A New Focus on Dumping

Instead of brooms and bulldozers, city officials hope a motion-sensor camera and a recorded message will be enough to keep clean a Watts alley normally blocked by discarded junk.

The camera, mounted on a power pole in the alley near Wilmington Avenue and 110th Street, is the first of 11 such cameras that will be installed in alleys and near abandoned buildings throughout South Los Angeles, officials said Wednesday.

As a photo is taken, the camera plays a recorded warning. “Stop! This is the LAPD ....We have just taken your photograph. We will use this photograph to prosecute you. Leave now.”

Similar cameras have been installed in other Los Angeles-area neighborhoods, including San Pedro, Rampart and Hollywood. The Watts cameras are thought to be the first paid for with money won from a settlement against a “nuisance property” owner.

The city attorney’s office bought the battery-powered watchdogs, each costing about $3,500, using money from Homeside Lending Inc., which owned a dilapidated house a block away.

The cameras, which will be maintained by Los Angeles Police Department senior lead officers, are viewed more as a deterrent than as a prosecutorial tool, Deputy City Atty. Kevin Gilligan said. The steel-encased camera is designed to catch any movement in the alley within 100 feet. The images may include taggers and trash dumpers, but it will also probably snap shots of dogs, cars and people just passing through.

Five similar cameras will be placed in other South Los Angeles alleys to catch and deter illegal trash dumping and graffiti; seven cameras will be mounted near vacant buildings to discourage squatters.

Lynwood’s seven cameras have been monitoring trouble spots for about a year and “are such a great deterrent, [taggers] don’t even get to the wall,” Sheriff’s Deputy J.D. Del Gadillo said.

Del Gadillo said the motion sensor has been timed so that the cameras snap photos only of people who linger near a wall, not of passersby.

No one has been prosecuted in Lynwood with photos from the cameras, he said. In Los Angeles, illegal dumpers and taggers could face misdemeanor charges that can carry a six-month jail sentence and a $1,000 fine per crime.

Those images are admissible in court, UCLA law professor Peter Arenella said, but their value would be limited. “The nature of the incriminating evidence is somewhat suspect,” he said

Arenella said that because the cameras are mounted in public places, there is no reasonable expectation for privacy, and that criminals would either go elsewhere or find ways to disable the cameras.

The Q-Star Flashcam 530 mounted in the Watts alley is designed to withstand a shot from a 9-millimeter handgun and is mounted so high off the ground that police officers will need to bring a ladder to retrieve the film.

Each senior lead officer will carry a tiny remote control, similar to the remote entry controls for cars, that can activate or deactivate the camera from the ground.

Isabel Castanon lives directly across the alley on 110th Street. In recent years, she said, illegal dumpers have left couches, broken televisions, even dead dogs in the alley.

People continue to dump junk there, even after the alley has been cleaned up.

“By the next day,” Castanon said, “we start finding all kinds of trash.”

Once a month, a crew cleans the alley, filling up at least one 20-cubic-yard dump truck, said Bruce Howell, who oversees the Department of Public Works’ alley cleaning crews.

He said that many alleys in Watts and South Los Angeles fill four dump trucks each time they are cleaned.

This year, crews have picked up more than 17,000 cubic yards of trash from similar sites in Watts, Howell said, more than 800 full dump trucks.