Slaying of Venice Activist Proves Danger of Truth-Telling

Someone out there must be giving himself high-fives for a good night’s work.

Not anyone you’d care to know. Someone whose idea of a good night’s work is putting a few bullets into a man whose business was his neighborhood’s business.

The dead man’s name was Jim Richards. His neighborhood was the 12 square blocks of a rough part of Venice called Oakwood, and his business was showing and telling the gang-and-drug crime and the official misrule that went on there.

In his online Neighborhood News newsletter, Richards named names and showed faces. His mission--it was nothing less--was reclaiming the neighborhood. His newsletter sometimes read like a police blotter--”They then proceeded westbound on Indiana. . . .” He was known to sleep with a police scanner on and sometimes got to the scene of the evening’s mayhem before the cops or the paramedics did.

He belonged to the Model Neighborhood Program and the Community Police Advisory Board, but police aren’t ready to say that he was killed to shut him up. His acquaintances have not been so reluctant. I e-mailed someone on his newsletter distribution list, who messaged back with this: “Hi--Sorry but I am afraid to call anybody re: the neighborhood. already the note is on another person’s door this morning that says “you are next.”

What is it about this killing that has even the BBC interested? Surely not just the irresistibly L.A. elements: murder near the roller-blading Venice shore, anti-crime crusader shot down in his own driveway at 4 o’clock in the morning, still wearing his sweats, just home from a workout at an all-night gym.

I think it has to do with the city’s unwritten privacy pact.

You move here to be left alone. You pretend not to see me, I’ll do the same for you. Maybe a nod of the head if we both pick up our mail at the same moment. What passes for neighborliness in other parts of the country, like the Midwest town where I grew up, is sheer nosy rudeness here.

And there’s the defeating geography of distance. Compton’s crummy schools? Not my kid, not my problem. Pico-Union people lost their jobs because of the bus strike? I gotta car, what do I care? Drug deal going down at the mall? How do I know it’s drugs, and anyway, I’m not dumb enough to call the cops and get stuck in some court hoo-hah over some punk doper who’ll probably get off anyway.

In Los Angeles’ courtrooms, in the first half of the last decade, three gang-murder trials in 10 wound up as dismissals or acquittals because witnesses were afraid. Too many evening newscasts began with footage of yellow tape and chalk outlines and sound bites like “ . . . was scheduled to testify . . . “

You can cheer someone like Jim Richards and wish there were more like him. You can admire him at the same time you think he was something of a busybody fool for meddling, for violating the privacy pact, for not just cashing out and moving out after 31 years and leaving it for someone else to handle. But you can’t deny what a rare bird he was here, to make himself into a semiprofessional citizen for the sake of everyone else who wouldn’t.

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Council member Ruth Galanter’s office, in asking for more police patrols and gang injunctions in Oakwood, calls Richards the publisher of the Neighborhood News.

The Internet has made “publisher” an elastic word, just as “journalist” no longer means a news reporting professional but anyone with an audience and a megaphone and, usually, an ax for the grinding.

Yet Richards’ killing is proof anew that any effort at truth-telling, to a world audience or to 12 square blocks, is a perilous trade. Across the world last year, 36 journalists were killed. Another 84 were thrown into prison. Last night, in the safety and comfort of Beverly Hills, several journalists who might have been among them were honored by the International Women’s Media Foundation for their courage.

Burundi journalist Agnes Nindorera has been repeatedly arrested, her equipment seized. A government official once told her that if she kept on she’d be shot in the head. Kamira Zydykova, in the old Soviet region of Kyrgyzstan, served a month in a labor camp, was banned from reporting for three years for exposing official corruption, and was fined the equivalent of her newspaper’s annual budget. British reporter Marie Colvin stayed behind in East Timor after other reporters left, convinced that by being the world’s witness she could protect refugees.

How difficult it is to protect the witnesses, these women all know--and Jim Richards may, to the last, have suspected.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com