Fear Stalks a Suburban Idyll

Margrit Feldman is a 49-year-old mother of three who is scared stiff about crime.

Just last week, not far from her house, a teen-ager was shot in the face by a suspected gang member while driving his girlfriend home from a date.

A month ago, after parking her car at a mall, Feldman happened upon a small crowd gathered around the sheet-draped body of a man who’d been gunned down in the parking lot moments earlier.

“I say to my husband, ‘What is it going to take to make us move away from here?’ ” she said. “One of our own children dying? . . . I’m ready to go now. “

It’s the kind of sentiment one imagines must be expressed a thousand times over in scores of violence-plagued communities throughout Los Angeles. But Feldman doesn’t live in one of those places.

This is Woodland Hills.

Leafy, affluent Woodland Hills, where police will tell you there are no home-grown street gangs, and where a couple of fancy cars having their cell phones ripped out qualifies as a crime spree.

For many decent folks in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere stuck in combat zones ruled by street-corner thugs, Woodland Hills must seem about as far from trouble as the moon, a utopia to flee to--not from -- for those with the means to live there.

But you wouldn’t know that from listening to Feldman and other members of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization, which held a special meeting last week to hear a couple of Los Angeles police officers talk about crime prevention.

When it comes to crime, insecurities run deep, even in utopia.

The gathering, held on the bucolic campus of the Pacific Lodge Boys Home, was intended as a kind of Officer Friendly-promotes-Neighborhood Watch event, but as soon as Capt. Valentino Pannicia and Senior Lead Officer Steve Kegley opened the floor to questions, the mood grew serious.

There were only two questions about Neighborhood Watch, and one was critical.

“You tell us we’re supposed to be your eyes and ears,” said one woman, barely concealing her agitation. “But the other day I called about a suspicious car in front of my house, and it took four hours to get a response.”

A soft-spoken college instructor wanted to know if authorities were likely to “begin issuing more concealed weapons permits any time soon.” (Answer: No.)

A well-dressed man asked if the LAPD has a contingency plan in the event of violence after the verdict is announced in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. “Are there places you would recommend we avoid going?” he asked earnestly.

Someone suggested--presumably joking, although few people laughed--that police K-9 units be used to disperse day laborers near a local shopping center. “It’s not safe to walk there anymore,” offered a middle-aged woman. “I don’t even feel comfortable driving by there.”

But what appeared to most burden the minds of the 50 or so residents present was violent crime, especially the gang-related variety.

A teacher said she had seen gang members hanging out at a local park and wanted to know what police were doing to drive them off. The woman upset about the suspicious car in front of her house said she had heard that gangs from Canoga Park and Reseda are increasingly rolling into Woodland Hills.

“It seems like we’re being surrounded,” she said.

Others brought up recent violence at the Fallbrook Mall, in neighboring West Hills, where three killings have taken place since 1993, including one in June, when a 16-year-old Taft High School student who went out to the movies with friends was gunned down. The accused triggerman is reputedly a member of a tagger group that goes by the name Every Woman’s Fantasy.

Of the other two slayings there, Pannicia said, one involved a lovers’ triangle and the other was the result of a dispute over a stolen gun.

“That doesn’t make the mall, as some would have you believe, a gang hangout, because it simply isn’t,” he said.

It was a challenging evening for the officers. Not because the residents were hostile to police. Far from it. Yet the police found themselves walking a fine line between preaching vigilance and trying to allay fears.

Seems it’s hard to tell people in utopia that, relatively speaking, they don’t really have a major crime problem, given the regular reports of mayhem that pervade the Valley and other parts of Los Angeles.

“If people here seem on edge,” explained homeowner group president Gordon Murley, “it’s because they’ve seen other once-peaceful communities lose the battle against crime already.

“What we hope to do here is hold the line.”