‘This Noise (Thump) Must Stop!’

“I can’t take this. It’s like torture in my apartment. This is like living in a disco.”

It is 9:30 on a Saturday night. The woman’s voice is pitched high with fury. The music thumping through the walls of her Wilshire district apartment is giving her a headache. She has a plane to catch the next day. She wants the police operator to know that “THIS HAS GOT TO STOP.”

A patrol car has already been sent once to quiet her neighbors. The operator promises to dispatch another.

All night long the calls pour in to the downtown Los Angeles police communications center from Angelenos desperate for a little peace and quiet. From Sunland to San Pedro, from Laurel Canyon to South-Central, in every accent, they plead for the CD players and the deejays and bands to fall silent.

They are sheepish and apologetic about bothering police. They are angry. Most of all, they are weary.

“Is there any way you can get them to realize they need the courtesy of letting us rest without the boom, boom?” begs one Mid-City woman.

Whether it’s a measure of the city’s penchant for lively celebration or of its rudeness and incivility, roughly half the calls to Los Angeles police on a typical Saturday night involve complaints about blaring music and raucous parties.

In many outlying communities, it’s not much calmer. Some small cities pay the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department to run weekend patrols devoted entirely to quelling boisterous gatherings.

On a warm weekend night in Orange County, at least a third of the calls to Huntington Beach police are party complaints, while in Ventura County they are common as well.

Crime may be down, but party noise remains an annoyingly invasive constant, setting neighbor against neighbor and gobbling up significant chunks of law enforcement time, since the music-abused tend to call police rather than risk a personal confrontation with their tormentors.

The party count is greatest in poor, dense neighborhoods. Yet affluent areas have their own brand of party hell. In the canyons, music bounces around the hillsides for miles, and in the wealthiest enclaves, mansion owners sometimes illegally rent out their homes for lavish, catered wedding receptions and corporate parties attended by hundreds.

The ear-splitting notes come in every musical taste--from rock to ranchero to rap--and accompany every size gathering--from a few people standing around a car radio to hundreds of youths jammed into small suburban yards for underground pay parties with deejays.

Sometimes the festivities turn lethal, as in the case of an LAPD officer who was fatally shot in August while sitting in his patrol car waiting for backup units to help break up a loud wedding party attended by gang members in southwest Los Angeles.

A few weeks later, a sleeping 9-year-old girl was killed when a man fired shots through her front door because he was angry that the child’s father had told him and his music-playing buddies to quiet down at 3 a.m.

However trivial a thundering band or sound system may seem on the scale of urban problems, when there is no escape, it can turn a night at home into a brutal experience.

Just listen to the calls to Los Angeles police on this particular Saturday night.

“The neighbors on both sides have had music on so you can’t even hear yourself think,” a San Fernando Valley man moaned to the operator after letting out a prolonged sigh. “It’s been going on for seven hours. Ma’am, it’s just unbearable. We have children who can’t sleep.”

The long-suffering sometimes held out their phone receivers to give operators a sound bite. “I just opened my front door. Can you hear that?” a Sylmar caller wanted to know.

Often, there was no need to open the door. The voice of one man could barely be heard above the blasts of music coming from his neighbor’s yard. It sounded like he was calling from a rowdy bar rather than his living room.

Near Westmoreland Avenue west of downtown, they were pounding drums. “BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. They do this practically every Saturday night,” groaned a man.

Down on South Central Avenue, the elderly wanted a respite. “This is a senior citizen building, and the old people are sick and they can’t sleep,” one tenant complained tiredly about the partying in a nearby building.

As the night wore on, the calls became more intense. “I reported loud music a long time ago,” a Westlake Avenue woman sputtered around midnight. “It’s getting louder. You know it’s really, really ridiculous. It’s really very, very obnoxious. It’s totally disturbing our peace and quiet.”

Super Sound Systems Are Harder to Escape

Urban dwellers have been annoying their neighbors with loud music ever since the radio and phonograph were invented. But the pumped-up muscle of modern sound systems and the grating quality of some contemporary pop music make it harder than ever to escape a neighbor’s good times.

“You could crack walnuts with the vibrations from some of those sound systems,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dave Anderson, who oversees a weekend patrol unit that does nothing but handle party complaints in the city of Paramount.

Bass notes crash over blocks like a tsunami. Houses several doors removed from the parties literally shudder from the sound.

Beyond cranked-up amplifiers, there may be another element at work.

“On the most abstract level it has something to do with the lack of public consensus, the lack of cultural consensus about what the rules of behavior are,” said USC anthropology professor Andrei Simic.

He cites two factors: the national emphasis on individual rights and the increasingly polyglot nature of American society.

Simic recently returned from Germany and Austria, where, he said, people simply don’t make noise late at night because it isn’t tolerated. The societal rule is not defied because there is enough cultural homogeneity to enforce it.

Los Angeles has no such homogeneity but is rather a stew of global cultures, including some that prize a lively public night life and some that don’t.

Moreover, Simic said, “the individual ethos in America has gone so far” that the clash of conflicting personal rights has become something of a cliche.

Indeed, law enforcement officers say their admonishments to turn the volume down are often greeted with the response: “This is my house, I can do what I want.”

Louie Alvarez’s South-Central band, Seven Black Cats, has played a number of backyard weekend gigs that were shut down by police for being too noisy. The band performs in homes because most of its fans are too young to go to clubs and Alvarez resents the fact that neighbors call police--who have occasionally arrived wearing helmets and holding clubs.

“What about being able to throw a party and have fun?” he retorts when asked about a neighborhood’s right to quiet. “We don’t live in suburbia. Most of the neighborhood is used to hearing gunshots or helicopters or parties.” Drive around South-Central on a summer Saturday night and it seems like there is a backyard party every second or third block. Baptisms, birthdays, weddings, visiting relatives, baby showers--they’re all excuses for bashes, often with colored lights flashing and deejays or live bands playing loudly--very loudly.

“They had a party over there and over there and nobody says nothing about it,” teenager Jessica Altamirano said recently, gesturing at neighboring houses as she questioned why police put an end to her sister Maria’s 16th birthday celebration.

“Before we had the party, we told everybody on the block and they said it was OK,” she added.

But someone was not happy to be hearing quite so much of the festivities and called the LAPD.

The second time officers arrived at the 56th Street house, about 11:30 p.m., they sent everybody home. Teenage girls stumbled across the dark street in their platform shoes as a large piece of sound equipment was carted to a police cruiser and loaded into the trunk to be booked as evidence.

Officers ticketed the deejay for loud noise and cited Maria’s brother under a 1991 ordinance that allows the city to assess hosts a fee for services if police return to a party.

Four Newton Division police units were on hand, a common turnout for breaking up a party. Although it was a pretty tame-looking gathering of fewer than 50 people, including children, police say they never know what they will encounter, especially after party-goers have been drinking for hours.

Earlier that night, a helicopter unit and 15 Newton officers descended on a packed parking lot on San Pedro Place to disperse about 200 revelers and a live band that had been disturbing the neighborhood.

The show of force can seem excessive to those on the receiving end. “There were a lot of cops, as if something bad happened,” Altamirano said of the response to the 56th Street party.

Sometimes it is excessive. The largest judgment ever rendered against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department--nearly $16 million--was based on deputies’ actions in breaking up a 1989 Cerritos bridal shower. After the 1995 civil verdict, the department adopted a policy of videotaping the scene when deputies disperse large neighborhood bashes.

Low Priority, High Frustration for Police

Law enforcement officers say that they would just as soon not crash so many parties.

“We would much rather be doing something a little more beneficial than telling people they should have common sense about how loud they play music,” said Sgt. Michael Oreb, a Newton patrol supervisor.

The fact that it falls to patrol units to handle party calls means that on a busy crime night, it can easily be an hour or more before officers respond. Noise complaints are low priority, automatically put on hold if more pressing calls come in, and they can stack up on police operators’ computer screens like planes waiting to land at Los Angeles International Airport.

The public knows that. Police say that callers will sometimes falsely claim they’ve heard gunfire at a neighbor’s gathering, just to get a swift response.

Getting authorities to react quickly can be even tougher if the problem involves illegal rentals of private homes for parties.

Since that is a zoning violation--conducting a commercial business in a residential zone--it becomes a matter for the city Building and Safety Department, which usually sends inspectors to investigate weekend parties only if it has advance notice of the event.

“I’m giving up. I’m moving,” said Connie Brown, an exasperated Hollywood Hills resident who said she and others have complained for years to the city about noise and disruption coming from one neighborhood house that is routinely rented out for private parties. “I’m leaving L.A. and this is part of it. The city does not function. Period.”

After an Internet Web site advertising the home as a party venue was discovered this year, the city ordered the owners to stop, which neighbors say they finally have--at least for now.

LAPD Vice Officer Georgia Odom has investigated several complaints about party houses referred by Building and Safety or City Council staff. Much of the time, she said, people don’t realize they are breaking local laws, even when they are renting out their homes virtually every summer weekend.

Even if they do know, the payoff for the homeowner is substantial and the penalty if caught, relatively minor.

Odom said commercial party planners seeking memorable settings for their clients’ events will pay mansion owners $5,000 to $10,000 to use the house and grounds for a single night. The city fine can range up to $1,000, but is usually no more than $200 to $300, according to building and safety officials. Moreover, the owners may not even be fined if they stop when warned.

Such was the case in a neighborhood of $15-million houses, where the owner of a 30,000-square-foot mansion used a slick color brochure to advertise her home for hire in “serene Holmby Hills.”

A wedding reception or corporate party was held at the opulent residence nearly every week for months, including one company bash for 250 that Odom attended undercover. Entertainment included chamber music and a 40-piece swing band, which Odom said could be heard “way down the street.” The owner stopped the rentals and was never cited.

The entertainment was a bit more enterprising at another party Odom attended undercover at a large Bel-Air home. The owners, who were away, rented the house for a weekend event that turned out to be a porno barbecue featuring live sex acts. Admission was $15.

The organizers, who had been warned not to hold the barbecue, were cited for, among other things, filming the sex without a permit.

At underground pay parties, where up to 500 teenagers can be shoehorned into a backyard, law enforcement doesn’t have to go undercover. Lt. Ben LaMothe of the Century sheriff’s station in southeast L.A. County said once organizers collect the $5 to $10 admission charge, they often welcome deputies and are perfectly happy to announce that the party is over.