How People Can Save Beaches From Crime : It’s time to institute citizens beach patrols to assist police

Like broken glass lying in wait in the sand, urban problems increasingly have collected on Southern California’s fabled beaches in recent years. A Whittier man who went to Santa Monica beach to celebrate a new start in life was shot to death last week when he tried to help friends who were being robbed. Hours later a woman was raped at gunpoint and her boyfriend was bound and robbed in Laguna Beach--where violence is so out of the ordinary that the incident prompted phone calls from the city manager to City Council members.

State parks and recreation officers began carrying guns as long ago as the mid-1970s, an ominous suggestion that trouble has been brewing in the sand for some time. The lure of the beach remains alive in the 1990s as new generations of Californians enjoy volleyball and romantic moonlit strolls. But there is an uneasy feeling, too, a sense that at times there is a risk in going to that great California oasis at the edge of the Pacific, especially at night.

It takes only a few miscreants on the beach to ruin an evening for the many who are behaving well. On a pleasant night, there can be thousands of people on the beach at Santa Monica or Venice. Those sheer numbers increase the potential for friction. Some bring their troubles and their weapons with them.

In Huntington Beach, problems with alcohol abuse and weapons ultimately led the state Department of Parks, Beaches and Recreation this year to impose a 10 p.m. curfew at Huntington State Beach and Bolsa State Beach. Newport Beach, reading the handwriting on the wall, imposed a 10 p.m. curfew that went into effect before Memorial Day. City officials and neighborhood homeowners associations were fed up with late-night revelers and the defacing of facilities with graffiti.

That’s one way to go. But those controversial decisions were made with grim resignation. Closing down the beach in California is closing down a part of life itself. Communities that can should try first to institute citizens patrols to keep an eye on the waterfront and to assist police in anticipating trouble spots.

Newport Beach’s divided City Council approved its curfew after hearing from dissenters who argued that closing the beach was too punitive to law-abiding citizens. They had a good point. Shutting down a beach can be as unsatisfactory as barricading a neighborhood against outsiders. Both are less than satisfactory attempts to contain urban ills and preserve sanctuaries of tranquillity in a troubled world.

Communities like Laguna Beach, faced with the prospect of rape and robbery along the shoreline, understandably may do some similar soul-searching. They may wonder whether they too should throw their hands up and join the list of “realists.”

That option will remain. But why not first try a less drastic approach? The relentless budget crises in California surely will make it difficult to increase police patrols on the beach. But the neighborhood watch concept, applied successfully on streets from urban Little Tokyo to suburban Irvine, can be adapted. That will give those with a stake in the California Dream a way to help preserve it at the water’s edge.