LA Judge orders evictions of gang-infested Apartment units

For the first time, a Los Angeles judge, acting at the request of city officials, has ordered the eviction of all the tenants from three gang-ridden apartment buildings on the grounds that they are a public nuisance. Gang members have made the 24 units with peeling paint and sagging balconies their headquarters for 20 years, terrorizing neighbors, dealing drugs and, since June 2002, shooting nine people, including two children, city officials charged Tuesday. "This building has been a headquarters of death," said Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief George Gascon, standing with a seized assault rifle in front of television cameras near the apartments in south Los Angeles. City officials held their news conference a half block from the apartments at 69th and Main streets, saying it would be safer. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's office said the tenants in just three of the apartments will be eligible for relocation assistance -- the others could be excluded because they live in units used by drug dealers or the 69 East Coast Crips for criminal activity. But several soon-to-be-displaced residents marched over to Delgadillo's news conference and challenged that decision. "I'm a single mother with four kids," said Tajuana Green, 47. "How can they just put all our families out on the street?" Green acknowledged there are gang members in the building, and added, "You got to get along, try to be nice." But she said that does not mean that she and her neighbors are criminals. Some civil liberties advocates also questioned the city's rationale for giving as much as $5,000 in relocation money to some tenants but not others. "That's appalling," said Catherine Lhamon, staff attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "If residents in that apartment complex are not being charged with criminal activity, there is no basis for distinguishing relocation expenses for some residents and not others." [more]