Valley Perspective : Gimmicks Won’t Protect You on These Mean Streets : Some Try to Cash In on Fear but Being Alert and Involved Are Better Bets

Several highly publicized carjackings in the San Fernando Valley last year led to all manner of ambulance-chasing sales pitches for devices that would keep crooks at bay. For the most part, these items offered little more than a costly and false sense of security. They might have even added to the dangers faced by their owners. How?

Consider the supposedly lifelike mannequin who is assigned to ride next to you to deter crime. These might tend to make their owners less vigilant. And any reasonably observant crook might see the situation precisely for what it is: potential victims riding around with plastic dummies in the passenger seat. We also have a problem with those expensive devices that render hijacked cars undrivable. Think about it: They disable the car when the gun-toting carjacker is right there with you.

Now, a variation on the same “We Sell Safety” theme has sprung up. This time the entrepreneurs are targeting people who have legitimate concerns about their children. These worries increased last summer with the news of sexual assaults on children in Pacoima. In November, parents learned that a serial child molester had been operating in the West Valley since February. That same month, an 8-year-old girl was kidnaped outside her Woodland Hills home and choked to death, allegedly by a neighbor.

In the wake of all this, folks taking advantage of the fear are hawking such products as a hand-held electronic alarm that emits a shrieking noise when activated. Fine, but which of the following two scenarios would you, as a parent, really prefer: to have your child trained to sprint as fast as possible away from suspicious strangers while screaming at the top of their lungs, or to have him or her standing there, trying to remember where they put this little alarm, in the book bag, lunch bag, coat pocket, pants pocket. . . .?

Another gem is a beeper-type device that supposedly monitors a child’s moves and allows a parent to page a child. Let’s see if we’ve got this straight. There’s your child, nine-tenths of the way to school, and he or she then has to stop and wander around to find a pay phone to respond to a page? A glorified pager is supposed to make a child safe?

Perhaps the worst, however, was the martial arts/self-defense instructor who made this statement about children: “They can defend themselves. It’s not that hard to take out a human being.”

Really? Perhaps the instructor had not heard about the case of Veronica Estrada, the 29-year-old Santa Clarita martial arts instructor who was so adept at tae kwon do that she was a nationally ranked black belt. She was choked to death in Canyon Country last month by a perpetrator who remains at large. So much for kids with a few hours of self-defense courses being able to defend themselves from determined adults. Worse, those children might be overconfident enough to ignore dangerous situations.

In reality, as usual, there are no easy answers or foolproof solutions. The good news here is that the best advice is also the least expensive.

As instructor Ellen Snortland wrote last month on the Times Op-Ed page, children need to be taught to scream “911” or “I need help!’ at the least sign of attention from a stranger. Better to yell and make a scene and be embarrassed--and safe--if it turns out to have been a false alarm.

The School-Community Alliance near El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills has taken steps that can be duplicated. It stations adults around a four-block radius of the school to watch over students. In Sylmar, parents at El Dorado Elementary School are gathering every day to escort their children.

There is also another laudable development that could be put to good use on behalf of the Valley’s children. Between January and December of last year, the number of Neighborhood Watch block captains in the Valley doubled to 3,330.

We can’t think of a better resource: People who can poll neighborhood adults to determine who among them might be available as escorts, for street-corner vigilance or to offer rides to school.

Things can be made much safer for children in the Valley, but gadgetry and gimmickry are not sound solutions.