The Hollow Victory at MacArthur Park : Crime: Police chase out the crack addicts who had overrun the site. But local merchants and residents say the criminals simply have relocated to nearby alleys and back yards.

A few months ago, business owners just west of downtown were clamoring for police to rid MacArthur Park of up to 600 crack addicts who brazenly fed their habits in full view of children and passers-by, turning the onetime urban oasis into a notorious breeding ground for crime.

After deploying dozens of officers on horseback, bicycle and foot patrols, Los Angeles police erected a substation near the park’s picturesque lake and, last week, declared victory.

The victory was a hollow one.

Although police say the park is now free of drug addicts, pimps and prostitutes, the merchants and residents on the periphery--the very ones who demanded the action--say the problem has simply moved, turning their alleys and back yards into scenes of depravity and violence.

Now they watch in terror as crack addicts of all ages wander in and out of alleys, alcoves and even crawl spaces beneath homes and apartments. Dozens of crack encampments have sprung up in the alleyways, some of them furnished with discarded couches, tables and chairs where addicts leisurely smoke the drug with seeming impunity.

On a two-block stretch of Westlake Avenue, prostitutes strut along the sidewalk. Old women, apparently working as drug couriers, exchange cash for rock cocaine that they tuck behind their lower lips. When police venture nearby, they spit the rocks on the ground and go on their way. “It’s like squeezing Jell-O--it squirts out in other places,” LAPD Capt. James McMurray said of the moving crime problem. “And we are squeezing the hell out of that Jell-O in the middle of the park.”

Perhaps more than any other place in the city, the crack cocaine problem here is powerful, widespread and entrenched, and it is threatening to destroy the Westlake area--the heart of Southern California’s Central-American community of about 500,000 people and one of Los Angeles’ busiest commercial districts.

Dr. Emil Leveniec, who said he plans to vacate his office on Westlake Avenue, a block from the new police substation, longs for the time when the addicts simply controlled the park. “At least in the park they congregated in one place,” he said. “Now they’re hustling my patients for money. One of my patients was robbed in the waiting room last month.”

His fears were echoed by an optometrist whose office adjacent to the park was recently invaded by a man who began “punching the walls and windows for no apparent reason.”

“The police have created a worse problem for business people because the drug addicts simply scattered like rats into the alleys--and the alley behind my office is one of the worst,” said the optometrist, who requested anonymity.

Around the chipped-brick corner of his office building on a recent day, in a grimy alley that has come to be known by merchants as “hell on earth,” dozens of men, women and teen-agers of varied ethnic backgrounds furtively exchanged cash for handfuls of tiny white pellets, or squatted on the urine-stained pavement to inhale smoke from two-inch-long glass pipes blackened with the residue of burned crack cocaine.

Most of these men and women acknowledged having $100- to $300-a-day habits and called the job of finding, buying and smoking crack a “7/24 business”--seven days a week, 24 hours a day--that ceases only when they drop from exhaustion.

Some hadn’t slept for days. After smoking so much of the powerful stimulant, their bodies and faces twitched uncontrollably. A few admitted “boosting” (stealing) from local stores or turning tricks to pay for the cocaine derivative one woman said was “more important than life itself.”

Fewer still seemed worried about getting caught. Repeated arrests had taught them that jails are too crowded to accept most people arrested on drug-abuse charges, and that police would only issue citations or verbal warnings.

“Some people use their citations as a lighter to smoke crack,” sneered a homeless crack addict who has lived in the area for years. “Usually, all they (police) will do is break your pipe and say get out of here, so why hide?”

The addict said he was speaking from experience.

“I had four outstanding warrants and one night they caught me,” he said. “I spent two days in jail. In court, the judge asked, ‘How many days you been in jail? Two days? OK, enough time spent. Get out of here.’ It’s a joke, man.”

Indeed, in Lafayette Park, a few blocks west of MacArthur Park, a group of “smokers” hunkered around a picnic bench were so unconcerned about arrest that they argued openly with police over their “right to smoke crack.”

“I was frankly pissed off when that police station went in (at MacArthur Park) because it took away some of my rights,” a woman crack smoker told two bemused officers on a foot patrol. At MacArthur Park, she insisted, “People respected us and we respected them.”

But law enforcement authorities said they are determined to keep the 100-year-old park off limits to lawbreakers. Although police concede that some of the criminal element has relocated to nearby neighborhoods, they contend their strategy is showing results.

In the last month, arrests have dropped dramatically in the vicinity of the park bounded by 3rd Street on the north, Pico Boulevard on the south, Union Avenue on the east and Hoover Street on the west, authorities said. According to the most recent statistics, the area’s overall crime rate dropped 50% between June 17 and Aug. 11 during the crackdown as compared with the previous tally period. Similarly, confrontational robberies were down 66%.

Now police say they hope to corral the spillover of scofflaws into the adjacent community with the help of 150 officers on loan from the Metropolitan Division.

“We are on foot in the center and Metro is in cars on the perimeter,” Capt. McMurray said. “We expand or contract that outer perimeter as we detect where people are relocating.”

But Hyun Chin, co-owner of a department store called D & R Merchandise a block from the park, said the law enforcement strategy is not working.

“The police must review their whole program again; they’ve got the wrong approach,” Chin said. “My business is reduced to one-tenth of what it was. We’re all dying out here.”

Added Chin: “The park is cleared but no one is satisfied. I’m here to make a living, not to walk through the park.”

Councilwoman Gloria Molina, who, along with Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, has led the effort to clean up the park, said complaining business owners “must recognize that the problem didn’t start overnight and cannot be resolved overnight.”

“I told them cleaning up the park was not the end of the problem,” Molina said. “It requires a long-term strategy . . . involving law enforcement, as well as the cooperation of the entire Westlake community.”

Until that happens, she said, authorities will have to keep pressure on the addicts and other criminal elements. “We have to keep them moving out of the alleys and out of the streets; we have to keep arresting them and hauling them out,” she said.

Even as Molina and community leaders press for stepped-up street and alley cleaning, new street lights, and drug rehabilitation for addicts, a growing number of business owners and residents are considering calling it quits and moving elsewhere.

“This area used to be a charming enclave close to downtown mostly for apartment dwellers,” said Ann Papa, a stockbroker who has lived less than a block from the park for 20 years. “Today, it’s a neighborhood where one must be on guard, where security gates keep people locked up, where there is a fear of coming home a little late.

“I would rather have had the police force in the park than to have had it kept by crack addicts and vagrants,” added Papa. “But I can understand why business owners are upset.”

Besieged by panhandlers, pimps and junkies, the owners of a landmark MacArthur Park restaurant, Edward’s Steak House, sold the place June 29 for about $2 million to a developer who plans to turn the lot into a swap meet arcade.

“It’s getting to the point where virtually every doorway and alley out here is smelling of urine,” said Tom Coyle, a spokesman for a group of concerned residents called the Westlake Task Force.

“Two of every three buildings on Wilshire is up for sale. Employees have to have security guards to get them into buildings. Property owners are putting up fences. Police admit they are swamped,” he said.

Still, authorities insist the situation is not hopeless.

“We are seeing a slow decline in the population of addicts in the neighborhood and alleys,” McMurray said. “It’s a slow process of erosion.”