Fighting Crime and City Hall at the Same Time

We usually don’t think of recycling centers as magnets for crime.

In most places, they’re not. But in some neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, recycling centers have become the enemy of residents trying to drive out drug dealers and prostitutes.

This view of recycling centers is just one of many unusual aspects of an anti-crime campaign being launched against clusters of lawlessness in the vast area south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

The grass-roots campaign, to extend over a year, has been organized by the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, a 6-year-old organization of African American and Latino adults and high school and middle school students.

Wednesday, with coalition members as guides, I saw how crime breeds in the rubble of civilization.

*

I drove to 82nd and Main streets with the coalition’s executive director, Karen Bass, Sylvia Castillo, the assistant director, and Rose M. Works, a member of the staff.

Bass said nearby residents had complained to the coalition about a recycling reception center where cans, bottles and other refuse littered the front yard and reached the front porch of a small bungalow.

A hand-lettered sign on a front fence advertised the prices per pound: aluminum cans, 11 cents; plastic, 50 cents; glass, 5 cents. There were no customers at that moment, but usually a mixture, ranging from working people to shopping-cart homeless, sell throwaways.

Some residents, Bass said, have complained that drug dealers and prostitutes congregate near this and other recycling centers so they can sell crack and sex for a few dollars newly earned from discards.

But, as my guides explained, it’s more complicated than that. They gestured south on Main Street, toward motels and liquor stores. Prostitutes work out of the motels, they said. The drug dealers hang out around the motels and the liquor stores. “It’s a mall of drug dealing,” she said.

I left Bass, Castillo and Works and walked over to the recycling center. Edgar Perez, who runs the recycling center with his father, was standing on the front porch. Perez told me a different story. “I don’t have that problem,” Perez said. Drugs and sex were on sale at the corner a couple of years ago, he said, but no more.

*

Maybe so. But you wouldn’t find a recycling center like his in the more affluent parts of the Westside or the San Fernando Valley. Recycling centers there are ecologically correct models of neatness. Nor would you find liquor stores with drug dealers on the sidewalk or motels that rent their rooms an hour at a time.

That’s because wealthier and better educated residents understand how to exert influence through City Council offices, the mayor and, most important, through the bureaucracy and its maze of laws and regulations.

Some of these activists lead neighborhood organizations that drive City Hall nuts. Others hire lawyers or lobbyists or make campaign contributions that get their phone calls returned.

When you and your spouse are working long hours for low pay, you don’t have time to fight City Hall.

Even so, many try. Lillian Marenco, who has lived in South Los Angeles for 18 years, told a recent Community Coalition meeting her experience.

For 10 years, she said, “I was a prisoner in my own house. I locked myself in. People stood outside selling drugs, everything. . . . My neighbors said, ‘You are a prisoner of your own fears.’ ” So she began working with her neighbors, pressuring the city to act.

To be effective, they needed coaches, campaign managers. Her neighborhood group became part of the Community Coalition. Paid organizers, financed by government funds and private contributions, now teach how to develop political muscle.

This isn’t the usual hyped-up war on crime, where politicians promise safety for all.

These people know that society’s ills aren’t being cured by this phony war. What they can try to do is eliminate breeding places for crime in their own neighborhoods--and to force an often indifferent government bureaucracy to help them.

I’ll follow their efforts in the months ahead.