DEALERS INFEST CITY DESPITE CRACKDOWN

Drug houses have continued to flourish in many parts of Los Angeles
despitea 4-year-old city task force that has made hundreds of arrests and
forced landlords to evict drug dealers.

Since 1997, the task force of the Los Angeles Police Department, city
attorneys and building inspectors has forced more than 900 evictions and
closed 200 drug houses citywide, 35 percent of which were in the San
Fernando Valley. Since 1998, the unit has made more than 900 arrests with
more than one-third of those in the Valley.

"We're making narcotics abatement a priority," said LAPD Capt. Walter
Schick, the commanding officer of the Narcotics Division's Field
Enforcement Section. "There's a new focus on making rock houses go away
permanently."

Despite the assault on drug houses, dealers have simply set up shop at new
locations. Investigators still are deluged with complaints about drug
houses and say dealers are getting more aggressive while the number of
officers assigned exclusively to drug cases dwindles because of
reassignments to beef up police patrols.

The city's answer is the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program, a task force
formed in 1997, to make an all-out push on drug houses.

In addition to police efforts, the task force uses civil law to force drug
dealers' evictions and make property owners clean up and renovate rentals
as a way to root out trouble. Under the law, the city can go as far as
demolishing a building to solve nuisance properties.

While neighborhood activists welcome the actions, some are frustrated with
a city bureaucracy that doesn't always listen or can't always respond
quickly enough to complaints.

"We often have meetings with the police and ask them how come they don't
respond," said Margarita Diaz of Familias Unidas, a grass-roots group of 15
mothers fighting crime in North Hills. "We need better cooperation between
residents and the police."

Assistant City Attorney Mary Claire Molidor, the task force director, is
sympathetic.

"It's a constant mantra that we want residents to participate in city
government," she said. "Yet when residents hear things and see things, and
we're not able to act on them quickly, people get frustrated."

But police say they are committed to investigating complaints promptly and
are working to shut down drug house activities permanently.

North Hills in crossfire

The epicenter of drug activity in the Valley is North Hills, a community
with the most police calls for service in the Valley and a well-known
open-air drug market.

Police believe there are at least 40 drug houses that remain unidentified
in the North Hills and Panorama City areas alone. Given the high amount of
street sales surrounding these properties, investigators believe the supply
is coming from someplace nearby.

But the short-staffed police drug units, which have been slashed to put
officers on patrol, are already juggling multiple cases and haven't yet
begun to investigate these suspected drug houses.

"We try to identify and eradicate these locations as best we can," said
LAPD Detective Rob Holcomb, a supervisor in the Valley's Field Enforcement
Section. "We're not holding back the tide."

As a result, some residents' complaints, many of which may be perfectly
legitimate, fall to the bottom of police priority lists, Holcomb said.

So far this year, the Valley Narcotics Bureau has received more than 300
complaints of narcotics activities. The police estimate they will receive
up to 500 such complaints by year's end.

"The majority of complaints are good," Holcomb said. "It's just that people
don't have enough for us to act on immediately, and therefore the complaint
goes to bottom of the list, unfortunately."

Landlords looking in

Drug dealers are increasingly using apartments as their drug headquarters,
police say, because they're off the street behind security gates, far from
LAPD patrols.

Because of the pressure to keep drugs out, some apartment managers have
also begun to keep a watchful eye on their tenants. Miguel Loera, a North
Hills apartment complex manager, recently had nine cameras installed to
keep an eye out for suspected drug dealing in his complex.

"They don't work, but they pay the rent," Loera said. "I've called the
police several times. They ask me to get their driver's license plates and
descriptions. What do they want me to do, put handcuffs on them and hold
them until they get here?"

As street sales increase, so do the numbers of drug houses, police said.
And fueling a rise in street dealing is the recruitment of Mexican
immigrants by midlevel dealers with the lure of quick cash for selling $10
and $20 bags of crack on the sidewalks outside drug houses.

"A lot of recent immigrants are hired by gang members who train them as
front-line street dealers," Holcomb said. "We literally get guys with no
shoes, Mexican money in their pocket and 100 bucks on them. They tell them
that it's easy money and there's hardly any police around."

Regular undercover police stings net the street dealers, but linking them
to the suppliers is difficult.

"A lot of these street dealers, they don't know where they're getting the
drugs from," Holcomb said. "All they know is to look for a guy in a cowboy
hat. They don't know where he lives."

When they do find the source, authorities are successful in forcing dealers
out.

The task force has mailed more than 900 eviction letters to suspected drug
dealers and property owners across the city since 1997, and has forced
landlords to clean up more than 386 properties across the city in the last
two years. And the task force has forced the demolition of 71 properties
across the city, including 21 in the Valley.

Property owners are beginning to take notice. Last month, the City
Attorney's Office sent property owner Ron Feinstein a letter notifying him
that a tenant had been arrested in connection with dealing dope out of an
apartment unit and suggested measures to quell the activity.

"The next day, I sent it to my attorney and asked him to start eviction
proceedings," said Feinstein, who owns four properties in North Hills and
Van Nuys, and is getting video cameras installed in one complex because of
suspected drug activities. "We contacted the tenant, and ... several days
later, they moved out. I was tickled pink."

Hard to close cases

The City Attorney's Office is usually successful in forcing dealers out
within weeks, but closing an abatement case on a property with problems can
take months. Such cases usually require a barrage of Planning Department
paperwork, police surveillance information and arrests, and a history from
the Planning Department, authorities said.

Opening abatement cases requires solid evidence of illicit activities, but
closing such cases is getting more difficult, a problem exacerbated by the
dwindling numbers of specialized police officers.

"As the specialized units are cut off and put into patrol, the expertise
and undercover status needed for drug cases has been severely reduced,"
said Molidor, who added she also understands the importance of filling the
ranks of patrol cops.

Police credit the task force with blowing away a dark cloud that has
infected North Hills for so many years.

Apartments have been refurbished. Neighborhood coalitions have been formed.
People are living there longer.

A Nuisance Abatement Program survey showed in 1997 only 30 percent of
schoolchildren enrolled at Langdon Street Elementary School re-enrolled in
the next school year, indicating that families weren't staying very long.

In 1999, that number rose to 60 percent.

The vacancy rate in several dozen apartment complexes was 50 percent in
1997. By 1999, that rate had dropped to 5 percent.

"The City Attorney's Office has made an incredible difference over there,"
said LAPD Sgt. Ernie Jimenez, who patrolled the streets of North Hills as
its senior lead officer.

"The buildings have been cleaned up. It's well-lit at night. The problems
have kind of moved from the areas we worked on."