Even an Island Sanctuary Can’t Stem Fear of Crime : Anxiety: Although Westlake Village site is safe, residents are not exempt from worry about urban anarchy.

On “the Island,” in the center of a 160-acre man-made lake, life is a sublime existence of morning tennis matches, cocktail hours on drifting pleasure boats and midnight strolls, a world apart from America’s daily deluge of crime. But even here, from the other side of the fairy tale moat, fear seeps in like a baleful tide.

To most of the wealthy homeowners who live on this comb-shaped spit of land in the heart of Westlake Village, the Island is the only true haven from crime that they have ever known. Murder, drug crimes, assaults, common burglaries--the encroaching furies of a nation’s urban anarchy--are simply not found here. Most people leave their doors unlocked when they go out. They stroll and jog anywhere on their Island, day or night.

“I barely think about crime at all,” said John Notter, who 30 years ago oversaw the construction of this colony of 329 homes that now range in value between $400,000 and $1.5 million. Notter, a hotel owner, maintains a house on the Island which he never locks. He does not even own a key.

Such are lost liberties Americans talk about wistfully in the past tense, if they remember them at all. The ability to leave a house or a car unlocked, to walk a neighborhood in safety, to return without wondering about intruders--these are hallmarks of a departed era, small freedoms permanently unraveled by the pervasive presence of crime and its attendant anxieties.

Yet even on the Island, as newcomers from crime-racked Los Angeles and tense Southern California suburbs marvel at their newfound freedoms, many remain unable to shake a nagging sense of vulnerability. If the Island is a sanctuary from crime’s realities, it is also a marker of fear’s distant reach.

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Perhaps that is why one waterfront mansion bristles with video surveillance cameras and electronic listening devices. Neighbors debate endlessly whether to upgrade the 30-year-old gatehouse where private guards watch the only road inside. Roving security patrols remind residents to keep their garages closed. Driving off the Island into the real world, “all our shields go right up,” says one resident, Carol Kirschbaum.

In their perpetual search for sanctuary, Americans have run up against a disillusioning legacy of life in the 1990s: They may run from crime, but there is no place to hide from their own fears.

Criminologists and psychologists who chart the public’s psyche worry that crime fear levels recorded in many national polls over the past year--a preoccupation that has reached a historic peak--are not likely to ebb for years, if ever. In consequences both subtle and profound, this enduring anxiety has begun to reshape the way Americans perceive each other and society at large.

“It may seem like people go on with their lives, but if you step back, you see how much it really has changed,” said Tom Minor, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA. “What you do with your free time changes. Where you spend your time changes. You may not recognize it, but it’s a huge shift in the way you’re interacting with the world.”

Scholars predict a host of bleak consequences: Increased racism. More clinical depression. More difficulty making friends. More insular lives, away from risky public places. Less willingness to get involved in community issues. More hostility and aggression as a sort of preemptive strike.

“I don’t go downtown (Los Angeles). Ever,” said Island resident Richard Young, a contractor. “And if I need to go into the (San Fernando) Valley, I hire a van to take me. It’s just not safe. The less we have to deal with those places, the better.”

It is an attitude reflected in the results of a Los Angeles Times nationwide survey on attitudes about crime, which found last January that 60% of Americans now avoid some sections of their communities because of unalloayed crime fears.

“People may be able to control their environments,” said Judith Martin, a professor of urban studies at the University of Minnesota. “But it doesn’t make them feel any safer.”

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In Minneapolis, crime fears have inflamed suspicion of newcomers, leading some residents to blame the city’s crime problems on poor emigres from Chicago, Detroit, Gary and other Midwest towns--families who are often themselves refugees from crime. In Chicago, Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez laments that undiminished crime fears have led to a lessening use of city parks by residents and to a growing reluctance among adults to volunteer to work with troubled youths.

“It’s like inflation,” Rodriguez said, adding: “It just feeds on itself.”

There are now more than 30,000 gated communities in the United States, according to the Community Associations Institute of America. In the hills around Westlake Village’s Island, “every new development coming in wants to be a gated community,” said James Emmons, former Westlake mayor and president of the Emmons Co., a property management firm.

Despite Westlake’s reputation as a crime-free locale--its largest neighbor, Thousand Oaks, ranked as the second safest municipality of its size in the nation last year, according to FBI statistics--”people insist on the added security of a gate.”

Crime fears have bled even into artistic visions, darkly resonant.

“You see people cocooning themselves, cities turning into garrison states,” said Berkeley novelist Ishmael Reed, who plumbed the relationship of crime fears and racial scapegoating in his recent book of essays, “Airing Dirty Laundry.” “The easiest thing to do is to turn away from the problems of the cities and look for scapegoats. And when that doesn’t make it all better, we pull away even more.”

Early this year, Chicago’s Randolph Street art gallery mounted an entire exhibit inspired by crime’s free-floating anxiety. “Lousy Fear” presented the dread-inspired works of 12 artists: photographs of old crime scenes, a canvas bearing the logo “Fear Life” (TM), portraits of people standing in front of the cross hairs of a gun.

Joseph Litzenberger’s contribution was “Untitled Self-Protective Device,” a nine-foot-long Bauhaus-style steel window containing seven panes of glass, each taped with conductors leading to security alarms.

“It has no function other than to protect itself,” Litzenberger said.

A transplanted Iowan, 35, Litzenberger mines all manner of human anxieties for his inspiration. He has found fresh material in America’s obsession with crime--and in the private fear that wells up inside himself every time his wife is late from work, every time he avoids unfamiliar streets after dark, every time he has to lock up the steering wheel of his Honda Civic.

Fear, Litzenberger said, has come to inhibit Americans from revealing their inner natures, walling themselves up in their homes and inside themselves. “This is the way,” he said, “I saw society heading.”

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Americans seem to talk obsessively about moving away from crime--29% of Minneapolis residents said they wanted to move to safer environs, according to a Minneapolis Star poll last September. Yet few are motivated solely by their fears when they actually do move--only 2% identified crime as a major factor in their moves over the previous year, according to last January’s Times Poll.

“It is not so much crime pushing people out as it is safe neighborhoods drawing people in,” said Ralph B. Taylor, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University who has studied fear’s effects on neighborhoods. “It’s a distinction that gets lost because most moves are made primarily for jobs and other economic factors. But the fact that large percentages are even talking about moving to get away from crime shows how deep their anxieties are.”

Even for those few who do move out because of crime fears, their anxieties may be lessened, made more remote, but never entirely quelled.

Last May, unnerved by a recent street robbery and weary of living under the daily yoke of crime, 28-year-old Linda Potts and her family took a dramatic step out of reach for most poor Americans. Potts, her five children and her security guard husband, Wiley, simply abandoned their apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s tough South Side and boarded a Greyhound bus to start a new life in Minneapolis.

Moving in with her sister’s family in a rented house on Minneapolis’ near north side, Potts has found a measure of safety long unattainable during her years growing up in Chicago’s housing projects.

Drug dealers no longer operate in plain sight of her window. The daily staccato of gunfire and the risk of stray bullets are less of a threat in her new neighborhood of worn frame houses than they were in the canyon-like commons of the Taylor homes.

Yet fear still drives her daily routine. Two months ago, only a block from her sister’s place, a man was dragged out of his car and shot to death by bicycle-mounted teenagers in a botched drug deal. Potts hears weekly accounts of purse snatchings and assaults from neighbors and relatives. The streets of Minneapolis are genuinely safer, but, just as she did when she lived in Chicago’s Taylor homes, Linda Potts keeps inside with her children most days, convinced her old prudence is the best policy.

“I know I should feel better about being here,” she said, “It is safer. But once you’ve been in the fire, you’re always going to have burns.”

That enduring sense of fear appears to be leaving a permanent mark on some Americans, say those studying its impact. James Garbarino, a child psychologist who heads Cornell University’s Family Life Development Center, suspects that fear of crime will become as powerful an influence on this generation of Americans as economic insecurity was on Depression-era families.

“The view you develop in youth is something you take along” in life, he said.

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Some psychologists say the only way to avoid long-term problems is for adults to think more rationally about how low the odds are of being a crime victim--compared to other risks of daily life. Fredrick Koenig, a professor of social psychology at Tulane University, suggests that adults should give older children more latitude to explore their neighborhoods.

“You could at least find out who your neighbors are,” Koenig said.

Conservative experts see such individual responses as half-measures, ineffective without swifter, surer punishment of criminals and a reclaiming of lost virtues. In any case, said Patrick Fagan, family and community analyst for the Heritage Foundation, “things are going to get worse before they get better.”

On the Island, safe behind its silent field of water, the outlook is often just as bleak. On the docks, in terraced patios, inside cavernous living rooms, residents relish their security-yet worry how long they will remain safe.

One of them, Jerry Leavitt, 57, came with a realistic sense of crime’s sway on peoples’ lives. More than 15 years ago, Leavitt was a Los Angeles County public defender in Burbank. He saw the workings of the criminal justice system up close, an experience so disillusioning that he turned away, spending his subsequent career as a civil litigation lawyer in Culver City until his recent retirement.

Held up once at gunpoint, Leavitt likes to think that his two-year stint as a criminal attorney gave him an understanding of crime’s realities that few of his neighbors have. He saw how most of the violent crimes frightening Americans occur in only a few urban pockets. He understood, too, how solitary incidents are often distorted by media reports and peoples’ exaggerations.

Yet despite his intellectualization, Leavitt, too, worries about crime’s expansion. It spurred his move to the Island four years ago from a gated community in Culver City.

He had felt safe in Culver City as long as he stayed inside. But “when I went outside for a walk or anything else, I worried. Nothing really violent. But there was always a car burglary nearby, or a broken window.”

Leavitt’s life on the Island is freer. Touring the lake on his puttering electric pleasure boat, Leavitt sometimes leaves his back door unlocked. From the lake, he pointed to a woman walking on an Island street, her face buried in a book.

“You can’t do that in most places because you always have to stay aware,” Leavitt said. “Here you go for a walk, any time, and people say hello.”

But his freedom is only a relative expansion of the gated security he had in Culver City. The Island’s circular moat and its guardhouse--overlooking a bridge and the only access road inside--may allow a sense of safety within, but it ends at the waterline. And the moat is unable to ward away nightly television coverage of crime or the ominous tales relayed inside by telephone and computer e-mail.

Two years ago, when riots swept Los Angeles, 40 miles to the southeast, the guardhouse at the Island’s gate was deluged by calls from residents convinced armed gang members were on their way. Lou Lynch, who runs the Island’s security, put an additional guard on duty “to put their minds at ease. This is an affluent community. People saw themselves as targets.”

“The riots got to us,” admitted contractor Richard Young. He and his wife, Joan, a local realtor, joined several other Island residents in pressing afterward for improvements to the old guardhouse.

“We wanted more glass so the guards can see everyone coming in,” Richard Young said. “And tire spikes so they can catch anyone trying to drive in the wrong way.”

The Island’s homeowners’ association has yet to adopt the plan. But it did buy a new computer to compile lists of the Island’s regular visitors--not only residents and their relatives and friends, but gardeners, fumigators, home construction crews, pizza deliverymen. Guards now make regular sweeps through the Island, monitoring outside workers, closing garage doors left ajar, checking on homes left vacant during vacations.

“We’re probably safer than 99% of America and we’re still living in fear,” lamented Anthony Tramanto. A retired realtor, he lived on the Island with his wife, Louise, from 1968 until 1985, then returned with her three years ago after living six years on Los Angeles’ Westside.

Old-timers on the Island, the Tramantos can retell the few instances of crime that anyone here remembers--the shoreside youths who came over by boat one night and partied on their dock, the old military flare left under the access bridge that brought out the L.A. County bomb squad, the FBI fugitive who turned out to be the son of an Island matron.

They shake their heads at neighbors who want beefed-up security, at the newcomer who demanded that the homeowner’s association hire patrol boats to scour the moat at night.

“The problem is it never stops,” Anthony Tramanto said. “Once the fear bug bites you, you have to have more gates, more guards, more security. At some point you simply have to say, ‘No more.’ And then you live your life. Wouldn’t that be a change?”

Wave of Fear

* The other eight parts of this series are available on the TimesLink on-line service.

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