Street Barricades Come Down : Law enforcement: Roadblocks have lost effectiveness in controlling neighborhood drug trafficking, police say.

City workers tore out the last barricade along Columbus Street in North Hills on Saturday, bringing to an unglamorous end a controversial crime-fighting experiment in which residents gave up clear passage through their streets to keep drug dealers out.

Like similar efforts throughout the city, the Columbus barricades worked at first. They forced the area’s crack dealers onto the broad expanse of Nordhoff Street--where they were easier for police to catch--and away from residential side streets like Columbus.

But in the end, the dealers adapted. They moved their business to the perimeter of the blocked-off area. They became adept at jumping over or around the barricades, hiding out on streets inaccessible to police cars in pursuit.

“Times have changed, strategies have changed, and it’s time for us to change with them,” said LAPD Capt. Vance Proctor, whose Devonshire Division patrols the Columbus area.

The barrier fad made headlines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when great fanfare attended their first installations in the Pico-Union District and in the area around 41st Street and Central Avenue. Congress held a hearing on the issue, and even President George Bush voiced his support.

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But the roadblocks have been quietly coming down in some neighborhoods. Police captains in the three divisions--Devonshire, Newton and Rampart--where barriers were installed amid the most hoopla say the concrete-and-iron devices have outlived their usefulness.

“I think they are a disadvantage to ongoing law enforcement efforts,” said Capt. Nick Salicos of the Rampart Division west of downtown. “The dope dealers have learned to use the barricades to their advantage.”

At a ceremony to mark the removal of the North Hills barricades on Saturday, Councilman Richard Alarcon, who is opposed to such barriers, put a positive spin on their removal.

“The city of Los Angeles should not be a city of barricades,” he said. “It’s a city where people should be able to move about freely, without fear of crime.”

Miriam Rosales, who manages an apartment building next to the barricades, said she is eager for them to be removed--but not because she wants easy access to Columbus Street. In her opinion, the ugly iron gates did not work.

“Right now, the police can’t get in,” Rosales said. “All along this street, [drug dealers] take over.”

The notion of installing barricades to thwart drug dealers gained popularity in response to the exploding sales of crack cocaine in the late 1980s, said Malcolm Klein, a criminologist at USC.

“Crack dealing was all on the street,” Klein said. “It was a quick hit to sell, and if police came, all the dealer had to do was drop it on the ground and step on it.”

Particularly after police focused attention on eliminating crack houses in the mid-1980s, Klein said, drug-seeking customers took to cruising the streets, stopping just long enough for a pass-of-the-hand transaction.

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To combat the trend, law enforcement experts came up with the barricade idea, said Cal State Fullerton criminologist James Lasley. If urban thoroughfares could be made more like suburban cul-de-sacs, the reasoning ran, it would be harder for drug dealers and customers to get in and out.

The concept was never favored by some community activists, who believed that it forced residents to give up access to their streets and segregated them from neighbors. But in communities desperate for crime relief, the barricades went up nonetheless. Some were simply pipes stuck in the asphalt, others were elaborate iron gates and concrete planter boxes.

The results were mixed.

Within the gated areas, drug dealing did go down, the police captains said. Some street-beat officers still support the roadblocks, saying police have learned to get around the barricades just was well as the drug dealers. Some residents in the Columbus neighborhood were jittery about the removal, prompting police to promise to put them back up if crime increases.

Around the area of 41st Street and Central Avenue, where the city installed planter boxes joined by gates, drug dealing and violent crime went down on some blocks, but not on others. Capt. Jim Tatreau, commander of the Newton Division, said the best results registered in areas targeted with heightened police and Neighborhood Watch activity.

Now, Tatreau said, he and others believe that the increased attention, not the gates, were the more powerful crime deterrent.

“I lean now toward taking them down because we’re not prepared to maintain them and they’re not the most beautiful creations that were ever designed,” Tatreau said.

Several of the barriers in the neighborhood have been torn down or vandalized, he said, although some remain in fairly good condition.

The barriers in North Hills did reduce drive-by shootings, Proctor said. “But as the years went on, the [shooters] started to adapt.”

With both ends of Memory Park Avenue in North Hills blocked off, for example, gangs began to hold meetings inside the barricaded area, shielded from police and free to terrorize residents, said Ana Salcido, an apartment manager in the area. Similar problems prompted the removal of barricades in the tough Blythe Street neighborhood of Panorama City.

And at Columbus and Nordhoff, Proctor said, crack cocaine customers still come from as far away as Pasadena and Simi Valley.

In response, law enforcement officials are modifying their own tactics. In North Hills, for example, police now plan to control crime in the area with beefed-up street visibility, community outreach and the opening of an LAPD substation in the neighborhood.

In the Westlake area of Los Angeles, police have begun putting up wooden sawhorses with big signs that label parts of the neighborhood as “narcotics enforcement” areas.

The idea, said Rampart Capt. Salicos, is to keep the streets passable while making it clear that the area is being scrutinized for drug activity.

“It’s just like football and just like war,” said criminologist David Chapman, who teaches at Cal State Los Angeles. “When somebody comes up with a good offense, somebody else is going to come up with a good defense. It’s just a matter of time.”