Crime in Projects 3 Times City Average, Study Finds

Violent crimes in Los Angeles’ public housing projects exceeded the citywide average by 3 to 1 from 1986 to 1989, according to a new study by the RAND Corp. And city public housing officials say they believe that crimes in some of those projects are continuing to increase.

The housing officials added that many of RAND’s recommendations for improvements have already been implemented and that these moves and other factors have decreased the crime rate in some housing projects.

The three-year study released this month by the nonprofit think tank was based on police reports of arrests and felonies at several housing projects and surrounding neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Washington.

Nine housing projects on the Eastside, in South-Central Los Angeles and in Watts were studied. Together, these projects averaged 67 violent offenses--including murder, rape and serious assault--each year for every 1,000 residents, compared with 29 in nearby communities and 22 citywide, the study showed. The projects were also the scene of an average of 58 drug arrests per 1,000 residents a year, versus 22 arrests in adjacent neighborhoods and 16 citywide.

The dated police records do not necessarily reflect the level of crime that exists today in the city’s housing projects, according to the Los Angeles Housing Authority. Last year’s riots and the Watts gang truce have changed the numbers of violent crimes in projects in the areas of the city that were studied, said Marshall Kandell, spokesman for the authority. The riots may have increased crime in some areas while the gang truce has decreased violent incidents in the projects in Watts, he said.

“The crime rate in the Hollenbeck area (on the Eastside) is higher than what’s indicated in the report,” said Kandell.

He added that much of the information on project crime rates is based on anecdotes from tenants and police patrol officers because the specific statistics for recent years have not been broken out.

“To get those numbers you’d have to do another RAND study,” he said.

Police in the Hollenbeck Division agreed that there has been more crime in Eastside projects since 1989, the most recent year of data used in RAND’s report.

RAND’s study was sparked in 1989 after reports from directors of more than 1,000 public housing projects to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed a grave problem with drug trafficking. Those reports were initially requested by former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp after he visited public housing projects in Baltimore and Philadelphia and saw drug dealers in the projects.

“There’s never been an empirical documentation on what the (crime) problem was in the projects,” said Terence Dunworth, the study’s main author. “The consequence of not knowing what the problem is from a policy point of view is that you don’t know how to do intervention.”

The study, Dunworth said, can be used as a blueprint by police and the Housing Authority to target problem areas and implement crime prevention programs.

Kandell said the Housing Authority is working with the Los Angeles Police Department to separate incidents in public housing from those in surrounding areas.

The 100-page report, funded by the National Institute of Justice, stated that public housing projects in general had higher rates of reported crimes and drug arrests than the rest of Los Angeles during the four-year study period. Individual projects showed even more severe crime rates when compared with other projects.

For example, Hacienda Village, a 183-unit complex at East 105th Street in Watts, was the most crime-ridden housing project of the study, with a crime rate 15 times higher than Rose Hills Courts, a 100-unit project at Florizel Street on the Eastside.

Rose Hills Courts is an anomaly because of its relatively small number of units and its location, nestled in a hill below Debs Regional Park in Montecito Heights, Kandell said.

In the study’s figures, each of the four Eastside housing projects had lower crime rates than the five housing projects studied in South-Central Los Angeles and Watts. However, the low numbers from Eastside projects do not necessarily mean that less crime occurs there, Dunworth said.

He attributed those figures to the reluctance of some Latinos to call police. There may be underreporting of crimes in the South-Central and Watts housing projects as well, he said.

Although the study supported commonly held views about excessive crime in housing projects, it refuted assertions that there was limited police response in the projects. Based on the number of arrests made in the projects, the level of police attention in those areas were at least equal to other parts of the city, the study said.

Incidents of Crime

Here is the RAND study’s housing project breakdown of serious offenses known to the police per 1,000 residents, by annual average from 198 to ‘89:

HOUSING PROJECT

Estrada Courts: 73

Pico-Aliso: 93

Ramona Gardens: 83

Rose Hills Courts: 33

Avalon Gardens: 294

Hacienda Village: 514

Imperial Courts: 261

Jordan Downs: 269

Nickerson Gardens: 283