Argyle Ave. ‘Beat Keepers’ Shut Doors on Drug ‘Supermarket’

Laura Dodson got mad one day in June when she found a cocaine dealer crawling around on the porch of her apartment on Argyle Avenue in Hollywood.

“He must have been searching for his drugs,” Dodson recalled Monday. “He was pretty whacked out.”

Dodson, a 42-year-old self-employed insurance broker, attacked the dazed man with a stick, turned him in to the police, then proceeded, with her neighbors, on a course that has virtually rid one tiny chunk of Los Angeles of what had been a persistent problem of wide-open drug trafficking.

Dodson is the president and driving force behind a brigade of about 300 residents of an Argyle Avenue neighborhood just east of the Hollywood Freeway who banded together this summer to take back their turf.

A Los Angeles Police Department patrol supervisor agreed Monday that the efforts of the group, which calls itself the “Beat Keepers,” have yielded results in the roughly six-block area.

Neighborhood streets, which are lined with apartment buildings, had been “an open-air supermarket for drugs,” Sgt. Brad Young said. “If there is any drug dealing going on now, it’s going on behind doors.”

The Beat Keepers organized themselves into six- to eight-member patrols. Since July, they have confronted the drug dealers and their customers on the street, armed with little more than patrol training from the Guardian Angels and their own grit.

Typical Confrontation

The patrols challenged the customers about why they were in the neighborhood and demanded that they leave. In a typical confrontation, Beat Keepers said, one patrol member would stand off to the side scribbling on a note pad while another would set off a camera flash in the customer’s face, giving the impression that evidence was being gathered.

“It was easy,” said Gina Dye-Johnson, the 92-pound, 18-year-old chair of the Beat Keepers’ security team. “Most of these people are too wasted to do anything. They are all done up on coke and are very paranoid. We just encourage the paranoia.”

After two months of unrelenting harassment of their customers, police said, the drug dealers have apparently moved their operations.

“What sense does it make to try to do business with this kind of pressure when you can go into an environment where people are less aware of what’s going on around them?” Young asked.

He appeared Monday at a press conference with Dodson, other Beat Keepers, Guardian Angels and City Councilman Michael Woo, whose office has aided the Beat Keepers in mounting neighborhood projects.

Young said other Los Angeles neighborhoods have in the past attempted to rid themselves of drug dealing with varying degrees of success.

In 1985, the Guardian Angels helped residents of another drug-plagued Hollywood neighborhood patrol their streets, causing at least a temporary decrease in drug sales. The patrols, however, drew criticism from some people in that neighborhood, who complained that they had been unfairly harassed by patrol members.

No such complaints have surfaced about the Beat Keepers, said Young, who praised the group for what he said was a high-level of commitment to cleaning up their neighborhood and keeping it clean.

Since July, when Dodson organized her neighbors for an alley party to discuss the drug-dealing problem, the group has sponsored an all-night street sale that raised $300, sponsored a picnic and planned a Thanksgiving Day potluck dinner, among other things.

“Before we got organized like this, we didn’t even know each other,” Dodson said.