DOWNTOWN
NEWS Volume 40, Number 47
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W W W. D O W N T O W N N E W S . C O M
November 21, 2011
Battling the Skid Row Drug Hydra Eighteen Months After Announcing a Novel Strategy to Fight Dealers, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich Has His Hands Full
Urban Scrawl celebrates Thanksgiving.
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The man behind the Pico House.
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Fresh ideas and fresh water.
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The Fashion District’s economic power.
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Carmen Trutanich wants to rid Skid Row of its most entrenched drug dealers. He says his Central City Recovery Zone has worked, but dealers still proliferate.
A new Downtown food find.
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‘Drawing the Lines’ at JANM.
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18 CALENDAR LISTINGS 20 MAP 21 CLASSIFIEDS
by Ryan VaillancouRt staff wRiteR
W
hen City Attorney Carmen Trutanich set out in April 2010 to rid Skid Row of its most entrenched drug dealers, he knew it would be difficult. More than 18 months later, it’s clear his groundbreaking plan faces even steeper challenges than expected. When he decided to tackle the Skid Row drug problem, he ordered deputies to devise a legal strategy to keep dealers out of the neighborhood. He gave them two months to bang out something enforceable. Instead, they confronted a slow-moving legal system: It took a year for a judge to fully approve the plan, an injunction that identifies 78 individuals with multiple drug sale convictions, and makes it a crime for them to be in Skid Row. It took another three months to train local police to enforce it. During that time, the problem has become worse. There are now approximately 1,600, about 80% more people sleeping on Skid Row sidewalks than there were the day Trutanich announced the proposed Central City Recovery Zone. There are more
parolees in the area too, and the recent shift in state inmate release guidelines is expected to keep more drug offenders on the streets longer. “You can only assume that on a pro rata share, there are going to be more drug dealers, because the market’s gotten bigger,” Trutanich said during a recent afternoon in his eighth floor office in City Hall East. Police only started enforcing the injunction in September, so it’s too early to score its full impact. The 78 dealers identified must be served with papers in person before police can enforce it. So far, a specially trained LAPD Central Division unit has only been able to track down and serve three individuals. Two of them were later seen in the area and arrested, said Lt. Shannon Paulsen. Violating the injunction is a misdemeanor, however, and overcrowded prisons and jails mean that non-violent offenders won’t likely spend much time behind bars. One of the two individuals arrested for being in the Recovery Zone was released from custody in less than 24 hours. The other remains in custody on a parole hold for an unrelated case. Still, the fact that Skid Row cops can’t find most
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of the defendants is evidence to some that the injunction, even in its infancy, is already working — if authorities can’t locate the dealers, it means they’re not in the area. “Right now the injunction is a 100% success,” Trutanich said. “It did exactly what we wanted it to do. It chased out the known drug dealers.” Trutanich knows that success has an asterisk. Even if the dealers never again set foot in the neighborhood, others quickly take their place on the block. It’s the Skid Row hydra rule: Eliminate one dealer and two more take his or her place. “What we have now is another problem, which is some other jerk is coming in behind them and filling in the gap,” Trutanich said. “It’s like that game where you knock one down, and another one pops up. What do they call it? Whack-aMole.” The DTGs The Central City Recovery Zone encompasses a nearly square mile patch of streets in Skid Row and a few blocks of the Historic Core. The name stems from its core objective — to make Skid Row a safer, more viable place to go for recovery from see Skid Row, page 12