasn’t it?

It’s really a problem throughout the country. It’s very easy for minors to buy alcohol. A lot of studies show that in some cities it’s possible for a minor to buy alcohol in 80% of the stores without being carded. A lot of the violations that ordinary people report to the ABC are illegal sales to minors. I know they filed about 1,000 cases in the state using decoys last year.

At Cal State Northridge, I’m doing a project. Students who live in residential housing are primarily under 21, but they all have friends who are 21 or over. I’ll bet in the Northridge area, it’d be pretty easy to go to a liquor store or a supermarket and buy a six-pack of beer and take it into a dorm.

Q. Would you explain what the CSUN project is?

The goal was to develop a policy coalition at CSUN to look at the problems related to alcohol abuse on campus--crime, vandalism in student housing, alcohol availability--and to try to increase student awareness of alcohol.

Q. What kind of a response do you get at CSUN?

Mixed. There are students who feel that college is college, we’re there to have fun, and this is our last fling before we’re adults. There’s also students who don’t want to drink and feel a lot of pressure in social situations to drink. And then there’s kind of a middle ground of kids who don’t like to see their friends get drunk or get rowdy and are concerned about problems with date rape or acquaintance rape or vandalism or whatever.

Q. One of the things you’re trying to do there is to have an alcohol-free dorm?

There are going to be two floors that are alcohol-free. Most of the students in campus housing are either freshmen or sophomores, so they shouldn’t be consuming alcohol anyway.

Q. Why are colleges concerned about this issue now?

The bottom line for universities is often money. It’s risk management. In fact, Donna Shalala, our neS. secretary of health and human services, was the chancellor of Wisconsin, and she once wrote that the No. 1 problem on her campuses was alcohol.

Q. What are some other projects the Alcohol Policy Coalition is focused on? I know you were active in influencing the governor to agree to appeal the court’s decoy decision.

Right, and getting Assemblymen Curtis Tucker Jr. and (Richard) Katz to introduce the constitutional amendment to exempt law-enforcement officers from the constitutional prohibition on the use of minors as decoys.

Q. So, although the policy coalition was set up to deal specifically with Valley issues, you’ve found that the way to be effective is to act much more broadly throughout the city and the state?

Yes. It’s not completely selfless. We can see that whatever policies the City Council sets will affect everybody.