NEWS ANALYSIS : Crime Spawns Fear That Claims Victims of Its Own : Violence: Incident upon incident unnerves the region. But often the perceived threat is greater than facts warrant.

If the dilemma at the Newport Beach pier is any indication, Southern California’s battle with crime may be as much in our heads as in our streets.

By almost any measure, the seaside landmark is among the safest gathering spots on the coast, drawing everyone from tourists to fishermen 24 hours a day. But the occasional intrusion of gangs--and their unpredictable, indiscriminate exploits--has undermined that perception of security.

Twice last summer, disputes among rivals ended in gunfire at the pier, leaving one man dead and four wounded, including an innocent bystander hit in the back as he tried to shield his wife and toddler. Some onlookers sought cover by scrambling over the pier’s edge, clinging to the railing until the shooting stopped.

The late-night attacks were frightening reminders that even the tony Orange County beachfront is not immune to scattershot violence. But when the Newport Beach mayor and its merchants’ association urged that the pier be shut after dark, Police Chief Robert J. McDonell hastened to put their fears in perspective.

The shootings may have been unsettling, he said, but only three crimes were reported at the pier in the first six months of 1993.

“The numbers suggest it’s not a significant problem--it just isn’t,” said McDonell. But he conceded: “It really doesn’t matter whether crime is up or down statistically. The real measure is how safe you feel. Perception is reality.”

With one shocking assault after another, Southern California has come to feel like a more dangerous place, unnerving a region that has long cherished its carefree, fun-in-the-sun image. Whether it’s three Pasadena youngsters gunned down on Halloween or a San Clemente teen-ager speared in the head with a metal paint-roller rod, violent crime has changed the way people think about their security, about each other, about their homes.

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You can see it in the Westside woman who drives with 911 punched into her car phone so that she needs only to hit the send button if a problem arises. You can see it in the civilian employees at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys station who were so apprehensive about walking to their cars after dark that sworn officers had to accompany them.

And you can see it in the young woman who left the hardships of East Germany for a job as a Beverly Hills nanny but could never relax in her luxurious accommodations. It was not crime that put her on edge, but the very devices that were supposed to protect her--the electric gate, the high-tech alarm, the private patrols, the handgun stashed away, just in case.

“It was clean and nice and the people were polite, but they lived in, like, a prison to feel safe,” said Ina Richter, 24. “I thought it was even more frightening.”

Like a contagion, the climate of fear has spread across the country, where polls show that gun-related violence is now the American public’s top concern. Keenly aware of the growing anxiety, President Clinton this month called for sweeping new restrictions on firearms, while debates rage over the impact of violent images in movies, TV, video games and “gangsta” rap.

With gunfire erupting at beaches, malls, parks, movie theaters and in tidy suburban tracts, Southern California officials have tried to restore a sense of comfort by drafting bans and curfews that keep gangs at a distance. MCA, the entertainment giant, spent $100 million on its new CityWalk attraction--a stylized strand of shops and restaurants built on the premise that Los Angeles’ best qualities can be recreated in a controlled environment, free of the city’s scarier elements. For thousands of residents, the solution has been simply to flee.

But just how real is the threat?

As reactions grow more extreme, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish perception from reality--to determine the point at which caution gives way to hysteria. Is the person who ventures to “dangerous” places being confident or naive? Is the person who avoids such places being prudent or paranoid? To what extent has fear itself become as destructive as the bloodshed that fuels it?

Measured empirically, crime in America is a mix of contradictory statistics that can support almost any conclusion. How such numbers are interpreted depends on one’s assumptions about life in an urban setting, about what level of violence is tolerable and about what risks are unavoidable.

In the last decade, for instance, the annual murder tally in Los Angeles has jumped nearly 35%, hitting an all-time high of 1,094 homicides last year. But the city’s murder rate--30 per 100,000 residents--remains on par with that of many less-sensational locales, such as Little Rock, Ark.; Norfolk, Va., and Cleveland.

As reports of carjackings sweep Los Angeles, they have spawned a cottage industry of protective gizmos that range from macho-looking mannequins to electric cables that can jolt a thief right out of the driver’s seat. Despite perceptions that the crime suddenly has reached epidemic proportions, the number of carjackings in Los Angeles has risen from 4,169 in 1990 to 4,761 in 1992--about a 5% annual increase.

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Worries also have been sparked by a handful of violent ATM robberies, including the fatal stabbing last March of a pregnant woman at a Sherman Oaks bank machine. But a survey last year by the California Bankers Assn. found that there were just 499 ATM crimes statewide--or one robbery for every 1.2 million transactions.

“You can try to calculate these objective probabilities, but it doesn’t matter,” said Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at Cal State L.A. “How much we’re living in Dodge City and how much we’re living in the Crystal Cathedral is ultimately a subjective estimation.”

Although violent crime of all sorts has shaped those perceptions, gangs have stoked the public’s fears like no other menace.

The cryptic scrawl of their graffiti has covered communities with messages that most people cannot read or understand, a constant reminder of the control that has been lost. The popularization of gang style--the baggy pants, the backward caps, the hooded jackets--has made it more difficult to distinguish between the good kids and the bad.

Above all, the reckless nature of gang violence--the drive-bys, the stray bullets, the innocent bystanders--has created the impression that crime is not merely going up, but that it is getting more random and bizarre. The brazen spray of semiautomatic gunfire, even when it does not hit flesh, penetrates the mind.

“We’re not really living with danger so much as the specter of danger,” conceded Kory Olson, 37, a bond-trading clerk from Reseda, as he strolled through the Beverly Center with his infant daughter. “But it eats at you after awhile.”

It is a specter reinforced every time gang violence spills onto the public spaces that are supposed to offer a respite from big-city life. Because people do not expect bloodshed at the beach or the mall, they are left feeling especially vulnerable by intrusions such as these:

* A melee between rival gangs erupts at the Venice Beach boardwalk, forcing police in riot gear to shut down the popular tourist landmark. Up the coast, a gang gunfight at a crowded Ventura beach sends hundreds of sunbathers scurrying for cover. Twice, gang brawls clear Malibu’s Zuma Beach, once when about 70 youths from the San Fernando Valley clash, leaving one of them with a screwdriver wound to the chest.

* Shoppers dive for cover when a suspected gang member opens fire from the upper level of Orange County’s Westminster Mall into a knot of youths below, seriously wounding a 13-year-old girl in the back. Gunfire echoes through the ornate Westside Pavilion, the Long Beach Plaza and the Plaza in West Covina, where a wild shootout between rivals sends 15 bullets ricocheting through the mall.

* Thousands of youths rampage through Magic Mountain in an hours-long frenzy that is egged on, authorities say, by gang members trying to panic the crowd by tossing firecrackers and popping paper bags. A picnic involving 200 gang members at Pasadena’s Brookside Park deteriorates into a chaotic gun battle with police as at least six suspects and three officers exchange fire. In Encino’s Balboa Park, a 2-year-old boy attending an Easter egg hunt is killed during a gang shootout as his mother tries to whisk him to safety.

“The perception, if not the reality, is that the safe enclaves are falling like dominoes,” said a 40-year-old TV writer from Santa Monica who asked not to be identified.

“I keep hoping that it’s all been blown out of proportion, but I’m also a pragmatist and a husband and a father and I have to concern myself with protecting my family. Anywhere that people from all over the city congregate in large numbers, in the back of your head is the thought that it’s only a matter of time before someone gets shot.”

That worry has been heightened by the fact that violence in Los Angeles, more than almost anywhere in the nation, is diffused throughout the suburban sprawl.

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Crime in most U.S. cities tends to resemble a doughnut--high concentrations in a confined urban core, ringed by placid suburbs. But in Southern California, powerful social, economic and demographic forces have reshaped cities across the region--a transformation that has brought deeper pockets of poverty to the suburbs and has made gangs more seductive to a wider range of youths.

With high-crime neighborhoods spreading fear in communities as far-flung as Venice, Pomona, Van Nuys and Long Beach, the danger never seems far away. Of the record 803 gang killings in Los Angeles County last year, more than 500 were outside South-Central and East Los Angeles.

“I feel it’s getting bad here, but where else could I go that’s less bad?” lamented Juan Vasquez, a 49-year-old salon owner who lives in tranquil Newbury Park, just west of the Ventura County line. “It’s an everywhere situation.”

To be sure, a disproportionate share of the violence is still concentrated in the most impoverished neighborhoods of Los Angeles’ central city, where perceptions often run counter to the anxiety gripping more peaceful suburban tracts. Although residents of crime-plagued communities worry about their safety, they also learn to live with the danger by sometimes minimizing what actually may be a serious threat.

“In many cases, if the families we see did not engage in these psychological defense mechanisms, they would be so distressed they would not be able to function,” said William Arroyo, a USC psychiatrist who specializes in the traumatic-stress disorders of children. “When you don’t have any other options . . . denial can be a very effective way of coping.”

On the other hand, in communities unaccustomed to the terror of gangs, even infrequent incursions can fuel hysteria.

The San Fernando Valley, once the epitome of American suburbia, had 53 gang killings last year; a decade ago the toll was in single digits. Orange County, an area built on the promise that Los Angeles’ mistakes could be avoided, had 42 last year. In the Antelope Valley, a wind-swept expanse of desert dotted by Joshua trees, authorities have identified individuals from more than 200 Los Angeles-area gangs. Last year, there were five gang homicides; only one had ever been logged before.

“It’s a very big psychological factor up here, because only a very small percentage of people are actually touched by it,” said Billy Pricer, an ex-sheriff’s deputy who now runs the Antelope Valley’s largest anti-gang agency.

“On the one hand, I want to say: ‘Hey, chill out, don’t worry about it’ . . . but you also kind of want the old days back, days when you didn’t have to lock your doors and you could trust your neighbors. Now it’s like everybody’s thinking: ‘I could be the next victim.’ And they’re right, they could.”

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The vastness of the metropolitan area makes it all the more difficult to put such fears in perspective.

Although nearly 9 million people live in the 88 cities on Los Angeles County’s 4,000-square-mile landscape, most horrors tend to get attributed to the caldron of “L.A.,” especially when viewed through the prism of TV news. The region is so immense that a string of anecdotal reports from disparate communities can create the impression of a violent onslaught, whether or not the particular crime is actually on the rise.

“Most of us don’t have a transcendent view of what goes on all over town, which makes it very difficult to get an objective take on a bad story,” said Michael Collins, senior vice president of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau. “The bad story may represent a truth, but it’s hard to know if you’re talking about a trend or a series of incidents that reflect the exception more than the rule.”

Even someone living in one of America’s safest cities can be unnerved by a few scary attacks.

When Rhonda Ogden left Culver City in 1981 for Thousand Oaks, she found a bucolic town of leafy boulevards and expansive parks, where white-collar professionals kept horses in back-yard corrals.

“I was in heaven,” said the 35-year-old mother of two, whose husband runs a sheet metal plant. “You could go out at night and have an ice cream. You’d see families out. It was really nice.”

Even now, after a decade of rapid growth, Thousand Oaks remains a pleasant place. Its median household income is $56,856, almost double that of Los Angeles. For three of the last four years, its crime rate ranked as the lowest of any U.S. city with a population of more than 100,000. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department likes to boast that patrol cars still get sent on late-night dog-barking calls.

Today, Thousand Oaks also has gangs.

There are not many, maybe four or five small cliques, each composed of youths from a range of racial and socioeconomic groups. They have a combined membership of fewer than 150, and detectives know virtually all of them by name.

But after two gang killings in the last two years and a baseball-bat attack on four teen-age girls last month, the relative safety of Thousand Oaks gives Ogden little comfort.

She now locks her doors when driving, avoids nighttime trips to the market and cringes every time she hears the sound of a car backfiring. Neither does she allow her 13-year-old daughter to go to the park by herself, or the public library, or the Oaks shopping mall.

“There’s no safe places anymore,” Ogden said. “Even if they’re safe, they don’t feel safe.”

Every day, Tommy Bell pays the price of doing business in a fearful place.

He sells water purifiers door-to-door in the San Fernando Valley, a job that by its nature is punctuated by frequent rejection. But if all the iron doors, barking dogs and locked gates did not pose enough obstacles, Bell also happens to be black.

“I try to look pretty harmless,” said the 45-year-old peddler, whose powder blue T-shirt bears his name and toll-free number. “I always wear short pants so they can see I’m not carrying anything. I usually have a clipboard in my hands. I always step back when they open the door. I lower my voice as I back up, so people have to kind of lean out the door and not be afraid. . . . But I realize I’m still going to have to work twice as hard as most people.”

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After 17 years of cruising the Valley, he has come to accept that certain people will never open the door. He does not like it, but at least he understands the mentality. “They’re fearful,” he said. “They don’t know who you are.”

But there is a kind of person he cannot tolerate, one whom he considers a far greater threat than any criminal roving the streets. They open the door, they smile, they take his business card--and then they call the police.

“A couple blocks away I get pulled over by a cop, telling me they just got a call about a suspicious black man selling stolen merchandise,” he said. “And I mean, that’s happened not just once or twice. You think they’re real honest people--they’re nice, they’re not cussing you out--but they’re stabbing you in the back. I give a gangbanger more respect than that.”

Jerry Tello, a Monterey Park therapist who counsels victims of violent crime, makes presentations across the nation about the double-edged nature of fear.

“Fear can be your friend,” he tells his audiences, which range from law enforcement authorities to at-risk youths, “if it helps you be more aware and more cautious when you need to be.

“But if it inhibits you from doing normal, everyday, human things,” he warns, “like greeting one another and treating people with respect and dignity, then fear has become your enemy.”

It does not help that some good citizens who have stood their ground to gangs have suffered for their mettle.

A Ventura County man who volunteered to remove roadside graffiti became the target of spray-painted threats after Caltrans posted a sign crediting his family with the clean-up. And the vigilant manager of a North Hollywood apartment complex, hailed as a heroine for helping to put five gang members behind bars, was fired--and later rehired--after the building owner said her negative comments about the neighborhood were scaring off prospective tenants.

But Tello contends that the alternative--withdrawal, retrenchment, exodus--will only bring more of the same.