Overcoming Hurdles to Taking Back Streets

It sounded as though Los Angeles Police Lt. Fred Tuller, supervisor of the San Fernando Valley’s anti-gang detail, had heard the question before.

“I’d like to say no,” he said, “and I don’t want to raise the fear of the public any more than it is now . . . But it doesn’t have to be on a dead-end street marked up with graffiti.”

We’d all like to say no, but we all know the answer. Sure, it can happen here. It happens here with frequency. Maybe the sad details haven’t been quite so stark, quite so traumatic, but do family and friends of Ramtin Shaolian grieve any less than the family and friends of 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen? Does the family of 2-year-old Ryan Stacy Brown?

Shaolian, you may recall, was the 16-year-old Taft High student gunned down at Fallbrook Mall this summer for nothing more than verbally disrespecting a street gangster. Little Ryan was shot dead in his mother’s arms in April, 1993, caught in gang cross-fire after an Easter egg hunt at Balboa Park in Encino.

The cliche is “senseless violence.” Last Monday, the same day that Stephanie’s slaying on Isabel Street in Cypress Park made national news and her wide-eyed innocence came to symbolize the cost of gang violence, it wasn’t hard to find more examples.

The Times’ Valley Edition that day carried two stories about other fatal shootings. Featured across the top of B1, it was hard to miss Jeannette DeSantis’ story on the drive-by shooting at Pop-eye’s Chicken in Reseda that left 16-year-old Samuel Barrios dead and bystander Henry Hagwood, a father of eight, wounded in the neck.

But did you catch the little story inside about the shooting Sunday afternoon in Palmdale? There were five paragraphs.

It seems that two men got into an argument near the intersection of 5th Street East and Avenue Q-6. One man had a gun. Willie Perkins Jr., 24, was shot, and managed to drive a short distance, crashing his car into another auto at a gas station. He died.

Down the street, a man had fallen. Ladislao B. Hena Jacobo, 33, was walking home, minding his own business, when he was struck by a stray bullet. He died six hours later at High Desert Hospital.

To live in greater Los Angeles is to risk the epitaph of innocent bystander. It’s not as though I’m saying anything you didn’t already know.

All of this, but especially Stephanie’s killing, has prompted another cliche: “It’s time to take back our streets!”

So say the outraged politicians and pundits and average citizens. The other day, Mayor Richard Riordan, Police Chief Willie Williams, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and others took a bold stand against the murder of little children by gang members. Councilman Mike Feuer proposed the creation of an anti-gang “czar” to go with our county health “czar.” Is Peter Ueberroth busy? Is Jesus Christ coming back any time soon?

Well, maybe some good will come of it, but shouldn’t this have been a top priority, oh, about 15 years ago? Meanwhile, we hear the ugly rumblings of vigilantism, often with a racist bent.

One moment the city is stunned by former Detective Mark Fuhrman’s vile words. The next, Daily News columnist Dennis McCarthy, usually a sensible, sensitive observer, all but suggests that the police function as vigilantes: “If that means cracking some heads and stepping all over the civil liberties of some gangbangers, so be it . . . It’s time to play by their rules, which mean no rules. Anything goes.”

Their rules? Drive-by shootings?

This comes at a time when the LAPD has taken pains to explain that the Fuhrmans of the force are aberrations. It’s a shame when bad guys get off because a cop might have cracked heads or whatever. To stoop to the level of criminals can make it hard to tell the good guys from the bad.

Lt. Tuller, while understanding McCarthy’s anger, did not seem heartened by his commentary. “When I come to work,” he told me, “I come as a professional. And I think that as a department we act professionally.”

I hope people noticed a letter to the editor published Thursday in The Times. It bears repeating:

“I retired from the LAPD in 1989 after 25 years of service,” wrote George Blishak. “I live in Toluca Lake and have no desire to join the LAPD expatriates who have moved to Idaho and elsewhere . . .

“To me, the key to this brutal crime lies in the statement, ‘It is common for 100 or more gang members to congregate at night in the middle of the street. . .’ In the 1960s and 1970s, if even eight or 10 gangsters congregated, concerned neighbors would call the police and we would respond.

“We violated no one’s rights, but would very often discover illegal activity, usually weapons or narcotics or outstanding warrants. Gangsters would go to jail and the neighborhood would feel a degree of security. If there was no criminal activity (and I fully understand that some people will find this hard to believe), we usually told the gangsters, ‘Thanks for your cooperation,’ and went about our duties.

“It seems now that some sections of Los Angeles have been surrendered to the criminal element. . .”

If we really want to take back the streets, perhaps we should wonder how we lost them. Seems to me that if you lose the schools, the streets will follow.

When I graduated from high school in 1974, California was among the nation’s leaders in spending per pupil and academic performance. In a generation, California has fallen to 40th in spending and near the bottom in performance; truancy and violent crime committed by youths is way up. Little wonder that parents who can afford to, opt for private schools, but that, too, hurts the public system, deepening community divisions. Public education is crime prevention.

We might also want to put more cops on the street. Los Angeles--both the city and the county--is notoriously under-policed. This doesn’t have to be so. Indeed, twice in recent years a strong majority of L.A. voters has called for an increase of property taxes to fund more police, but fell short of the required two-thirds. Similarly, measures to improve police and school facilities also fell short.

The two-thirds standard, a legacy of the sacrosanct Proposition 13, is an increasingly tough obstacle to reform and a frustration to the community’s sense of purpose. Anybody for taking back the Democratic process?

Money isn’t the key here. It is, to use another timely cliche, a matter of seeking the common ground--and holding it. We can’t take back the streets hiding behind gated communities and relying on rent-a-cops for protection. On Friday, another columnist, my colleague Al Martinez, put it this way:

“We all live on Isabel Street, and will for a very long time.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.