‘Noise Cops’: They Shun Guns for Decibel Meters

Efren Rodriguez thought that he was going crazy. Here he was, living with his family in a small but very neat apartment above a bar in South Los Angeles, and the bar was playing live and recorded music so loud that the apartment floor vibrated. So loud that Rodriguez’s three kids were sometimes too tired to wake up for school on Monday mornings.

It went on like that for years until Rodriguez found some special cops.

Noise cops.

Cops whose hidden assets are not their guns but their decibel meters. Cops whose enemies are electric guitars, ghetto blasters, leaf-blowers or 5:30 a.m. trash truck routes--anything that creates a chronic noise problem in a neighborhood.

The cops are 18 Los Angeles Police Department officers who work a shift of overtime each week for the department’s little-known Noise Enforcement Team. The 5-year-old team last year handled about 1,000 citizen complaints, an unusually strong police commitment to the problem of urban noise, which most cities leave to building and safety or environmental health inspectors.

The team dispatches pairs of officers, armed with copies of the city’s noise ordinance, to apartments with blaring stereos, construction sites where workers turn on their saws too early or throbbing bars like the one underneath Rodriguez’s apartment. The owners of that bar closed it three weeks ago after police asked the city attorney to file a criminal complaint.

Most of the time the noise cops make their calls in business suits and in an unmarked car. At other times, when enforcement requires that the offending sounds be surreptitiously measured against a neighborhood’s ambient noise, they don grubby clothing to take decibel readings.

It’s nit-picking work that usually ends with a warning and rarely involves anything as dramatic as an arrest. Yet officers, who boast of obtaining voluntary compliance from noise makers in 95% of the cases they investigate, say the work has distinct rewards.

“You finally get to do what you signed on (with the department) to do--you get to make an impact,” said Officer Chuck Massar, the noise team’s coordinator, who mans the complaint line (485-4573) in a little office on the 24th floor of City Hall.

“I’ve done all the heroic things you hear that policemen do,” said Officer Ted Hunt, who has worked cases for the noise team since the City Council created it. “But nobody has been as grateful to me as the citizen who has no other resources and has to live next door to this obnoxious noise.”

Jeannine Roman had that kind of problem. Roman lives in the East San Fernando Valley foothill community of Sylmar, where many residents pasture horses on large lots. Unfortunately, her next-door neighbor’s teen-age son pastured off-road motorcycles, riding them with friends on a home-built motocross course.

“I couldn’t use my backyard or talk on the phone,” Roman said. For years she called her city councilman’s office and the city attorney’s office, “but everybody kept getting hung up about the fact that this was happening on private property.” Finally, one council deputy remembered hearing something about the noise team.

Hunt and another officer visited the neighborhood last fall and informed the motorcycle owners that the Municipal Code prohibits engine noise on private property if it can be heard more than 150 feet away from the property.

Could Impound Bikes

They warned that a petition could be filed against the youth in Juvenile Court, and that the bikes could be impounded until the court proceedings were concluded.

“It worked like day and night,” Roman said. “Now the boy and his father load up the bikes in the back of a pickup truck and go out and destroy the desert.”

Noise investigators don’t do barking dogs (that is for the Department of Animal Regulation to handle) or stationary problems such as out-of-whack air conditioners (that is the Department of Building and Safety). Nor do they usually handle one-time crises such as loud parties. (Call your local police division and maybe it will send a patrol car.) Two-thirds of their cases involve the repetitive misuse of music--band music, bar music, car stereo music.

Hunt and his partner, Officer Ray Dominguez, work a prime shift for that kind of action. They head off together every Friday afternoon after Hunt finishes his regular job as a Police Academy instructor and Dominguez wraps up his as a hit-and-run accident investigator.

On a recent evening, they headed south on the Harbor Freeway, Dominguez driving as Hunt scanned the day’s caseload, new complaints that had been phoned into team coordinator Massar and follow-up calls.

Amplified Music

Their first visit was to a large family in Southwest Los Angeles whose habit of playing music out of their pickup truck’s stereo--heavily amplified through large speakers in the truck’s bed--was annoying residents of an apartment complex across the street.

The officers had been here once before. Now they returned for a final warning, including the standard threat of impounding the offending equipment.

Later they visited a rock band whose practice sessions on the second floor of an Echo Park home had brought a complaint from a neighbor several houses away. This was a first visit, so Hunt and Dominguez were more gentle, sympathizing with the financial impracticality of renting a studio.

“We want to help you if there’s any way we can,” Hunt said to one of the band’s members, Monique Caravello, 17.

“You wanna loan me 5,000 bucks?” she said.

“I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you this,” he said. “The noise has got to stop.”

“Is there any time they can practice?” a family member asked Hunt.

“It’s like Denny’s,” Hunt said. “The law is in effect 24 hours a day.”

The band was convinced. “We’re going to soundproof the garage and practice there,” Caravello said a few days later.

A more subtle problem needed tending on Bonnie Brae Street in the Westlake district a few miles northwest of downtown. Inside a big, old home that had been converted into apartments, several radios and stereos were blaring Spanish-language music.

To someone just driving past there was a certain charm here. The dinner hour had arrived on a lovely, warm spring day; the sky shone its deepest blue and the melodies that filled the air from the west side of the street epitomized the Latinization of Los Angeles.

Noise, Not Atmosphere

Yet to the people who lived on the east side of Bonnie Brae in a much newer, much more expensive apartment house, this was too loud to be atmosphere. It was noise. It went on past 10 p.m. Hunt and Dominguez had already been here once.

They walked up the crumbling stairway of the old home and knocked on a door. In Spanish, Dominguez explained the complaint to the woman who answered. As often happens, the woman countered by asking why she had not been able to get the police to investigate real crime, in this case the kids who had tried to break in through her roof.

Couldn’t Prove Violation

The officers knocked on the next-door unit. The young Latina who answered told them in firm, resentful, unaccented English that she had not played her music loudly since their first visit.

The cops were sure she was lying. They were sure she had turned it down when their unmarked car drove up. But they couldn’t prove it.

“The next time,” Hunt said sternly, “you’re not going to know we’re out there. We’re going to get a measurement, and we’re going to take the equipment and cite you, and remember, the fine can range from $250 to $500.”

Question of Priorities

For years the Police Department has complained that its 7,000 officers are insufficient to handle Los Angeles’ crime problems. That raises the question of whether noise patrolling is a justifiable use of law enforcement resources.

“It’s preventive medicine,” Hunt said. “It’s preventing escalation of violence. The thing people become the most upset about is their belief that they have the right to make as much noise as they want. They don’t. You don’t have the right to pollute.”

Noise team coordinator Massar said the cost of the noise team is minimal. “The overtime from all our team members costs about the full-time salaries of two officers,” he said.

Team members believe that police officers’ ability to threaten arrest and their training in mediating disputes make them more effective in gaining compliance than their civilian counterparts. And only by assigning officers who specialize in noise can the department make sure that such complaints don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Some Odd War Stories

The field brings with it some odd war stories. Like the guy in Echo Park who built his own musical instrument out of tubular steel, drew a complaint from a homeowner a half-mile away and insisted to officers that neighbors should be paying for the privilege of listening to him.

There was the man in an apartment building off Sunset Boulevard who complained that some Bible students who lived in another unit were singing their religious hymns too loudly. The complainer was a minister.

And there was the West Los Angeles restaurant owner who, when confronted by Hunt about the noise his four Mariachi musicians were making, quickly settled the problem.

“He walked over to them,” Hunt recalled, “and said, ‘You, you, you, you--you’re fired.’ ”

ENFORCING THE NOISE REGULATIONS

The Los Angeles Police Department’s Noise Enforcement Team concentrates on enforcing several sections of the city’s noise ordinance. Among them:

Construction in residential zones is limited to the hours of 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays. It is banned on Sundays. An individual is not prohibited from working on his own home but can be investigated for disturbing the peace if persistent complaints result.

Garbage collection within 200 feet of a residential zone is limited to the hours of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Loud noises from any musical instrument, stereo or other amplified device is prohibited if it “interferes with the peace and quiet of another,” whether on public or private property.

In a residential zone, any instrument or sound reproducing device should not be audible more than 150 feet from the boundary of the property where it is being played. A car stereo system or radio should not be audible for more than 200 feet.

The shriek emitted by a car theft alarm system must become automatically silenced within five minutes.

Backpack leaf blowers may not be used before 7 a.m. and must be no louder than 65 decibels. According to police, two makes of leaf blowers meet this requirement.