Motel Owners Forced to Police the Streets

* Your story “Motel Owners Split on Prostitution Issue” (June 8) missed the point by focusing on the “divided” motel owners.

I attended the meeting at the Carriage Inn, and I heard understandably frustrated and disheartened motel owners expressing legitimate arguments and complaints to the police and Councilman Marvin Braude’s office about having been “ordered to check identification and hire security as part of 27 conditions imposed by the Los Angeles City Zoning Department.” These conditions have been imposed in a feeble, but (for the motel owners) very costly, attempt to alleviate prostitution in the neighborhood.

I also heard about the new program which effectively allows the police to arrest prostitutes simply for being at the same location as they were when they were previously arrested--making that job for the police a whole lot easier. You noted that now motel management can “call police to arrest these prostitutes simply for being on Sepulveda Boulevard.”

I wonder why these motel owners (who are already busy enough trying to figure out how the heck they are going to comply with the city’s conditions) should also be held accountable for seeing to it that prostitution does not occur along the public boulevard as well? Don’t these motel owners have a right to complain when they are told they must “ease the problem of crime near their locations”?

As Albert Chiu, vice president of the Greater Los Angeles Hotel/Motel Assn. correctly pointed out, “Isn’t this what we are all paying our taxes for?”

HARRIET K. BILFORD

Northridge