For Female Cabbies, Danger Is Just Another Road Hazard

Rebecca Rodriguez was sitting in her Yellow Cab on an East Hollywood boulevard, waiting for a fare. It was a pretty average day.

But Rodriguez and the handful of female cabbies who drive the Los Angeles area are always aware that any day, no matter how average, could easily turn violent.

“As a taxi driver, I’m prepared for anything,” says Rodriguez, 42, who has had a gun pointed at her twice in her 10-year career. But, she says, “I’m not afraid.”

Taxi drivers are much like police officers--the possibility of violence is never far from their thoughts. So last week’s fatal shooting of Martin Enrique Norman, a 42-year-old driver for Long Beach Yellow Cab, was a reminder of the dangers. But it wasn’t a revelation.

“I don’t get nervous or anything,” says Rodriguez, a slight woman from West Covina whose long black skirt and buttoned-up white blouse made her look more like a schoolteacher than a cabby. “Because when the time comes for you to die . . . you can be in your house sleeping and somebody can kill you.”

Isela Jimenez, 30, of Fontana says she doesn’t dwell on the dangers either. “I can’t put my life on hold ‘cause I’m scared. I’ve got a family to feed,” says the Independent Taxi Co. driver.

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Female drivers say they are sure of one thing: The streets are no more dangerous for women than they are for men and certainly not dangerous enough to keep them from something they enjoy.

“To tell you the truth, I love my job,” says Jimenez, who helps support her parents by working as a daytime dispatcher and driving the graveyard shift--no traffic and cool weather. “I know that things happen. ‘Specially people think it’s more dangerous for women. But everybody takes a risk.”

Norman’s death is the third violent incident--and the second fatality--among cabbies in the L.A. area in the last eight months, but police say taxi drivers do not encounter an unusual amount of violence.

“There doesn’t seem to be a high incidence . . . given the thousands of drivers in the city,” says Officer Eduardo Funes, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department.

And some of the incidents that do occur, Funes adds, may be related to unlicensed “gypsy” drivers involved in illegal activities, such as drug trafficking.

Linda Small, 53, drove with United Independent Taxi in the San Fernando Valley for two years. But she quit, in part because two colleagues were robbed two weeks ago. She also is afraid of other dangers, such as the drug dealers who often hire taxis to travel around the city.

“I loved the job,” she says. “In two years I saw more of L.A. than I saw all my life. . . . But I feel it’s becoming too dangerous.”

Rodriguez drives from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. all over Los Angeles.

“It’s a job like any other job,” she says. Her husband, who also is a driver and dispatcher, once was almost robbed by men wielding screwdrivers, but the police arrived unexpectedly.

Rodriguez, however, experienced her first violent incident in March 1998, nine years after she began driving. The second one came less than two weeks later.

She arrived at a Baldwin Park address before noon, and the fare, a young man, asked her to take him to Pasadena. He jumped in the back and calmly stuck a gun through the partition, pressing it to her head and demanding that she drive him where he wanted to go.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t telling him don’t kill me or anything,” she recalls. “I was just talking to him about his school, family, how my kids were doing, their ages.”

She dropped him off at an apartment complex on East Washington Boulevard and chased after him, but the young man’s mother helped him escape through the back door, Rodriguez says.

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Two weeks later, she picked up another young man at General Hospital in Boyle Heights and drove him to Manchester Boulevard and Denker Avenue in South-Central.

At the end of the trip, he pulled a gun.

“Sorry, ma’am, but I have to do it,” she says he told her. “Leave the keys in the ignition, don’t run and don’t scream.” Then he drove away in the taxi.

“He apologized. That was nice of him,” Rodriguez says, laughing. “He was a nice guy, believe me. I was prepared for him to run away without paying, but I didn’t expect to have a gun pointed at my head.”

Drivers know that passengers often run off without paying.

“It happens, two, three times a day,” says Jimenez, who has driven for five years and has never encountered violence.

The news of any violence runs quickly through taxis’ two-way radios, and, for a while, cabbies will stay away from the area where an incident occurred. But they say they always exercise discretion in picking up clients.

Sometimes Rodriguez tells a potential client she’ll be right back, she’s just going to turn around. She comes back with her doors locked and doesn’t stop.

Jimenez won’t pick up anyone wearing a trench coat because she can’t see what the person may be hiding.

“If you’re a cab driver, you have a sixth sense,” she says.