Police, Citizen Groups Meet at Summit

Citizen activists from around Los Angeles gathered Saturday to celebrate a new level of interaction with police, but they said more needs to be done to produce the kind of community-based law enforcement that has been promised for nearly five years.

The leaders of 18 police advisory boards met with their local beat cops, Police Department officials, Police Chief Willie L. Williams and Mayor Richard Riordan during a daylong summit at the Convention Center.

Community board members said they increasingly are helping police root crime out of their neighborhoods. But they want to do more.

Take Virginia Huber of the San Fernando Valley community of Winnetka. Now that she is a member of her local police advisory board, she said, she feels the police respond rapidly to her complaints about abandoned cars and trailers. And officers answered neighborhood complaints about prostitution on Sherman Way with patrols that helped drive hookers out.

“Some of that may seem small,” Huber said after a workshop attended by more than 700 people. “But it makes a big difference in our lives.” Still, she feels resistance from some police officers to increased community interaction.

“There are a certain percentage of them out there still who seem to think we are there just to spy on them--to catch them without their boots shined or something,” Huber said, asking, “How can we break that down?”

Sgt. Dominic J. Licavoli, a Wilshire Division sergeant who trains officers to interact with their community, told Huber that some officers are still smarting from publicity associated with the beating of Rodney G. King and the 1992 riots. “The way to break that down is to just get together with them and talk,” Licavoli urged.

Later, Licavoli acknowledged that community-based policing is so far just “scratching the surface. . . . We’ve got a long way to go.”

Many of the board members, who meet at least monthly with area police commanders, said they personally must shoulder the burden of improving relations with officers.

North Hollywood representatives told one workshop that activities as pedestrian as ice cream socials and the presentation of written commendations to officers had helped break down communication barriers.

Albert Alfaro, who was credited with making the Wilshire Division advisory board one of the most successful in the city, told another workshop that volunteers must do more than wait for news about crime in the neighborhood.

He urged board members to meet regularly, form subcommittees to address specific hot spots, and call on private firms and other city agencies--like the Building and Safety Department--to intervene to solve community problems. “We are talking about a huge investment of your time,” Alfaro said. “This is not just a monthly board meeting.”

While participants agreed that the advisory boards were giving them more of a voice, a few cautioned against the groups becoming too insular.

Jaime Motta, a coordinator with the AmeriCorps national service program, said both the Police Department and the advisory boards have to do more to make sure they reach out to young people and “homeboys from the barrio.”

The Elysian Valley resident objected, for example, to a newsletter from a Northridge community group distributed at one of the workshops. The newsletter included a “criminal description” checklist, illustrated with a Latino-looking gunman wearing a fedora.

“We need some more sensitivity to not make it so much ‘us against them,’ ” Motta said.

The leader of the group that published the newsletter, Lin Squires, said the “criminal description sheet” had been obtained from the LAPD and agreed the caricature should not be used again.

Chief Williams promised that a program will be available within a few months to expand on the conference’s theme--training community members how to solve problems with the police.

Times staff writer Sharon Bernstein contributed to this story.