Crime Rises 21% in Public Housing Projects as Police Patrols Decline

Crime reports in Los Angeles’ public housing projects have climbed 21%, while the number of Housing Authority police officers has declined and many areas have no patrols for 12 hours at a time, city officials said Monday.

The problem has prompted City Council President Alex Padilla to call for an examination of the authority’s police deployment practices.

“The resources we are giving the Housing Authority projects are insufficient,” Padilla said. “People in our housing projects deserve the same level of public safety services as the rest of the city.”

Late Sunday night, 70 to 80 people threw rocks and bottles at several LAPD officers who were arresting a man at Jordan Downs, a project in Watts, the police said. At least one person was arrested and an officer was cut on the leg, the police said.

Raymond Palacios, who heads the authority’s police force, said his officers probably would not have had the same problems if they had been there because they know most of the tenants.

The number of authority officers patrolling the city’s 17 housing projects has declined in the last few years from 76 to 50 because of inadequate federal funding and difficulty recruiting and retaining officers, Palacios said.

To thoroughly patrol all of the projects, home to 8,200 families, the authority needs about 120 officers, Palacios said.

“The people in public housing are terribly underserved,” he said. “We are doing everything we can. Our department is one of the lowest paid in the county, so it is difficult to retain officers.”

The starting salary is $2,800 a month, he said.

A funding shortage also has forced the authority to reduce overtime, which has further eroded patrols, officials said.

The agency once had nine squad cars on night patrol, but now often has three or four. Regular patrols are limited to the four busiest projects: Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs and Imperial Gardens in Watts and Aliso Pico in East Los Angeles. Even at those projects, patrols stop from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, officials said.

In the other projects, a liaison officer is assigned to attend tenant meetings and hear complaints, but there are no regular patrols.

Donald Smith, the authority’s executive director, said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provides a small fraction of his policing budget, and the LAPD and the city are expected to make up the difference.

LAPD Deputy Chief Maurice Moore said he believes his agency has always helped patrol the projects and can take up the slack from the reduction of authority officers.

But authority Sgt. George Holt, president of the Supervisory Peace Officers Assn, said the LAPD has been unable to fill the vacuum.

“It’s beyond crisis,” Holt said. “The LAPD is expected to step in, but they can’t. They are short of officers too.”

The increase in reported crime is for the first six months of this year. There were six killings during that time, one more than in the same period last year.

“On any given weekend, we don’t know what is going to happen,” Padilla said. “It might be a quiet night or it might be a weekend of terror.”

Sandra Obando, who heads the tenant association at San Fernando Gardens, said gangs have moved in.

“There have been a lot of drive-bys, every day, practically,” she said. “I can’t say anything else or they will kill me. I have been threatened. My life is in danger.”

The shortage of regular patrol officers means it is more difficult to forge trusting relationships with residents, and LAPD officers sent in for emergencies have even less of a relationship, said Brad Ponsford, director of the Housing Authority Police Officers Assn.

Some city officials wondered whether that was a factor in the Sunday night melee at Jordan Downs. The police said the unruly crowd confronted the officers, who called for backup. Officers in riot gear were sent to the scene.

But several Jordan Downs residents, who gathered outdoors Monday to try to piece together the sequence of events, disputed the police account. They said the officers provoked the crowd in their handling of Herbie Moore, an 18-year-old suspected of stealing an inflatable playpen. The residents said they poured out of their homes to protest, claiming that the police were using unnecessary force in the arrest.

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Times staff writer Daniel Hernandez contributed to this story.