Tackling Neighborhoods’ Little Woes Before They Grow Large

The unkempt fraternity house on the corner was a nagging reminder to Northridge homeowners of the peaceful existence they led before Pi Kappa Phi moved into their neighborhood more than a decade ago.

Over the years, residents complained about the fraternity’s loud parties and trashy surroundings to Los Angeles police and city officials. But their troubles lingered without permanent resolution.

This month, an energetic young deputy Los Angeles city attorney named Anthony Paul “A.P.” Diaz successfully prosecuted the owner of the fraternity house for a municipal code violation committed by his tenants.

The owner pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Under the terms of his probation, he may no longer use his property as a fraternity house or to host large parties.

“A lot of times, the community calls police, but then they are left with: ‘What do we do next?’ ” said Diaz, one of City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo’s 18 new “neighborhood prosecutors.”

“Police officers spend most of the time responding to immediate calls,” Diaz said. “What we can deal with is the aftermath.”

In seeking to resolve quality-of-life issues, Diaz also is working with police and city officials to try to stop street racing in Chatsworth and drug dealing on North Hills’ streets.

Delgadillo launched the Neighborhood Prosecution Project in March, transferring veteran prosecutors to work with police and residents to solve minor problems before they lead to larger ones.

The City Council funded the program for a year, providing one neighborhood prosecutor for each police district.

“It’s little by little that things erode,” said Mary McGuire, a spokeswoman for Delgadillo. “That’s when the bigger crimes come in.”

About half of the county prosecutors’ offices nationwide engage in this preventive practice commonly known as community prosecution, according to a recent survey by the American Prosecutors Research Institute.

Community prosecutors have worked in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office since 1993, when they began by responding to neighborhood complaints about gang activity with injunctions to stop known gang members from associating in public, said Michael Yglecias, head deputy in charge of the unit. The district attorney’s 20 community prosecutors work with sheriff’s deputies in unincorporated areas of the county and with local police in smaller cities.

As recently as 1990, there were just two such programs in the nation, said Mike Kuykendall, director of the National Center for Community Prosecution. The most recent converts, he said, are local city attorney’s offices, such as Delgadillo’s.

As one of the nation’s first community prosecutors in Portland, Ore., Kuykendall said, “I learned I could do more outside of the courtroom than in it.”

With the community’s help, he said, he shut down drug houses where many of the crimes were considered too low-level for police and courts to do much about.

Traditionally, prosecutors don’t get involved in a community problem until police have investigated and filed criminal charges. This new approach encourages them to use existing tools, such as nuisance abatement laws, to improve safety, Kuykendall said.

After four years in a downtown Los Angeles trial court, Diaz, 31, applied to work in the new program. He is assigned full time to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division, where his desk is in a trailer alongside nine senior lead officers.

The Loyola Law School graduate leaves his sport coat at the office when he gets in a patrol car to visit neighbors. He wears a prosecutor’s badge on his belt and works from a cell phone and laptop computer. He talks to residents about problems such as junk cars and music blaring from illegal home recording studios.

“I believe the job that Rocky [Delgadillo] wants us to do is come up with nontraditional approaches to solving crimes,” he said.

Driving down Parthenia Street, Diaz points to an ice cream factory as an early success. Neighbors complained that the owner held big parties on weekends and charged an admission fee. Diaz said that he met with the owner and that within two weeks the parties stopped.

At a neighborhood watch meeting last month in Panorama City, Diaz urged members to call him whenever they see an abandoned car on the street, or a sofa or bathtub dumped in a vacant lot.

“We have to come up with creative solutions to solve crimes,” he told the dozen or so residents.

Diaz said he will try to solve a community problem by talking to property owners or asking other city agencies to act. But he has a strong weapon, whenever it’s needed. “I always have the power to file criminal charges,” he said.

That’s one way that Diaz has helped residents of Sherwood Forest, a neighborhood that adjoins the Cal State Northridge campus and has been home to Pi Kappa Phi members.

In February, police in riot gear dispersed a crowd of more than 1,000 people that had spilled out into the street and onto neighbors’ lawns at the fraternity’s back-to-school bash.

After years of complaining, neighbors were demanding results. “That was it,” said Jack McGrath, who lives on Zelzah Avenue, half a block from the residence that has served as the Pi Kappa Phi house. “We’ve had it.”

Within days, Diaz met with McGrath and the others. Together, they testified at a Cal State Northridge Interfraternity Council hearing, where Pi Kappa Phi was sanctioned.

Restrictions imposed at the hearing included an order that members attend monthly homeowners meetings and volunteer eight hours a month in the neighborhood, said Jamison Keller, activities coordinator at the university.

“In the past, many of the residents have been very hesitant” to testify against the fraternity in campus proceedings, Keller said. “They were scared of retaliation.”

Having Diaz involved “gives the people in the neighborhood a lot of confidence,” McGrath agreed.

Joey Catlin, the fraternity’s president, said his members are trying to become better neighbors.

“We are doing everything that we can,” he said, from painting the outside of the one-story ranch-style house to reducing the number of live-in residents to four.

“We are just trying to keep it up and keep it clean so it fits into the community,” Catlin said. “We want to stay there.”

Catlin’s landlord, Hamid Helmandi, was charged in mid-May with two misdemeanors for trash accumulation on the property and for using the land for a fraternity house without a conditional use permit. Helmandi, who pleaded guilty last week to the trash charge, could not be reached for comment.

Under the court agreement, four fraternity members can continue to live in the house at one time, but the home cannot serve as a fraternity headquarters.

Diaz’s next project is to try to end street racing in a commercial area of Plummer Street between Canoga Avenue and Topanga Canyon Boulevard, where hundreds of people gather for races.

LAPD Senior Lead Officer Ken Cioffi said he has been struggling with the problem for years. His request to the California Department of Transportation to install speed bumps was rejected because they are permitted in residential areas only.

“The best thing I could do was put up no-parking signs,” he said. “I kept getting shot down.”

Now Cioffi has a new ally in Diaz, who has studied the problem and alternatives to speed bumps. “I felt like an engineer for a week,” Diaz said.