Insecure About Safety

The 1995 bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City rattled Americans and shattered many illusions about the government’s ability to protect its citizens. In Los Angeles, the City Council was not immune to the fears--it promptly bought metal detectors to screen for weapons at the doors of its ornate chambers.

But three years later, with the shock of the deadly bombing fading into memory, the safety devices remain in crates in a storage room. To this day, anyone can walk into the City Council chamber with a concealed crowbar, knife or gun.

Such is the ambivalence of public officials in Los Angeles and elsewhere when it comes to balancing safety with freedom and public access. They buy metal detectors. Then they don’t use them.

Riverside Shootings Raise Concern Anew

But the issue of safety in public facilities has again been thrust onto the front burner by the alarming shooting that injured six people earlier this month at Riverside City Hall.

A man dismissed from the Parks and Recreation Department, for which he had coached chess part-time, has been accused of storming an unprotected room where several Riverside City Council members and others were meeting. The gunman was finally shot down by police.

Now, Riverside city officials and many other government leaders are renewing discussions about security in public facilities. Although there is a popular consensus that threats of violence are increasing, many other issues complicate talks about how to increase safety.

“It’s a tough thing, because we are a public entity and we want to be accessible to the public,” said John Ferraro, president of the Los Angeles City Council. “We also have to think about safety, but we also have to consider if [protective measures] will really prevent anyone who is trying to get somebody. And we have to consider cost.”

Action Lags at L.A. City Hall

Nowhere is the conundrum more evident then in Los Angeles. Here, council members agreed to spend $11,000 on several metal detectors. But in the three years since, they have never discussed where or when to use the devices.

In the meantime, the mayor and council moved out of the historic City Hall, which is undergoing seismic renovation. The security question “sort of got lost in the shuffle,” said Ron Deaton, the city’s chief legislative analyst.

After the Riverside shooting, Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr. asked that the discussion of safety measures be reopened. The review should include a discussion of whether safety devices should be part of the $300-million remodeling of City Hall, which is principally designed to make the structure earthquake safe, Ferraro said.

In the meantime, city lawmakers are not totally unprotected. Visitors must wait to be ushered into council members’ locked inner offices. And council members have “panic” buttons at their desks for emergencies.

Los Angeles officials need not look as far as Oklahoma City or even Riverside to be concerned about violence. Three months after the federal bombing tragedy, a disgruntled city electrician shot and killed four supervisors at a downtown yard and warehouse.

Just last month, a security consultant hired after the shooting at the city yard called for security improvements at City Hall and 30 other municipal facilities. Essentially, the report says Los Angeles should depend more on electronic security systems at night, that it should arm some of its uniformed security officers and use a beefed-up safety squad to patrol many outlying buildings.

With a $4.5-million price tag over three years, it remains to be seen whether the City Council will approve the enhancements. At a minimum, Svorinich said, he will push hard to install the closeted metal detectors at City Hall.

Injuries to Bystanders Are Among Concerns

“One of the concerns I have is the innocent bystander or tourist who gets caught in an act of terror,” Svorinich said. “What do you tell the family and those who survive an incident like that? That we knew better but chose not to act? I would find that unconscionable.”

Another massive and, perhaps, massively under-protected building in downtown Los Angeles is the county’s central Superior Court, at 1st and Hill streets.

The sprawling courthouse experienced its own violent episode in 1995 when a Woodland Hills doctor shot his wife to death in a hallway during a break in their divorce proceeding.

In the three years since, court administrators have planned to install metal detectors. They even bought the devices.

But getting the detectors in place has proved far more difficult.

It took court officials nearly three years to find the money for personnel to operate the detectors. It was not until this fall that the state Legislature finally located $8 million needed for more safety employees downtown and at several other courthouses.

But Superior Court officials said the devices at several entrances will be worthless if more than a dozen other doors are not secured in the nine-story courthouse.

Those restrictive measures, including blocking and alarming doors and installing security cameras, will cost another $770,000. Court officials have asked county Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen for that money and an additional $1 million to improve security at other county courthouses.

Of 22 locations in the county with Superior Courts, just five--in the Antelope Valley, Burbank, downtown, Norwalk and Torrance--do not have magnetometer and X-ray machines for weapons screening.

Victor E. Chavez, assistant presiding judge of the Superior Court, said the need for the improvements is grave. “We are in desperate need here,” Chavez said. “Each day you just cross your fingers and say, ‘I hope it doesn’t happen here.’ ”

Janssen said in an interview that he believes the money for the courthouse security measures can be found “within a few weeks.”

But even rigorous safety measures can’t be foolproof.

At the Compton courthouse, one of the most tightly guarded in the region, deputies and security guards patrol the hallways. The public is screened at the door by a metal detector and X-ray machine and video monitors scan much of the building.

Yet in June, James Eugene Moore smuggled a homemade wooden knife through the door. When a jury convicted him of charges related to a kidnapping and assault, he flew into a rage and, during a scuffle, plunged the weapon into the chest of a sheriff’s deputy. As Moore went for the throat of another deputy, a third shot him to death.

Sgt. Robert McLin, who oversees security at the building, said there is little more deputies could have done.

“If it was up to me, there would be a moat around the building, and everybody would be stripped naked with full [body] cavity searches,” McLin said. “Even then, though, that doesn’t stop someone taking a shot at the building.”

Even in Washington, high security at the Capitol proved penetrable this summer, when a deranged gunman shot his way past guards at a metal detector, killing two police officers.

And no matter how much buildings are protected, there is always the possibility of violence erupting outdoors.

In 1995, a man shot and wounded his ex-wife outside a Pomona court after a child custody hearing. The next year, another man shot the mother of his 9-year-old son in Riverside while the child watched. The incident occurred just steps outside metal detectors in the city’s family court.

Rob Quist, deputy court administrator for the Los Angeles Municipal Court, says that detectors should not be viewed as a cure-all. But he believes the devices help to deter the many people who habitually carry weapons.

11,000 Items Kept Out of Courtrooms

In the third quarter of this year alone, deputies refused to let nearly 11,000 items into Los Angeles municipal courtrooms. That included guns, knives, forks, chemical sprays, brass knuckles, scissors, razors, screw drivers and at least one stun gun.

“Most of these people just have it in their pocket, not to do any immediate bodily harm or with any specific intent,” Quist said. “But people can flip out and if they have a weapon with them, it can be much more difficult.”

Quist said an untold number of such impromptu attacks are probably prevented by disarming the public at the courthouse’s front door. However, angry individuals who are “intelligent, rational and funded . . . are going to get through any kind of security,” Quist said.

With the thicket of issues and competing interests surrounding the security question, it is not surprising that various government operations have responded idiosyncratically.

Nearly a decade ago, Los Angeles County officials installed metal detectors and a higher railing to separate the public from the Board of Supervisors. Some supervisors were even chauffeured in bulletproof cars for a time, until they decided the heavy armor plating was too costly and made the vehicles perform poorly.

In the state Capitol, meanwhile, galleries overlooking the Senate and Assembly have metal detectors. But the floor of the Legislature and most of the halls of the historic state office building are accessible without passing through such security. And the Legislature has repeatedly rejected attempts by Gov. Pete Wilson and others to install a perimeter fence to deter potential terrorist bombings.

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) doubted whether a fence would be effective and noted that even the U.S. Capitol’s security measures did not prevent the two deaths. “There’s nothing safer than the U.S. Capitol, and look what happened,” said Burton, a former congressman.

Concrete Planters Erected as Barriers

At the old federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, meanwhile, the Oklahoma City bombing led to installation of bulky concrete planters and restricted parking zones to prevent vehicles from approaching the building too closely.

More security precautions may be in the offing at a host of city halls as a result of the Riverside shootings. In that city, two armed police officers now watch over City Council meetings. A committee of Riverside council members will study more substantial precautions.

In West Covina, a police officer has been repositioned to be more visible at City Council meetings. Pasadena has added a second police officer, at the back door to the council meeting room, to the one stationed inside the chambers. (The city’s police chief also is continuing a review of security.) And Burbank--which also staffs its council meetings with two armed officers--is launching a safety review.

But any actions that follow will fall mainly on the whim of the lawmakers involved. No local, state or federal agency pretends to make comprehensive threat assessments and to respond accordingly.

No Appeals Boards Have Metal Detectors

If such an assessment were made, one agency that would probably be deemed among the most under-protected is the state Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board. Denied benefits and often down on their luck, appellants before the boards are sometimes emotionally volatile and desperate. Perhaps only family courts deal so routinely with such overwhelming emotions.

Yet none of the appeals board’s 25 locations employs metal detectors. Typically, judges call the California Highway Patrol and request an officer to watch over hearings they expect to be volatile.

But judges say they can’t predict when violence will erupt. About five years ago, one woman pulled a gun, then turned it on herself at one of the board’s Los Angeles facilities.

“Everyone would like to have more security,” said one workers’ compensation judge, who asked not to be identified. “But there isn’t anything yet, and there probably isn’t going to be until somebody gets killed. That is the sad truth of all of these things.”

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Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein, David Rosenzweig and Eleanor Yang and correspondents Jack Leonard and Richard Winton contributed to this story.