Street Barriers Backfired, Critics Say : Crime: Many North Hills residents no longer want the barricades, saying they failed to stop drug dealing. Police want to keep them.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on a recent weekday, Gabriel R’s one-man rock cocaine operation in the mid-San Fernando Valley community of 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. Then he 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 North Hills apartment owners financed barricades to block access to four streets, residents hailed the move as a solution to the street crime plaguing their neighborhood east of the San Diego Freeway’s Nordhoff Street off-ramp. Now, the same residents want the barricades removed, contending that they are ineffective and have hastened the area’s decline by isolating it.

What was supposed to create a sanctuary, they say, has made 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.”

Last week, members of the North Hills Community Coordinating Council asked the Los Angeles Police Department to remove the four barricades and 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 to discourage drug traffic has been questioned. What makes North Hills different is that the residents who were to benefit from the barricades 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 North Hills resident for 33 years.

Police continue to support the barricades.

“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 LAPD’s Devonshire Division, which polices North Hills. “And I don’t think anyone in that neighborhood wants that to happen again. We have the fear that if we remove the barricades the problem will recur.”

The barriers are 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, pointed out an apartment laundry room that once served as an armory for a gang. Then she chatted with two armed security guards who patrol a building where only six of 69 units are occupied. There are bullet holes in palm trees, through windows and in walls. Nearby is 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 problem, Rangel said, is that “the barricades allow a comfort zone for criminals. 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.

North Hills residents were among the first in the city to install barricades. The cost of $6,900 was borne largely by apartment owners. About the same time, other barricades were placed in Pico-Union, Koreatown and South-Central Los Angeles.

Law enforcement experts contended that barricades would cut down on drive-through drug sales by reducing prospective drug buyers’ access to a neighborhood. The barricades create a series of confusing cul-de-sacs, where small streets dead-end at 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 gang turned a Van Nuys barricade to its own uses--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 Van Nuys barricade was removed and replaced by a beefed-up police presence and a Neighborhood Watch.

“Barricades work in some situations, but they can’t stop all crime,” said the LAPD’s Proctor. “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 North Hills barricade a few blocks away on Orion Street at Nordhoff Street. On Wednesday, the department dropped those plans, but officials denied that 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 at Orion and Nordhoff 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.

“In the beginning, the area certainly quieted down,” said Tony Swan, president of the North Hills 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.

But Anne Madden, secretary of the neighborhood’s coordinating council, said: “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.”