Amid the Splashing and Fun at Public Pools, It Has Also Been a Summer of : Troubled Waters

The Hoover Crips begin arriving at the pool each day in the early afternoon. They come in twos and threes, all baggy clothing and menacing looks.

They hang out just outside the fence of the swimming pool, under the shade of two trees. On some days there are dozens of them, gang members drinking and talking and shooting dice in the middle of the block-long dead-end street that leads to the Sutton pool in South-Central Los Angeles.

Invariably, the anarchy of the street finds its way inside the pool area, where lifeguards in red swimming trunks watch for any sign that the mood might be turning on them.

Here, lifeguards do not blow their whistles with authority and yell at kids running on the pool decks. Instead, they speak softly to all. “Talking down,” said one pool official, “is like lighting a fuse to a bomb.”

The young boy who is running may have a brother who is in a gang. And the guards know it takes only a wisp of an excuse for the gang members to come streaming over the fence.

“It’s a power game,” said Billy Wilson, a manager at the pool at 88th and Hoover streets. “Sometimes we have to give respect in order to get it.”

In some urban pools--once a haven, a cooling-off place during the hottest months--this summer has been an uneasy and incongruent time, a season of joyous splashing juxtaposed against an ever-present threat of trouble.

As they work through a season that ends Sept. 5, the trick for some lifeguards has been to get through the summer, to avoid a mistake that could get them hurt. And the same has been true for some of the swimmers.

To be sure, Los Angeles--with 54 city-run pools and 33 operated by the county--has plenty of thriving programs, such as swimming lessons, inner tube water polo and synchronized swimming. In many areas--economically depressed neighborhoods where a back-yard pool would be an undreamed of luxury--the recreational opportunities offered by public pools are all the more precious.

Doug Brown, the aquatic director at Rancho Cienega pool, a popular facility in Southwest Los Angeles, said the key to the success of his program has been getting adults in the community to become more active in what goes on at the pool. “When the parents are involved, children are more motivated and less likely to act up,” he said.

Other areas have been less successful in overcoming gang troubles.

Ruth McManus’ front door overlooks the parking lot of Sutton pool, but she refuses to allow Demitrius, her 13-year-old great-grandson, to swim there since he was punched by a gang member last year in an argument over a kick board.

“The gangs have their own set of rules and those are not the rules I want Demitrius to live by,” McManus said.

Instead, she takes him to the county-run Will Rogers pool in Watts, which has a more structured program. But that pool also has a history of trouble.

In July, a Will Rogers lifeguard tried to restrain a youth who had been roughhousing in the pool. A band of gang members, maybe 30 in all, spotted the confrontation and came over the fence. When the melee was over, two lifeguards had been cut and beaten. One had a broken nose, another had several cracked teeth.

The next day at the same pool, lifeguard Paul Alba was trying to protect a 13-year-old boy who was being hazed by older swimmers. The guard was so severely kicked and beaten by gang members that he slipped into a coma. Alba has regained consciousness but, more than a month later, is undergoing rehabilitation treatments.

Although officials did not directly link them, the attacks happened in the midst of widespread displeasure over a county decision to charge pool admission fees for the first time. After widespread coverage of the melees, enough private funds were donated so that swimmers at Will Rogers and 13 other county pools in disadvantaged areas could be admitted free for the rest of the summer. Funding for next year remains in doubt.

Elsewhere across the nation, violent incidents have sparked outrage at the intrusion of crime into places where it was once considered a daring act for a swimmer to direct the spray of a cannonball dive toward the lifeguard stand.

In New York City this summer, there have been a number of sexual assaults--dubbed “whirlpooling”--in the public pools. The assaults--in which a group of young males surround a single female and take off her bathing suit top and in some cases attempt to rape her--are a continuation of last summer, when 17 such attacks were reported at New York’s public pools.

In Washington this year, a concerted effort is being waged to keep pools safe after six children, ages 5 to 14, were shot in a single incident last summer. The shooting rampage, which involved children shooting at other children, was believed to be gang-related. Now, police patrol the perimeter of the pool regularly.

“I feel a lot safer because the police are here all the time,” said 11-year-old Nick Makle, who dove into the pool last year and swam underwater to escape the spray of bullets.

In Milwaukee, sheriff’s deputies have confiscated two dozen weapons, ranging from knives to sawed-off shotguns, at the city’s pools and beaches. In June, four lifeguards were beaten by more than a dozen swimmers at one of the public pools.

In the Los Angeles area, there are regular notations in daily logs kept by pool management that allude to violence lurking nearby. One, written June 27 at the Sutton pool, reads: “Gang fight outside pool in parking lot facing pool. Emergency. Closed pool.”

In the Pacific region of the city pool system--which includes an area south of Downtown and goes as far west as Venice--there have been nearly 300 reports of break-ins, thefts and vandalism in the last four years. There have also been more than 100 incidents including gang fights, sexual assaults, weapons confiscations and drive-by shootings. And those are just the ones that are considered serious enough to be noted in the log book.

On July 4, one of the busiest days of the year for public pools, gang members began taking over the Green Meadows pool on 89th Street in South-Central for their own private party, according to lifeguards. The gang members had gone so far as to put up sheets on the chain-link fence in preparation for a bikini contest when lifeguards convinced them to call it off. Their argument: partyers probably would be charged with trespassing and those with two prior convictions could be sentenced to long prison terms.

At the county-run Jesse Owens pool at 98th Street and Western Avenue last month, a lifeguard was threatened by a man with a gun who was extorting money from a line of children waiting to get in the pool, officials said.

The Will Rogers pool has a roped-off area for young women to swim because of complaints by teen-age girls last summer that they were being sexually assaulted.

“If we didn’t have it, some girls just wouldn’t come to the pool,” said Art Thompson, a senior lifeguard there.

The separate section has eased many of Gertie Mathews’ concerns about going to the pool for a dip with her 1-year-old daughter. “Sometimes the girls are afraid to get in the water because they don’t want to be messed with,” she said. “Guys are not allowed in the girls’ section and girls are not allowed in the guys’ section. That way there are no problems. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

At the city-run Harvard pool on Denker Avenue in South-Central, manager Danielle Upton said many young girls choose to stay away altogether.

“The guys harass them, dunk them in the water or try to fondle them,” she said. “Most young ladies get out; they’d rather stay away and not be bothered.”

At the indoor pool of Fremont High School on Towne Avenue, students taking lifeguard courses that extend into the evening are driven home in a city-owned van because of the danger of being around the school at night.

“It’s just unsafe,” said Richard Godino, aquatics director for the Pacific region of the city recreation and parks department. “They’re smart enough to say they’re not going to risk their lives just to get a job.”

At outdoor pools, the scene extends into the night as well. Pool employees in many parts of the city begin almost every morning by finding chain-link fences that have been snipped with wire cutters so gang members can have their evening swim. A repair truck makes daily rounds to patch the holes.

Pool offices are regularly vandalized and sprayed with graffiti. At the Sutton pool, lifeguards and pool managers painted the offices to cover gang markings at the beginning of the summer season, but they know that they will only find more of the same after the pool is closed for the winter.

Benches in the changing rooms are long gone because they were found at the bottom of the pool almost every morning. A tall, sturdy, chain-link fence separates pool employees from swimmers entering from the park, the better to keep the pool till from being robbed or have the telephone used with impunity.

“In most cases we are in charge only because they are letting us be in charge,” said Samuel V. Jones, assistant director of the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation. “We can’t put armed guards at every pool and keep them there. We have to depend on being able to relate to the community.”

For their part, many people who live around public pools have put aside fears of violence this summer and gone swimming anyway.

Renee Rachal was initially cool to the idea of taking her 11-year-old son Jonathan, who has chronic asthma, to Will Rogers pool to swim, especially after she heard reports about the lifeguard beatings. She said she spent several days checking out the program before she became convinced that it was the right one for her son.

“I saw the parents sitting around the pool watching their children swim and I fell in love with the program,” she said. “I’m not one of these people who is afraid to go somewhere in my community. I can’t live like that.”

Tension at the public pools is nothing new.

News accounts from more than 40 years ago tell of the agony of desegregating public pools, particularly in the South. Along with buses and restaurants, the pools were often the focal point for desegregation efforts.

In 1949, riots broke out in St. Louis when the City Council ordered the desegregation of an all-white pool. As late as 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court was ruling on the desegregation of public pools. In that case, the court ruled that Jackson, Miss., city officials could close city recreational facilities rather than desegregate them.

In Los Angeles, African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos for years were only allowed to swim on what was known euphemistically as “International Day.”

Dr. Sammy Lee, 73, the Korean American who was a two-time Olympic gold medal diver, remembers his “International Day” swims at the Brookside Park Plunge in Pasadena.

“We laugh at it now, but it was painful,” recalled Lee, 73, who now lives in Huntington Beach.

Some of the memories still rankle Lee: a pool supervisor who refused to hire Lee as a locker room attendant because of the supposition that he would be an immediate suspect if anything was stolen. And the fact that he could not attend his high school graduation party at Brookside, although he was senior class president, because it did not fall on an “International Day.”

Violence has long been a problem at Los Angeles pools as well. In 1972, a lifeguard was shot and killed at the swim stadium adjacent the Coliseum.

One particularly trouble-plagued year was 1970, when about half the city pools were threatened with a shutdown because of an outbreak of violence and vandalism. But at the time, the disturbances were caused by firecrackers and cherry bombs and glass bottles thrown onto the pool decks during the night. Now, pool officials eye gang members on pool decks and wonder what kind of firepower they have hidden under their baggy clothing.

“There have always been problems at these pools,” said Alfredo Giddens, athletic director at Fremont High School, who has worked at virtually every pool in South-Central and Watts over the last 38 years. “To deny that would be wrong. But one of the big things to happen is that the gangs used to fight, but they didn’t have the weapons they do now. You didn’t have kids coming out with an Uzi.”

Giddens is outspoken about what he sees as a lack of support by police and city officials. He said police are slow to respond to calls for help at the pools because they are low on the priority list. And, he said, sometimes they do not come at all.

“I’m still waiting for them to respond to some of my calls from four summers ago,” he said.

Lt. John Dunkin, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, concurred with Giddens’ assessment, saying that calls from the pools and parks are often bumped down the list because of a steady stream of more serious crimes.

“That’s correct,” he said. “If we have a choice between a robbery in progress and a juvenile group at a local park, the robbery gets the priority.”

Some pool officials do not even call police except as a last resort.

“We actually take a bigger chance calling the police than what it may be worth,” said Andre Brent, who oversees many of the public pools in the Pacific division. “They (gang members) will definitely be waiting on you when you’re going home. They’re going to find out who called the police.”