Gang Ban Solves Problems for One Neighborhood : Crime: Officials hope a Blythe Street court order will have same success as one for Burbank’s Elmwood Street.

To Detective Eric Rosoff, the court order banning 88 gang members from the 100 block of West Elmwood Avenue in Burbank is a big zero.

“That’s right, zero,” Rosoff said Thursday. “We’ve had exactly zero major gang incidents there since the court order” went into effect last October.

Residents of the block, which starts at Lake Street and ends in a cul-de-sac at the Golden State Freeway, back up Rosoff’s number with their own tales of a new-found sense of security. They now let their children play ball in front of their apartments without fear of being hit by stray bullets from gang warfare.

“It used to be that there were 30 or 40 people hanging around here 24 hours a day. They used to raise hell and shoot their guns,” said Tony Pasillas, 55, as he sat on the front stoop of his apartment building reading a book Friday afternoon. “Now, look at this. You see little kids running all around. . . . That’s the way it should be.”

Before October, Burbank recorded at least 10 gang-related incidents a month on Elmwood. These included several shootings--including two in one day in February of last year--along with frequent beatings, robberies and drug busts. In the year before the ban was enacted, the block was by far the most notorious in Burbank.

That all changed with the court order.

Now, the only things Rosoff has to worry about are occasional acts of vandalism or graffiti.

Los Angeles city officials have carefully monitored the Burbank order and hope to replicate its success by banning 500 gang members from a stretch of Blythe Street in Panorama City, which police consider the most crime-ridden block in the San Fernando Valley. City Atty. James K. Hahn filed the request Feb. 22 and a hearing on the matter is scheduled for March 25.

If granted, the Blythe Street order would make it a crime for gang members to arm themselves, trespass or appear in public with other gang members. The suit also seeks a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew and a ban on wearing clothes or jewelry with the gang’s logo, which is scrawled in many places along the street.

As in Burbank, violators on Blythe Street could face time in county jail and/or fines at the discretion of the judge.

But lingering questions remain about both the legality of such orders and their long-term impact on gang activity.

Civil libertarians maintain that such orders are unconstitutional and too broad. Critics also contend that court orders or laws banning gang members from a specific geographic area do not solve problems but merely push them elsewhere.

The American Civil Liberties Union has threatened to file suit against the Blythe Street proposal on the grounds that the order would ban constitutionally protected activities, such as free association, free speech and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure.

The Burbank order was never seriously challenged in court. The 88 gang members named in the court order did not have an attorney representing them at the Oct. 21 hearing in Burbank Municipal Court. Their opposition was dismissed by Judge Thomas Murphy.

The ACLU has opposed similar measures in the past with mixed results.

In 1987, Hahn asked for a broad injunction against a gang in the Cadillac-Corning area of the Westside and won a six-point preliminary order that he says was a key factor in reducing crime there. But Hahn never followed through with a permanent injunction, saying that problems had been largely solved. The ACLU contends that it ultimately would have won that case.

In 1991, to stop a war between rival groups, the city of San Fernando passed an ordinance that prohibited members of two local gangs from entering Las Palmas Park.

That ordinance expired last July after police decided it was no longer needed. The ACLU’s request to block enforcement of the ordinance by temporary injunction was rejected by a judge. The ACLU dropped the suit once the ordinance expired.

Pomona passed a similar ordinance banning gang members from Cherryville and Philadelphia parks in December, 1991, after there were seven killings in or near the two parks that year. But that measure has not been challenged in court.

Police in San Fernando said they would not hesitate to ask for another ordinance if the problems there ever reappeared. And the Pomona ordinance has even won grudging praise from one of its biggest critics, Councilman Thomas Ursua, who originally voted against it.

“It has accomplished its policy objective. People aren’t getting shot in the park,” Ursua said.

Gang members interviewed in Burbank and San Fernando said they resent such restrictions because police have the power to drive them out of the turf they call their own without actually arresting them for a crime.

“It’s a violation of my civil rights,” said Robert Acosta, 23, an admitted gang member named in the Burbank order. “This is worse than Russia. This is more like Bosnia or maybe the crap you expect from Saddam Hussein.”

An ACLU attorney and a law professor echoed Acosta’s comparison to authoritarian regimes.

“That sounds more like the pass laws of South Africa than the American Constitution,” said ACLU attorney Mark Silverstein.

“Romania had a similar law that banned gatherings of three or more people,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor of constitutional law at George Washington University. “No one doubts the ugly reality of crime in Los Angeles but do we really want to emulate a totalitarian state?”

Turley said U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent years revoking vagrancy laws and upholding panhandling as a constitutionally protected form of free speech clearly show that measures “barring a certain class of people from public places are unconstitutional.”

In addition, Silverstein said the Blythe Street measure has some flaws not contained in the Burbank order. He said that since the Burbank order lists the affected persons by name, those people at least have a chance to challenge their inclusion “before they are harassed on the street.”

“The Blythe Street order would allow police to harass anyone they want,” without finding evidence of criminal activity, Silverstein said. “It’s a shortcut around the burden of proof. It seriously erodes the presumption of innocence. It undermines the right to travel and the right to privacy.”

Ted Goldstein, a spokesman for the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, said the 500 gang members were intentionally not named in the city’s petition to the court in order to give police more flexibility with a large, complex gang. He said that each gang member banned from the street would be warned first and would be identified as a hard-core member.

The Blythe Street lawsuit acknowledges concerns for gang members’ civil liberties. But, it argues, the gang’s activities add up to a nuisance that denies rights to others. Rather than a broad ban, the lawsuit argues, the injunction would give police a “narrowly drawn” tool.

“It is not an overstatement to describe Blythe Street between Van Nuys Boulevard and Willis Avenue as a neighborhood under the ‘occupation’ of a concerted and organized group of criminals who virtually control the activities and lifestyles of all who dare to live and work in the area,” stated court documents filed by the city of Los Angeles.

Residents of crime-ridden areas like Elmwood in Burbank, such as Dale Treadway and Victor Montoya, aren’t moved by abstract legal arguments about civil liberties. They were desperate. Now, they notice the difference.

“We’ve had three apartments shot into,” said Treadway, who manages three buildings on Elmwood. “That makes it pretty hard to find tenants.”

Montoya, 44, described how unfamiliar cars that pulled into the cul-de-sac used to be greeted with a hail of rocks, bottles and gunfire.

“I remember one guy just got out and ran because he ddn’t want to run through that again,” Montoya said. “He just left his car here and never came back, he was so scared.”

Deputy Los Angeles Police Chief Mark A. Kroeker and Barry Nidorf, the county’s chief probation officer, have also promised to mobilize the resources of their offices to enforce the injunction against the drug-dealing gang. Kroeker said if the injunction is granted, he will authorize overtime so that gang-detail detectives, foot-beat officers and other police assigned to the area just west of the now-shuttered General Motors plant can enforce its restrictions.

Some experts in gang activity are also skeptical because the court orders do not end gang violence, they just prod gang members toward other neighborhoods.

“This really doesn’t entice people away from criminal activity,” said Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, a UC Berkeley sociology professor who has studied Los Angeles gangs for the past 10 years. “This is a short-term harassment therapy that could do more long-term damage than the problems it’s designed to solve. These measures may start out with widespread support but you create a lot of resentment, especially in minority communities.”

Jerome Skolnick, a UC Berkeley law professor who has written several books on police activity, said even if the ban on gangs is upheld legally, it may ultimately be found impractical because bans need increased police resources over a long period to be effective.

“I’m sure some of these kids are career criminals who should be off the street, but I’m still skeptical of this process,” Skolnick said. “Police should have a lot of discretion on the street, but these things have to be used wisely. If they are not used wisely, you could have a big controversy--like another King beating--on your hands.”