Police Firing Range Triggers Complaints From Neighbors

Standing in the frontyard of her Granada Hills home, Lorraine Phillips can hear a barrage of gunfire. The incessant pop, pop, pop of handguns and the louder explosions of shotguns go on some days from early in the morning to late in the evening.

“It sounds like firecrackers, like someone set off a whole slew of them--pop-pop-pop-pop,” said Phillips. “If you go out in your yard and sit to read the newspaper, it’s very distracting. You can’t enjoy yourself.”

So call the police, right? Wrong: It’s the Los Angeles Police Department doing the shooting.

A year after the LAPD opened a $29-million training center in Granada Hills, some neighbors have had enough.

“At 7:20 this morning, in my backyard it sounded like ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ ” said John Moranville, president of the 500-member Knollwood Property Owners Assn.

“It’s a war zone,” said Frank Kohler, a four-decade resident of the area. “It sounds like when I was in Okinawa in 1945.”

Nick Kurek, a 32-year resident of Granada Hills, said it is annoying to have the peace of his neighborhood shattered by gunfire several times a week.

“When you have guests and you are sitting down to dinner, and all of a sudden gunfire breaks out, you have people ducking for cover,” Kurek said.

The Granada Hills firing range--located in the new Edward Davis EVOC Firearms/Tactics Training Facility at the base of the Van Norman Bypass Reservoir--is essential to ensure that police officers are well-trained in the use of deadly force, officials said.

Every one of the department’s nearly 10,000 officers must requalify with a handgun every other month, and recruits also use the ranges to train. The department also uses an older outdoor range at its police academy in Elysian Park.

“There is a critical need for ranges at both locations,” said LAPD Cmdr. Dave Kalish.

Kalish said the department has received so many noise complaints about the Granada Hills facility, however, that it has decided to address the neighbors’ concerns.

The facility has three firing ranges--capable of being used by 72 police officers at a time. They were built with a roof and three walls, but the back end of the ranges, where officers stand when they are firing, is open. Now, said Kalish, the city has set aside nearly $100,000 to install large sound-absorbing panels at the ranges.

“We think this will mitigate that problem,” said Kalish, adding that the retrofit is planned only in Granada Hills, source of the complaints.

But even as LAPD officials are talking about retrofitting the center, there is increasing pressure to expand its use.

City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who can hear gunfire from her home near Elysian Park, recently sent a formal request to the LAPD to significantly reduce the hours of operation at Elysian Park’s outdoor firing range.

If the soundproofing in Granada Hills works, she said, more officers should travel to that location for weapons practice.

“If Granada Hills is soundproof, it won’t matter,” she said.

The noise problem has upset many Granada Hills residents who already feel they have had to take more than their fair share of nuisances, including two oil pipelines, several freeways, the flight path for Van Nuys Airport and the proposal to reopen a section of the Sunshine Canyon Landfill nearby.

Kurek said when he isn’t hearing gunfire from the LAPD facility or airplanes flying overhead, he often has to shut the windows of his house against the foul smell of the county portion of the landfill already in operation.

“We feel dumped on,” he said.