City Attorney Honors 3 With Service Awards

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has honored three people for work in furthering law enforcement and a “fair and equitable criminal justice system.”

Harry Coleman, Farideh Kioumehr and Toshio Nakamura each received a service award presented annually by City Atty. James Hahn.

Coleman was honored for work as president of the North Hills Community Coordinating Council and for organizing a task force that has helped the Los Angeles Police Department crack down on drug dealing and gangs in that neighborhood.

“I really didn’t reinvent the wheel on this one,” Coleman said. “We must maintain the presence. . . . This just wasn’t a North Hills project. We’re doing this as a forerunner to a Valleywide approach” to crime.

Kioumehr was honored for work as founder of the Anti-Violence Campaign, a violence-prevention program at the International Health and Epidemiology Research Center in Sherman Oaks.

And Nakamura was honored for volunteer work with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division and for serving as a Neighborhood Watch block captain.

The three were among 12 recipients from the Los Angeles area honored at a luncheon Monday.

The awards were sponsored by the city attorney’s criminal justice panel, a group of citizens that provides the attorney’s office with public input and occasionally lobbies on his behalf, said Mike Qualls, an office spokesman.