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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Businesses Fighting Crime

The scenes property manager Guy Stadig witnessed at his North Hills apartment complex are reminiscent of those in action flicks. There were pursuits of all sorts on foot, parked cars and rooftops. “They used to be standing in front of the building,” Stadig remembered. “They had lookouts. If they saw activity, they’d go running out through the building.” Apartment units became hideouts. The building grounds, a collective escape route. Only, the characters involved didn’t have names like Neo or Jason Bourne. They weren’t heroes who ended up on the wrong side of the law but gang members who had taken over the property after the city forbade them from operating on the streets. Now, however, the apartment complex in the 15500 block of Rayen Avenue in North Hills is no longer a hub for gang activity, according to Stadig. In December, police were called to the complex 57 times. In the six subsequent months, calls for service dropped to 16. The drop is one for which the Los Angeles City Attorney takes credit. Last year, city attorney reps approached Stadig about making changes to the property to thwart gang activity. The platform is known as Taking Out Urban Gang Headquarters, a division of the citywide nuisance abatement program, which strives to bring criminal activity in the city’s worst properties to a halt. “They’ve already installed a video camera system,” Cindy Shin, senior communications deputy for the city attorney, said of the Rayen building’s management. Added Stadig, “Police will be able to monitor it from the laptop computers in their cars. We have 16 cameras. We also added a gated system in our lobby that every individual knows the code to, so we can monitor who comes into it.” At the city attorney’s request, Stadig is now in the process of putting custom design metal fencing around the building’s perimeter, Shin said. It’s the most costly change he has made thus far. Management doled out $35,000 to purchase the fence work and contributed another $3,000 to get the fence approved by the city because, as high as 18 feet above ground in some sections, it was above code. It had to be to ensure that the gang members who routinely used the building’s parking lot to flee could do so no longer. “Of course, it’s a financial burden,” Stadig said. But management made the changes because “the police are stretched thin with resources, with the number of police officers they have.” Heeding the city attorney’s advice may have cost tens of thousands but the results it has produced have been incredible, Stadig said. In addition to the drop in calls for service, onsite violations decreased from 34 to 13 between July 2006 and May 2007. Since then, there have been two onsite violations. The six other properties in North Hills targeted by the city attorney’s TOUGH program have also seen drops in calls for service and onsite violations, alike. One building in the 9000 block of Orion made particular progress. A year before the TOUGH’s program December launch in North Hills, there were 21 calls for service at the building. Following the launch, calls for service dropped to zero. While the management of the cluster of buildings on Rayen, Orion and Langdon avenues made changes willingly, Shin said that the city attorney has sometimes sued property owners to force them to put a stop to illicit activities on the premises. “Some property owners are relatives of gang members in certain areas,” Shin explained. “They allow gang activity.” Gang expert Alejandro Alonso has covered the North Hills-based Langdon Street Gang on his Web site, streetgangs.com. He believes that the proximity of the North Hills properties to each other contributes to the amount of crime in the area. “Once you’ve created a densely populated area, it’s going to be accompanied by these kinds of problems,” Alonso said. “Part of the problem is the way they’ve bunched the people together. Some communities have torn down properties in the City of Los Angeles that have been a problem and put in nicer townhouse types for people of smaller populations.” In addition, Alonso questions how effective cameras will be in reducing gang crime in a broader geographical area. “If you put a camera on street A, but you don’t have cameras on streets B through Z, all you will do is displace the activity,” he said. Managers and business owners who have the privilege of playing a role in how their properties are constructed should incorporate designs to reduce crime, according to Lisa Scates, a City of Palmdale crime prevention specialist who recently spoke at the National Institute of Crime Prevention conference in Las Vegas. She is an expert in the field of crime prevention through environmental design. “You want to build the project to provide natural surveillance, for example a lobby that faces a parking lot,” she said. “Limit the number of entrances and exits. Maybe have one way in or one way out.” Establishing ownership and keeping up with maintenance is also crucial. “Engage in territorial reinforcement by showing ownership of an area with decorative fences, archways or public art,” she said. “Graffiti tends to happen in places that show no ownership. Remove graffiti in a timely manner. If you don’t keep maintenance up, that’s a lot of times when a criminal element will come into play.” In addition to recommending that the North Hills property owners remove all trash, graffiti and debris from their grounds, the Los Angeles City Attorney asked them to tear down carport roofs, install high intensity exterior lighting and remove the storage units that gang members were using to scale walls. Some of these recommendations overlap with the ones Councilman Richard Alarc & #243;n made in his 10-step plan, released July 27, to reduce crime in the “Safer Cities Initiative” areas of North Hills and Panorama City. The councilman wants to work with local businesses to help reduce property crime as well. Though such measures have been shown to play a role in crime reduction, Scates urges property and business owners to have realistic expectations about the results of implementing them. “Anything that you implement is never going to wipe out crime 100 percent,” she said.

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