Neighborhood Gives Up on Barricades : North Hills: Residents feel trapped by barriers that were built to curb drive-through drug sales.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on a recent weekday morning, Gabriel R’s one-man rock cocaine operation in North Hills was doing turn-away business.

After selling out his stock for the night, he directed a customer driving a late-model Mercedes to another dealer and then relaxed by leaning against one of the barricades designed to stop drive-through drug traffic in the neighborhood.

“I think they are a good thing,” Gabriel, 17, said of the concrete-and-steel barricades. “Otherwise, I’d have to stand up all night like everyone else.”

Three-and-a-half years ago, when the neighborhood paid $6,900 to block access to four local streets as a crime-fighting weapon, residents hailed the barricades as a panacea to the street crime that plagued the area just off Sepulveda Boulevard and Nordhoff Street. Now, the same residents want the streets cleared, saying the barricades are ineffective and have hastened the neighborhood’s decline by isolating it from the rest of the community.

What once had been a sanctuary, say the residents, is now a prison.

“We feel trapped here with the barricades,” said resident Petra Alba, the mother of three young children. “We can’t afford to move. There’s nothing we can do.”

Members of the North Hills Community Coordinating Council asked the Los Angeles Police Department to remove the four barricades, during a meeting last week at which council members also expressed opposition to plans for a new barricade in a neighborhood three blocks away.

This is not the first time the once-heralded tactic of erecting barricades has been questioned as a strategy for controlling drug traffic. What makes this case different is that residents who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries have given up on the strategy.

“Hopefully, people are starting to realize that barricades are not an answer, but a problem,” said Brigitte Siatos, a neighborhood resident for 33 years.

So far, police are not convinced that removing the barricades will solve the area’s problems.

“Before the barricades were placed there, it was the worst drug-sale area not just in the Valley, but the entire city of Los Angeles,” said Capt. Vance Proctor, commander of the Devonshire Division, which polices North Hills. “And I don’t think anyone in that neighborhood wants that to happen again. But we have the fear that if we remove the barricades the problem will recur.”

The barriers are located in an area of high-density apartment buildings east of the San Diego Freeway on Columbus Avenue at both Nordhoff Street and Parthenia Street; on Rayen Street at Burnet Avenue, and on Memory Park Avenue at Parthenia Street.

On a late-night tour of the area, Paula Rangel, resident manager of an apartment complex on Parthenia Street, pointed out an apartment complex’s laundry room that once served as an armory for a local gang. Then she chatted with two armed security guards who patrol a building where only six of 69 units are occupied. There were bullet holes in palm trees, in windows and in walls. Nearby was the site of a recent double homicide.

Rangel swapped jokes with “Mousie,” an 11-year-old gang member with a tattoo on his neck, asking what he was doing out after midnight on a school night. But she steered clear of a large group of older gang members loitering on the sidewalk.

“The barricades allow a comfort zone for criminals,” Rangel said. “Gang members know when and how police are going to come through the neighborhood, and they use the barricades to their advantage” by jumping over them and running down one-way streets.

In 1989, when North Hills installed the barriers, the community became one of the early experiments in using barricades as a crime-fighting tool.

At about the same time, barricades were placed in Pico-Union, Koreatown and South-Central Los Angeles. A barricade at the intersection of Blythe Street and Willis Avenue had blocked traffic since 1987.

Law enforcement experts believed that barricades, placed at key intersections, would cut down on drive-through drug sales by reducing a neighborhood’s access to prospective drug buyers by creating a series of confusing cul-de-sacs where small streets dead-ended into major thoroughfares. To get out, drivers would be forced to back up and turn around, giving authorities a chance to catch them.

But after a local gang turned the Blythe Street barricade into a tool of its own--robbing, shooting and harassing neighborhood residents and outsiders caught on the wrong side of the barrier--the notion of barricades as a weapon in the war on drugs began to be re-evaluated.

In March, 1992, the Blythe Street barricade was removed, replaced by a beefed-up police presence and a Neighborhood Watch.

“Barricades work in some situations, but they can’t stop all crime,” Proctor said. “The most effective thing is to get the community on board in Neighborhood Watch programs and other activities. . . . We don’t want the barricades to be a war issue.”

Police had been planning to install another barricade a few blocks away from the others on Orion Street at Nordhoff Street, also in North Hills. On Wednesday, the department dropped those plans, but officials denied they were swayed by neighborhood opposition.

Some apartment owners were upset at the department’s decision. Lloyd Holtzman and 11 other apartment building owners on Orion Street want a barricade to change traffic patterns until the neighborhood and police agree on a long-term solution, such as turning the street into a cul-de-sac, a one-way street or restricting it to parking-permit holders.

“As it is now, all someone has to do is jump off the freeway, turn right and make a buy,” Holtzman said. “It’s like a supermarket. The purpose of the barricade is to immediately make it harder on them to use this area.”

Police had installed a temporary barricade there in 1989, and they say it was successful in reducing drive-through drug sales in the area by 33% for the 11 months that it blocked traffic, police said.

But the majority of residents who want to remove the other four barriers say the barricades are a shortsighted solution to the drug-dealing and gang activity that are endemic in parts of the neighborhood.

“In the beginning, the area certainly quieted down,” said Tony Swan, president of the coordinating council. “But the area has actually deteriorated since then, and the problem is as bad as ever. People are frustrated. We’re afraid it will continue to go downhill unless we get the barricades removed.”

Other residents, who have begun to refer to the area as “North-Central Los Angeles,” blame the barricades for high apartment vacancy rates, a reluctance by some lending institutions to make loans in the area and a steep decline in property values.

Robin Bourne, for example, who bought a $225,000 house on Andre Court a year-and-a-half ago, has watched the value of her home shrink by $21,000. “I wanted this to be a first home, something to move up from,” Bourne said. “But I’m stuck here now.”

The problems are not new, say residents. And the area--which is divided between three council districts, claimed by three gangs and bisected by one of the world’s busiest freeways--does not aid neighborhood identity.

Making matters worse, the wealthier portion of the area on the west side of the freeway changed its name from Sepulveda to North Hills two years ago.

“It’s easy to be overlooked, but we have vowed to be the squeaky wheel,” said Anne Madden, secretary of the neighborhood’s coordinating council. “But despite its problems, this is a nice place to live. We just have to remind ourselves sometimes that we are a community . . . and get rid of the barricades.”