City Seeks to Bar Parolees From Trouble Areas
Veteran Los Angeles County probation officer Robby Robinson is new to the suburban streets of Lancaster. But in three weeks, he has learned to respect the big-city troubles plaguing its worst neighborhoods.
In two hours of work Wednesday, Robinson and a pair of Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies threatened suspected teen crack dealers with arrest, served a gun-possession warrant on a member of a graffiti crew, had a run-in with a knife-clutching drug addict, and broke up a possible prostitution deal in a liquor store parking lot.
"This reminds me of when I used to work in South-Central," Robinson said. "You turn every corner and there's something going on."
That's what worries civic leaders in Lancaster, a fast-growing, family-friendly city 70 miles north of Los Angeles where children still enter their best-looking chickens at the annual fair.
In recent years, urban crime has become a fact of life here. To combat it, prosecutors and city officials propose making the roughest areas off-limits to parolees and probationers, an ambitious plan that has civil libertarians on edge.
The idea, under review by the city attorney, will be considered by the City Council next month. If approved, the program would be implemented in August in a 20-block test area behind the local sheriff's station. It's the same neighborhood Robinson cruised Wednesday afternoon.
Signs posted around the neighborhood -- bordered by avenues H-8 and I to the north and south and Cedar and Fig avenues to the east and west -- would tell parolees and probationers to keep out. They also would be barred from renting or owning property in the area, although current residents would be exempted.
Violators would receive a warning on the first offense and face arrest on the second.
The measure would work in conjunction with stepped-up code enforcement, a new Neighborhood Watch program and a proposed law to impound lawbreakers' cars. If successful, the Lancaster Community Appreciation Project could be replicated in other drug- and crime-plagued neighborhoods.
"It's a very novel idea," said Anne Aldrich, a spokeswoman for the city. "But the solutions in these neighborhoods require very open-minded thinking."
The American Civil Liberties Union believes the strategy is unconstitutional. Ben Wizner, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, said that although he had not reviewed the draft of the Lancaster plan, it appeared to violate the 1st Amendment right to association and a court-established right to travel.
