LAPD Reports Identify City’s Crime Hot Spots : Police: Unreleased documents from 18 divisions include strategies for fighting serious problems.

Still-unreleased reports compiled by the Los Angeles Police Department identify dozens of pockets of violent crime in the city and recommend an array of suggestions for cleaning up those problem areas.

The reports, reviewed Thursday by The Times, draw heavily on crime statistics for violent felonies such as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Using the crime data and other information, most of it from the public record, the reports identify a number of “hot target” reporting districts, communities where police are combatting particularly serious problems, and they rank those districts by the various violent crimes committed in them.

The reports from the LAPD’s 18 police stations vary widely in content and form. Some go into great detail about the possible causes of crime, while others, such as one submitted by the LAPD’s West Los Angeles station, are extremely brief. The suggestions for action also cover a range of proposals, from increasing patrols in certain communities to building closer ties to neighborhoods so they can better protect themselves.

The LAPD has said it will release the reports next week after editing them to remove sensitive information such as details about proposed officer deployment. The 18 reports reviewed by The Times on Thursday were unedited.

Among the findings from those reports:

* Although crime in many San Fernando Valley neighborhoods is down since last year, homicides remain a stubborn problem, and some communities are afflicted by an array of other ills. Several corridors, including three in Devonshire and one in the Foothill Division, account for a large portion of the Valley’s violent crime, the reports say.

* Commanders in the department’s 77th Street station, responsible for some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods, reported progress in most areas, but acknowledged that homicides are on the rise and expressed frustration about their inability to combat certain kinds of crime. “The number of arrests for rape seems to have no impact on the number of crimes committed,” the report states.

* In that Wilshire Division, officials found that most of the division’s 59 homicides were the result of robberies, and the second-leading motive was gang-related activities.

* In the Newton Division, another hotbed of violent crime, officials identified three major corridors of violence--along Vernon, Broadway and Central avenues--and noted that four of their “hot reporting districts” have been stubbornly resistant to previous efforts to root out violent crime.

The LAPD report from the Valley’s Devonshire Division is typical of the documents, which were prepared late last year and submitted to Assistant Chief Bernard C. Parks, who heads the Police Department’s Operations Bureau.

In that report, Devonshire officials cite three problem areas: the community surrounding the Northridge Mall, another along Roscoe Boulevard and a third, which department officials call the “Sepulveda Corridor,” a long stretch of land near the police division’s southern border.

“This area is inundated with prostitution activity, narcotics trafficking and gang-related activity,” officials say in their analysis.

Commanders from Devonshire recommended 11 strategies for combatting the crime in those three areas. They range from traditional police responses--deploying additional patrol officers, detectives and vice officers--to suggesting ways for engaging the community more actively in fighting crime.

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Parks received all 18 reports earlier this year but was dissatisfied with some. As a result, he returned the documents to each of the city’s police stations, asking them to review their findings and submit revised copies to him next month. Some of those reports have been completed and go beyond ranking communities according to each type of crime to prioritizing the most violent neighborhoods in each of the 18 areas.

Although LAPD officials have pledged to release the first round of reports next week, they said Wednesday that they will edit the documents to ensure that no information is made public that might jeopardize public safety or that would invade privacy rights of anyone mentioned in the reports.

Cmdr. David J. Gascon, a department spokesman, declined to comment in detail Thursday.

“We’re in the process of evaluating the reports,” he said. “And we’re in the process of living up to our promise to release them once they’ve been redacted.”

Department officials are particularly sensitive about information contained in the documents that might be of use to criminals or that might jeopardize police officers. In a number of places, the reports have recommended that special patrols be deployed in certain areas at certain times of day.

It is that type of information, Gascon said, that might jeopardize the Police Department’s ability to fight crime. Many of the reports also list addresses where crimes have occurred. That information is likely to be deleted in order to protect crime victims, Gascon said.

Some of the reports include detailed demographic information about the race, gender, age and other characteristics of suspects arrested by the Police Department. In the Newton Division, for instance, officials report that 53% of all violent crimes were committed by black males. Women represented only 1% of total suspects. More than eight out of 10 violent crime suspects were 30 or younger, the report adds.

Although some City Council members have expressed concern about the LAPD targeting people based on their race, none of the reports reviewed by The Times recommends taking special action against suspects of particular ethnicity or based on other demographic considerations.

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The study of violent crime in Los Angeles is being funded by a federal grant, and that has given officials the ability to analyze extremely detailed information about crime inside the city.

In the Foothill Division officials identified a stretch of Van Nuys Boulevard from San Fernando Road to Foothill Boulevard as “a major source of violent crime in Foothill Area. The high concentration of low-income housing complexes, gangs and narcotics activities are contributing factors.”

In the West Valley, officials identified five problem areas and proposed solutions for each. The problems they highlighted were street robberies in Canoga Park and Encino, homicides in Canoga Park, rapes in Canoga Park and aggravated assaults in the north end of the West Valley area.

As part of the study, officers theorized as to the cause of those crime concentrations. They attributed the spate of aggravated assaults to concentrations of gangs near the intersection of Sherman Way and Reseda Boulevard. “Also, there are a variety of problem (liquor stores) in this area, which may be a contributing factor,” the report from West Valley adds.

The crime problems in the Valley, however, pale compared to those reported from some of the Police Department’s other divisions. In the Pacific Division, not one of the city’s most violent, officers reported a continuing problem with aggravated assaults in districts near the ocean.

“Aggravated assaults are largely due to the hot weather and alcohol consumption that is readily available in this area,” the document states.

In Central and South Los Angeles, meanwhile, gangs remain a dominant theme in the reports, as does the shortage of police resources to address the problem.

“Rampart Area’s workload . . . is so heavy that it causes the Patrol Division to be primarily reactive rather than proactive,” the report from that police station states.