Trying to Fence Problems Out

At first blush, it seems like a reasonable argument. If homeowners can install all manner of security devices against unwanted intrusions and crime, then why not block off entire neighborhoods for the same reasons?

That is what 150 Los Angeles neighborhoods want to do. They seek at least partial closures or gates that would seal off their communities entirely. Six communities are already closed off by gates.

Until recently, the City of Los Angeles believed that it could grant such requests and take property out of public use or limit access to it. In two cases this year, however, Superior Court judges have ruled to the contrary. The city cannot place devices that “deny or restrict the access of certain members of the public, while permitting others unrestricted access.”

City attorneys say that the ruling does not affect privately owned developments. They are less certain about police barricades installed to fight crime, such as those found in Pico-Union.

But the community of North Hills in the San Fernando Valley has learned an important lesson. Barricades alone will not arrest crime and may even hasten a neighborhood’s sense of isolation and decline.

North Hills is near Nordhoff Street just east of the San Diego Freeway. Police contend that the four barricades placed there since 1989 have curtailed one of the city’s most active drug markets, but that was hardly apparent on a recent night. A drug dealer who had already sold his wares used a barricade as a seat as he calmly directed customers to other traffickers. North Hills now wants the barriers removed.

In Panorama City, on Blythe Street, streetwise gang members even used such barricades to their own advantage in fleeing from police cars or robbing residents caught on the wrong side of the barriers.

The Blythe Street barricades were removed in March of 1992, replaced by an active Neighborhood Watch team and a heightened police presence that has done much to rescue the citizenry from crime.

Such tactics are clearly preferable to barricades. Gates or other barriers may merely produce more of a siege mentality in law-abiding citizens, while giving criminals a heightened sense of power.