A Little Band of Hawks

Hollywood has been going to hell, to the best of my knowledge, for about the past 25 years.

It looked seedy to me when I first came to L.A., except maybe up in the hills where the homes are, and it still looks pretty seedy.

But seedy wasn’t and isn’t the only problem plaguing the community that was once a synonym for glamour and beauty and other necessities of the time.

Gangs, prostitutes and drugs slowly sucked the wonder from the name until all that was left was a fast-fading memory of what used to be.

Much of L.A. has been going in the same direction, with neighborhoods succumbing to the slow deterioration that a drift toward crime encompasses. Hollywood is probably more noticeable because of what it was before its main street became a freak show and its alleys open-air drug markets.

But there’s always been a strong voice rising from the debris of yesterday’s glitter calling for action to save the community from becoming a total slum.

One of those voices now belongs to Joe Shea, a 50-year-old online editor who has devoted years of his life to fighting crime in his own neighborhood and, by extension, in his community. He’s one of those people who’s madder than hell and not going to take it anymore.

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L.A. County has enough community activists to fill a city the size of Pocatello and I’ve heard from most of them over the years.

Some are so bright their heads glow, others are borderline schizos. I’ve seen them chain themselves to buildings, moon a mayor, ride a horse into City Hall, fist-fight at council meetings and get hauled off to padded cells.

For some it’s a full-time job and occasionally an obsession. They go after everything from graffiti to barking dogs and can’t wait for the next round of trouble to start bells ringing in their heads.

Shea falls into several categories at once. He’s a bright guy who, with some others, created an online daily newspaper called the American Reporter.

He’s also a full-time, unpaid, unbelievably dedicated community activist who can back you into a corner for eternity and tell you what’s wrong with just about everything.

Shea is president of the Ivar Hawks, a Neighborhood Watch club on Ivar Avenue that went after crime in Hollywood a few years back and may have to hit the streets again if a new LAPD policy reverses what they’ve already accomplished.

He lives with two computers and six cats in a small, pleasantly messy apartment across the street from where Nathanael West wrote “The Day of the Locust” and down the block from where “Sunset Boulevard” was shot.

Shea became politicized when he moved to Hollywood from upstate New York in 1983 and found that he couldn’t walk through his own neighborhood without being hustled for drugs.

“It happened so often,” Shea said the other day over coffee in his apartment, “that I finally lost my temper. When a dealer asked ‘Whadda you need?’ I said, ‘I need you to get the hell out of my neighborhood!’ ”

Shea helped start the Ivar Hawks and pretty soon they were making citizen’s arrests, shaking up the management of the Paladium and forcing the closure of the bar that was a hangout for drug dealers.

A couple of months after they got the bar shut down someone shot out the windshield of Shea’s car, but he just kept right on shouting.

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Crime is edging slowly downward in Hollywood. In the first six months of the year, it dropped by about 8%. The place continues to look pretty shabby along its street of dreams, but maybe that’ll get better too.

What’s bothering a lot of Hollywoodians now is a plan by LAPD Chief Bernard Parks to eliminate a “senior lead officer” program in which one officer acted as a liaison between community improvement organizations and the department.

Parks wants to put the lead officers back on patrol, where they would teach junior officers community policing skills. But people like Shea want them to continue as vital links between the people and Parker Center.

The Hawks don’t patrol anymore, Shea says, because they don’t have to. They’ve been able to go to their own senior lead officer, identify problem areas and stand by while those areas were cleaned up.

“Now,” he says, “we’re told to dial 911 when we spot trouble and that’s not going to work.”

Shea just gets by in life, earning a minimal living from the American Reporter. His bank balance hovers around the neighborhood of $1, and he’s been without hot water or a stove for two years due to nonpayment of a gas bill.

“I’ve never really had a strong desire to make a lot of money,” he said unnecessarily the day we met. “I’ve just always wanted to help people.”

Shea sees what he calls “a great new America growing in the streets of Los Angeles” and doesn’t want the movement to slow or die.

“Confrontation is [being] replaced over time by trust and partnership,” he wrote in an American Reporter editorial obviously aimed at Chief Parks. “The man or woman who would destroy that will never be forgiven.”

Hollywood has slowly been crawling out of the hellfires of its own creation. Whether or not it will ever be a part of that “great new America” remains to be seen. But if it ever is, they ought to build a statue to guys like Joe Shea and his little band of Hawks.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com