In one L.A. neighborhood, feeling safer but not safe

It used to be so bad at East Vernon and Compton avenues that customers at Taqueria La Carreta filled donation boxes that helped pay for the funerals of shooting victims.

When the Mexican restaurant known for its carne asada quesadillas was opened 15 years ago by a couple from Jalisco, Mexico, shootings in the neighborhood were a fact of life.

“It was a pretty hot spot. The last few years it’s been pretty low,” said Edgar Diaz, 25, who now manages the restaurant for his parents.

There hasn’t been a funeral donation box in two or three years at the business a couple of miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Diaz said there also used to be quite a few fights at nearby Jefferson High School that would spill over to the restaurant, “but that went away too.”

Crime is down in the neighborhood -- there is general agreement about that. But the anxiety about crime remains high. People feel their neighborhood is safer, but not safe.

Statistics released this week by the Los Angeles Police Department show that overall in the city, violent crimes, including homicides and rapes, were down 4.9% this year over the same period in 2008.

The drop is seen in the LAPD’s Newton division, where the restaurant is located and which stretches from southern downtown to Florence Avenue and from the 110 Freeway east to the city limits. But despite a decrease in violent crime in the neighborhood over the last decade, it remains one of the city’s more dangerous areas.

There were 17,627 serious crimes in the division in 1992, compared with 7,056 in 2008. In 1992 there were 124 homicides, compared with 41 in 2008, police said. Serious crimes include homicide, rape and robbery and such property crimes as burglary and auto theft.

“There’s a lot of things that have changed for the better, but Newton is still a challenge. There’s way too many gangs, and there’s way too much violence,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz, whose area includes that division.

Residents said that the quality of life in the area has risen but that they still often fear for their safety.

“Somewhat, I think it’s safer now,” said Flor Estrada, 20, who was eating lunch on Taqueria La Carreta’s patio with her 11-year-old sister, Silvia Lemus.

Estrada’s family came to Los Angeles from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero when she was 4 years old. She said that there have been major renovations of houses in the surrounding neighborhoods and that gang violence seems to have settled down.

Still, she said, there is often gunfire and her nerves rattle.

When she and her husband came back from work last weekend at 1 a.m., she said, they heard gunshots as soon as they opened the front door.

Lemus, her sister, said she likes her neighborhood but that sometimes living there can be “very scary.” She recalled recently hearing gunfire and grabbing the family cat, Sunny, and hiding inside her home with relatives.

Crime statistics for the first three months of 2009 underscore the mixed record.

Homicides in the Newton division have declined marginally from 10 in the first three months of 2008 to eight so far this year, and aggravated assaults have dropped to 252 from 283 in the same period of 2008. But not all the numbers are down; robberies have increased from 232 during the same period last year to 267 this year.

John Frank Hernandez, an organizer with the Watts/Century Latino Organization, has lived in the neighborhood around La Carreta since his birth 26 years ago.

He credits the decrease in crime across the city to a better partnership among community activists, social service agencies and the LAPD. But he noted that “there was just a shooting” and that he’s skeptical the situation has drastically improved over the last few years.

The police are “changing this so-called warrior mentality of just arresting and suppression,” Hernandez said. “Now they’re more community-oriented.”

He remembers that as a child he ran up to police officers who would hand out baseball cards to area youths. But he said that after the 1992 riots, there seemed to be a purely antagonistic relationship between residents and police. That anger seems to be waning, he added, and pointed to new police-community partnerships like the Watts Gang Task Force as a sign of changing times.

Three weeks ago, his organization held a community forum with an area sergeant and captain. “In the past, that would’ve never happened,” he said.

Byron Gatewood, 47, has lived in the neighborhood near the restaurant his whole life and this week remembered that during the 1990s “it was terrible over here.”

“Everybody was stealing from everybody, and the crime rate was at the top of its peak,” he said.

Today, things are definitely better, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center worker says.

“A lot of young men are being a lot wiser now.”

--

ari.bloomekatz@latimes.com

Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.