Vigilant Street Cameras Drive Drug Dealers Away

Police called it a dope supermarket, a notorious corridor on Yucca Street in the heart of Hollywood where cocaine dealers ruled the streets and residents hid behind their doors from gunfire after dark.

Law enforcement targeted the area, making scores of arrests and pressing owners to board up vacant buildings that had become drug dens. But impatient neighborhood leaders felt that more had to be done, so they decided to take up the fight themselves.

Drawing a lesson from the Rodney G. King episode, landlords mounted video cameras atop their apartment buildings and began conducting around-the-clock surveillance of their streets, turning over footage of suspected drug activity to police.

The video campaign on Yucca Street is a novelty for Hollywood, but those who launched it are hardly alone in their enthusiasm for electronic surveillance. Other groups in Los Angeles are expressing interest, and several communities across the country already have embraced the controversial crime-fighting strategy.

“You can’t commit crimes if you know Big Brother is watching you,” said James DiIorio, a property owner who spearheaded the year-old camera project.

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On Yucca Street today, banners announce the new vigilance. “Buy Drugs, Go To Jail,” one declares. “Entering Video Tape Surveillance Zone,” another proclaims.

Most of the dealers who once filled the corners are gone. Some have been arrested with help from the cameras. Others have relocated after seeing clientele drift away.

Many who live and work in the area say the video surveillance, combined with the police crackdown, helped bring calm to their neighborhood, a block from legendary Hollywood Boulevard and the landmark Mann’s Chinese Theatre.

“A few years ago, I wouldn’t have walked through this neighborhood at night,” said Victor Barajas, 24, a tenant at the Lido apartment building, where a second-story camera scans the street corner below. “Now, sometimes we go out and get fresh air.”

But the notion of Big Brother snooping around the nooks and crannies of neighborhoods has raised old questions about the balance between civil liberties and the rights of citizens to live free of fear.

“I am troubled by having behavior monitored directly or indirectly by the government, absent probable cause,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a USC law professor and constitutional law expert.

Civil libertarians take issue with one particular aspect of the Yucca Street approach in which police identify suspected drug buyers through license plate numbers captured on film.

Police send warning letters to the registered owners of such vehicles, informing them that their automobiles have been spotted in a zone known for heavy narcotics activity.

“I object to the police sending letters to people who have done nothing but have their car in a certain area,” Chemerinsky said. “That is suspicion based on geographic association.”

Despite the concerns, the Yucca Street surveillance project has begun to garner official recognition.

Neighborhood groups and business associations from mid-Wilshire to the San Fernando Valley have contacted Yucca Street leaders in hopes of replicating the crime-fighting approach.

And the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency recently awarded the Yucca Street group $25,000 to double the number of cameras to six. The entire system will be in place within three months, with volunteers scanning their streets on monitors hooked up at a nearby police substation.

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The Yucca Street operation is part of a growing movement involving high-tech partnerships between law enforcement and communities. In the Devonshire area of the San Fernando Valley, volunteers stake out trouble spots with video cameras and two-way radios, recording illegal activity as they stay in constant contact with police.

Merchants and police in Baltimore last month unveiled their own anti-crime plan in which cameras monitor a 16-square-block area near the city’s redeveloped inner harbor.

Neighborhood activists and police also have teamed up for camera surveillance in Tacoma, Wash., and the Boston suburbs of Chelsea and Rockland.

“It’s the same thing as if officers were hiding in a bush,” said Officer Corina Hopkins, a spokeswoman for the Tacoma Police Department. “The gang members and drug dealers don’t know when they are being monitored. And that is, hence, the deterrent effect.”

In Redwood City, on the outskirts of San Francisco, police are pursuing a related strategy--listening for crime, using acoustic sensors that detect gunfire and immediately transmit the signals back to headquarters.

On Yucca Street, drug dealers--most of them gang members--once conducted their business with little concern for law enforcement.

The problems earned the area a dubious distinction two years ago when a survey y the city’s FALCON narcotics program identified Yucca corridor as one of Los Angeles’ most drug-infested neighborhoods.

As a result, the FALCON unit--with staff from the Los Angeles Police Department, the city attorney’s office and the Department of Building and Safety--brought its operation to the area.

Narcotics officers made nearly 500 arrests and confiscated hundreds of grams of cocaine and heroin during an intensive 18-month campaign. Prosecutors pressed landlords to fence off open lots and board up vacant buildings, places where drug dealers congregate. And building inspectors sought to clean up neglected properties by citing owners for broken windows and other code violations.

But several landlords, frustrated at the continued presence of drug dealers, began to discuss their own methods to fight the problem.

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Recalling how a videotape captured the police beating of Rodney King, the group decided to try surveillance. About 30 landlords and business owners contributed $15,000 to buy three cameras.

Today, authorities and residents alike agree that each crime-fighting tool played a role in bringing order to Yucca Street, in particular barriers erected at three intersections that block drug buyers from passing through the neighborhood.

But many landlords and residents point to the arrival of the surveillance cameras a year ago as a defining moment in the neighborhood’s shift to activism.

Officials with the Los Angeles Police Department praise the use of cameras, banners and other measures.

But not everyone is convinced.

Some Yucca corridor residents say the presence of cameras has simply pushed some of the illegal activity elsewhere, a point that police concede. Other residents complain that drug dealers still conduct business at a couple of spots along Yucca Street.

Nonetheless, landlords who initiated the project hope to spread that same message to neighborhoods beyond their borders.

The activists are working with business owners on Hollywood Boulevard to duplicate the video surveillance strategy.

“This is our community. This is our problem,” DiIorio said. “No one is going to solve it for us. We have to take responsibility for ourselves.”