Church to Confront Drug Dealers : Cocaine: Volunteers from a Mid-City congregation plan to close neighborhood crack houses with a strategy of prayers, picketing and legal pressure.

Leaders of a Mid-City church are preparing to rout crack cocaine houses from their neighborhoods with a strategy that risks confrontations with drug dealers in the courts and in the streets.

The group from First A.M.E. Church, 2270 S. Harvard Blvd., hopes to recruit 50 African-American men from 25 churches to stage marches and prayer meetings in front of targeted crack houses for up to six months--or until they close.

It also intends to barrage landlords who allow tenants to sell drugs with civil lawsuits, claiming emotional stress.

The campaign, which is scheduled to hit the streets in early February, will be led by members of the church’s 2,200-member Richard Allen Men’s Society, said the Rev. Cecil L. (Chip) Murray of First A.M.E. Church.

“Those who are losing drug profits will backlash--they’ll make intimidating phone calls and threaten us,” Murray said. “We’ll have to let the Lord safeguard us.”

In an earlier effort to close down a nearby crack house, First A.M.E. congregation members were pelted by rocks and bottles thrown by irate drug customers.

“We won’t eliminate the problem entirely,” Murray said. “But we have to eliminate the spinoffs: children killing children, adults killing children . . . neighborhoods held in bondage and terror, school dropout rates of 50%, drive-by shootings.”

Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief William Rathburn praised the community-based effort he said will combine with already toughened law enforcement policies to create a “very, very formidable force.”

Although law enforcement raids on crack cocaine houses have reduced their numbers in certain communities, “they are still a problem,” Rathburn said.

“We need people to stand up and say, ‘I’m not going to allow these kinds of things to take place in my neighborhood,’ ” he said.

The anti-drug campaign will be loosely modeled after similar but smaller joint efforts involving the Brotherhood Crusade, the Nation of Islam and churches, including First A.M.E. Church.

In 1989, the Brotherhood Crusade sponsored an effort to remove trash from streets in a 110-square-block area north of Watts and rid them of drugs, gangs and violence. During the course of the monthlong effort, called “Taking Our Community Back,” crime dropped 45% and neighbors were encouraged to help each other and themselves, according to crusade leaders.

Nonetheless, organizers of the Brotherhood Crusade’s campaign found it difficult to gain the trust of a community wary of social programs, police and years of violence. Four weeks into the effort, they could only muster 275 patrol volunteers to do a job originally intended for 1,000.

Still, “Our effort was very successful in that we were able to galvanize 300 to 400 African- American men during the course of the campaign,” said Ralph Sutton, spokesman for the Brotherhood Crusade, a community-based service organization.

“Secondly, we were able to convince the majority of the people in the target area that were suspicious of law enforcement that we were there on their behalf,” Sutton said. “We are ecstatic that First A.M.E. has taken the movement on to another area.”

First A.M.E. Church leaders anticipate problems in attracting volunteers during the early stages of their campaign, which will include patrol teams armed with video cameras to make records of drug transactions that could be used as evidence in court trials and lawsuits.

“But by the sixth week people will be applauding us and the eighth week they’ll be joining our marches,” said Mark Whitlock, president of the Richard Allen Men’s Society. Allen was a freeman who founded the church in Philadelphia in 1787.

The effort will target at least 10 crack cocaine houses operating within a square mile of First A.M.E. Church--south of the Santa Monica Freeway, near Western Avenue--and expand to neighborhoods of the other 25 mostly black churches enlisted in the campaign, he said.

The marches and demonstrations are almost certain to draw hostile responses from drug dealers.

Over the Christmas holiday, for example, Whitlock organized a series of “first wave” protest marches in front of half a dozen rock houses operating within a few blocks of the church. Customers who had lined up to buy drugs at the the fortified residences threw rocks and bottles at the marchers, he said. No one was injured in the confrontations.

“We patrolled neighborhoods around the church with groups of 10 to 20 men, some of them carrying signs that said, ‘Down With Dope, Up With Hope,’ ” said Whitlock, an assistant vice president for a title insurance company in Los Angeles. “We also held prayer meetings in front of rock cocaine houses, which really agitated the customers.”

“We had rocks and bottles thrown at us, and threats of drive-by shootings,” Whitlock added. “We were unarmed but we had faith.”

Ralph Dawson, coordinator of counseling at Cal State Los Angeles, suggested that “the reason people throw rocks and bottles at us is because they don’t believe we are serious.”

“We are serious,” Dawson said, “and we’ll be out there on our own until we win the hearts and minds of the community.”

At a strategy meeting attended by 75 people at First A.M.E. Church earlier this month, NAACP attorney Leo Terrell said his organization will participate in the campaign by helping church officials form neighborhood “block clubs” to file lawsuits in Small Claims Court against landlords who allow drug sales on their property.

By filing such lawsuits under the umbrella of a neighborhood group, he said, specific individuals can be protected from reprisals.

“These groups can take a nuisance like drugs and go to town with it in civil courts,” Terrell said of the technique used by a group of Berkeley residents last year. The barrage of litigation succeeded in putting several drug dealers out of business.

“Previous arrests made at a residence or apartment can even be used as evidence in these lawsuits, which can be filed in Small Claims Court for $13,” Terrell said.

“I never thought about civil suits--sounds like something I should consider,” said a 52-year-old systems engineer who came to the meeting in search of a strategy he could use “without engendering overt risk to me or my family--some covert action, if you will.”

He said a group of young men hang out at a house down the street, “wearing the same style jacket and the same color handkerchief hanging out of their back pockets.”

“We’ve had a few bullets come flying through the walls of our house,” he said, “and one of my neighbors spent $2,000 to put up a six-foot concrete wall about the same time the Berlin Wall was coming down.”