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SOUTH BUREAU
`There are a lot of people . . . locked down in their houses, afraid to go to the store, afraid to go outdoors.'
Devin Rene Cain was born and raised in this South-Central neighborhood, a hardscrabble stretch of land that straddles the Harbor Freeway south of Florence Avenue. It was never elegant, she admits, but in recent years it has gotten worse and worse.
"It's bad," said Cain, who raised three children here-two did just fine, the third ended up in prison. "It's ugly, and I don't like it."
The plot of land along the highway is just one mile long and barely three long blocks across. And yet last year the two LAPD reporting districts in this neighborhood-known as 1256 and 1266-recorded some of the city's highest violent crime totals.
Prostitutes regularly work the strip of Figueroa Street that cuts through the center of both districts. Merchants along Broadway and Vermont, the eastern and western borders of the zone, complain of robberies. And throughout the area, residents say it's all too easy to end up dead.
"One third of these people are so sick," said Arthur Lee Boone, who once lived on these streets, an alcoholic, scrounging for change and cigarette butts. Today, he is a pastor at the Free Speech Church of God in Christ on Figueroa Street. "The ones who are sick, who are addicted to the cocaine, they think you got a nickel on you, they'll kill you. They'll kill me."
No community in the LAPD's South Bureau saw more killings last year than Reporting District 1256-which has consistently ranked among the city's most violent neighborhoods for the better part of a decade. Twelve people were murdered in that small neighborhood in 1993. Another eight were killed in the adjoining district to the south. Robberies also abounded, with Reporting District 1256 recording more than any other place in Los Angeles.
Those two reporting districts were identified by police officials in their soon-to-be-released study as the worst in the LAPD's 77th Street Division. But that study only confirms what the statistics make abundantly clear: These communities are rife with violent crime.
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To the west and east, two other nearby neighborhoods tallied South Bureau's highest number of rapes-10...