Residents Fear Loss of Closeness to Beat Officers

Allena “Moms” Maxwell opens her screen door on 114th Street, clasps her frail hands across her orange-checkered apron and smiles wide enough to show her gold fillings.

“Hi, sugar pudding, how are you?” she says excitedly, hugging the man she considers her son.

“Hi Moms,” says Los Angeles Police Officer Mike Lockett.

Eyes gleaming behind her thick glasses, the 88-year-old native Arkansan turns to Lockett’s partner, Officer Armando Ramirez, and says, “You look good, you’re all pink and rested.”

Lockett met Maxwell 10 years ago, when the area around the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts was his beat. In Maxwell, he saw a lonely but chatty widow--who would be a respected elder in rural Arkansas--living alone on a tough, weedy street where gangbangers thought she was a snitch and wanted her gone.

So Lockett “adopted” her, promising to stop by at least twice a week, even after his beat shifted to other parts of Watts. She marks the days with big Xs on her calendar.

Lockett, 44, and Ramirez, 37, are LAPD’s closest version to the old-fashioned beat cop. Stand on any street corner with them--in neighborhoods long simmering with resentment for police--and someone will honk, wave or run out of a house to say hello.

As senior lead officers, Lockett and Ramirez are free to roam their beats without having to respond to radio calls and instead work on those persistent problems that can’t be fixed with a routine patrol stop.

But last year, Police Chief Bernard Parks announced that the 168 senior lead officers would be phased back into regular patrol duty. He has said they were too removed from the rest of the force, and that all patrol officers need to feel the same connection to the people they serve.

Some have lauded his decision. But others wonder if officers and sergeants will have the time and patience to make community links when they are constantly pulled away by radio calls.

And while community policing might be an abstraction in the secluded bedroom communities and hillside suburbs, in South Los Angeles--when it works--it can be a lifeline.

“Moms” Maxwell enjoys tending her roses in front of the little house she and her husband built on a dirt road among the fruit orchards and corn patches in 1947.

Over the years, the neighborhood pride that once flourished among homeowners and aerospace workers has withered with tenants who come and go. Maxwell’s yard is now a manicured haven among waist-high weeds, fetid mattresses and rusted car parts.

The slight-framed, retired schoolteacher gets the most grief from the young men who call her “old witch” and flash menacing glares from the porch across the street. They used to blame her any time there was a drug bust, she said, for she is always standing in her yard or looking out her windows.

One day, when she was taking out the trash, one of them threw a football, hitting her on the shoulder, she said. Out of fear, she checked her temper, picked the ball up and set it on the porch.

“They laughed. . . . It tickled them to death,” she said. “I turned to walk inside and they threw another [football], and it hit me in the neck.”

She asked some passing officers what she should do, and they told her to call the Southeast Division. Officer Lockett was dispatched to the scene.

“God came in and sent him,” she said.

Lockett gave a stern warning to the boys and began spreading the word in the neighborhood that she was his mother.

Maxwell says they don’t bother her any more as long as he stops by every two or three days, a job patrol officers might not have the time to do.

Then, with tears welling, she laments the fate of the once-pleasant street where she has lived half her life: “I wouldn’t ever have imagined that things were going to be like this.”

Up the street in Ramirez’s beat on 87th Street and Avalon Boulevard, Jose Hernandez, 52, felt the same way about his neighborhood after moving from the lush mountains of Michoacan, Mexico. The former sergeant in the Mexican federal police makes a living selling fresh fruit, peanuts and chicharrones from his grocery cart. In the last eight years, he was been robbed twice, once by knife and once by a mob of men who almost crushed his skull with a baseball bat, he said.

The neighborhood has calmed down dramatically since then, he said, but he feels especially secure since he met Officer Ramirez.

“He cares about the vendors,” said Hernandez. “He points out the gang hot spots and tells us where not to go. When I met him, he gave me his card and said, ‘Give me a call about anything, because you’re on the street and you’ll be my eyes and ears.’ ”

Ramirez and Lockett started riding together four years ago. Stepping into their patrol car recently, they joke that as senior lead officers they get the dented old Chevy Caprices, which on sunny days smell of scorched vinyl.

“Rocket man, you drive,” Ramirez tells Lockett, whose solid build and arched back give him the shape of a missile. Ramirez, whose hair is gray on the sides and dark on top--like a toupee--goes by “Marv Albert.”

The partners constantly joke around, which is one of the reasons they first clicked. When they drive through the housing projects, they wave and smile at tough-looking gang members, catching them off guard and seeing who in the neighborhood likes the police.

“What’s up, man?” Ramirez calls out in a heavy cholo accent to two scowling men sitting on a stoop in the low-slung barracks of Jordan Downs. The men wave reactively, looking puzzled. “By the time they catch themselves, it’s too late,” Ramirez says, laughing. They go, ‘Oh man.’ ” But both officers are quick to point out that their job consists of more than putting a good face on the department. Both have been patrol officers for years, and Ramirez has worked narcotics and vice squads. They joined the force to stop crime, not practice public relations.

Residents at Avalon Gardens and the surrounding area say their neighborhood has become much safer in recent years, and credit Ramirez for helping to help them overcome their fear and to clean the streets of gangs and drugs.

He spends a lot of time at neighborhood meetings. He works with apartment managers to evict drug dealers. He organizes days to clean up neglected alleys where junkies gather around their crack pipes. He goes after people who illegally dump trash, and even tries to enforce a city ordinance forbidding people from abandoning cars in their driveways.

His theory is that if something would not be permitted in more affluent suburbs, it shouldn’t be permitted here.

“You have to remember that 95% or more of the people here are just plain working people trying to get by,” says Ramirez, echoing many police critics who over the years have blamed officers for viewing everyone on their beats as potential criminals.

Ramirez and Lockett say their devotion to these communities, so marred by images of violence and blight, arises from their own hardscrabble backgrounds.

Ramirez was born in El Salvador and came to the United States when he was 15, just before civil war broke out in his native country. In Los Angeles, his mother was a housekeeper, and he lived in the Los Feliz home where she worked.

Lockett was born in the poor Irish Channel area on the New Orleans waterfront. His father was a Buick mechanic who became a hard-core alcoholic, leaving Lockett’s mother to work several jobs to provide for her 11 kids.

Growing up, he traveled a rough road with the New Orleans police. “The Police Department there was going through the Jim Crow era,” he said.

Then, when Lockett was 16, the police tragically and forever changed his life. He and his friends were watching a USC-UCLA football game on his porch one evening when some kids ran up and said, “Hey Michael, the police are chasing your brother!”

As the boys started running toward the commotion, the sound of gunfire roared out from a nearby alley. It sounded like a war zone. He came around a corner to see officers, who seemed to be smiling and celebrating, dragging his brother’s 17-year-old body onto the street.

“I just cried,” he said. “My friend and I wanted to rip the police apart. My friends were holding me back.”

But years later, he met a white officer at church who persuaded him that the police force needed minority officers with backgrounds like his.

Lockett and his wife moved to Los Angeles for the palm trees and balmy sunshine, and he eventually joined the department.

Eula Mae Jones said her grandson, Damien Burris, owes his freedom to Lockett. In 1993, she and Burris were in church when a young man was gunned down and killed in Crip-controlled Imperial Courts. Witnesses told police the shooter was named “Pookie”--Burris’ nickname--and identified Burris in a photo lineup. He was soon arrested.

At the time, Lockett was working foot patrol in Imperial Courts and was regularly approached by residents who said the detectives got the wrong guy. Skeptical at first, he gradually realized a mistake may have been made and persuaded the homicide division to reopen the investigation.

After Burris spent five months in jail, a new set of detectives corroborated Jones’ story with the pastor and other church members, and concluded: “There is no doubt Damien Burris was not involved.”

Community activists who have worked with the police over the years say that while some officers in the area are truly devoted to their beats, Lockett and Ramirez are unusual.

“I think it’s rare,” said Jeanine Watkins, of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. “These two guys are ideal for the community. And with one being African American and one being Latino, they’re role models.”

Cliff McLain of the Brotherhood Crusade said Ramirez and Lockett have bridged a chasm between police and minority neighborhoods.

Both he and Watkins were optimistic about Parks’ decision to phase the senior lead officers into regular patrol, firmly echoing the chief in saying that senior leads’ community links need to be “institutionalized.”

“Everybody in a police car in South-Central L.A. must know what the community relations team knows,” said McLain.

Capt. Jim McDonnell, the LAPD’s community policing spokesman, agreed. He said the department is being restructured so that all patrol officers in a basic car area will attend neighborhood meetings and work to solve problems, instead of merely responding to incidents.

Since 1994, he said, patrol officers are assigned to specific areas “so that the community gets to know the officers working that car, not just the senior lead officers.”

But others doubt that the bulk of patrol officers will have the time or will to make extensive contacts on their beats. And still others are skeptical of the department’s motives altogether, saying that community policing becomes a buzzword after a riot--Watts in 1965 and Los Angeles in 1992--and is discreetly scaled back as things quiet down.

The senior lead officers are tentatively scheduled to be put on regular patrol this summer. Lockett has been promoted to sergeant and will work in the Newton Division. But while the department struggles to reach out to the community, the people in his old beat are still grappling with a void.

“Things are not the same since you were here,” an Imperial Courts resident told Lockett. “These kids, they won’t talk to anybody but you. We’ve got to do something.”