Putting the Skids on Teens : Antelope Valley Officials Set Down Rules, but Youths Say They’re Bored

When the master planners of the Antelope Valley set out to transform a dusty expanse of High Desert scrub brush into what would become the county’s fastest-growing suburb, they imposed a precise grid of lettered avenues and numbered streets on the landscape.

Housing developments, small businesses, light industry and strip malls fit perfectly into the grid, appealing to the need for order among those who flocked there in the 1950s for aerospace jobs, and then in the 1980s in search of affordable housing and relief from the urban ills “down below” in Los Angeles.

Now, the communities of the Antelope Valley--Lancaster and Palmdale--are trying much the same technique on their young people.

Teen-agers in this valley must live by the rules:

* High school students must submit to periodic, unannounced inspections of their book bags by drug-sniffing dogs.

* At the local mall, groups of more than three teen-agers are not allowed to congregate. Anyone wearing a backward baseball cap is told to turn the brim forward or leave.

* Students caught in truancy raids must sit through lectures at a counseling center run by a former sheriff’s deputy who is also a preacher at a local fundamentalist church.

* Violations of the 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. Lancaster curfew can bring a fine of up to $700 and/or six months in jail.

With these rules as their leading artillery, Antelope Valley officialdom has declared war on juvenile dissipation.

Not only did they instruct law enforcement and school officials to clamp down, they encouraged students to join their cause, first offering $25 rewards for tips on weapons and drugs, then upping the ante to as much as $1,000 for information on taggers and other vandals.

“I’m convinced that in many places in the (San Fernando Valley) and Los Angeles, they truly have given up, and we are committed to not giving up,” said Lancaster City Councilman George Runner, head of a local Christian school who spearheaded many of the council’s curfew and anti-graffiti regulations as part of his mission to make teens act responsibly. “We’re doing this so they don’t grow up and become out of control.”

But in the rush to conquer the desert and their youngsters, the adults of the Antelope Valley seemed to have forgotten that teen-agers do not take kindly to grids. The teens have been supplied with plenty of rules, but not many options for Saturday nights.

“There’s not much to do in Lancaster, it’s just the same thing over and over,” said Tina Marie Lerma, 17. “Usually on weekends, if I don’t go ‘down below,’ I just stay in my house. Most of the time we don’t end up doing anything.”

In this valley, population 330,000, teen hangouts are scarce: one coffeehouse, one club that occasionally features local punk bands, a restaurant that turns into a disco two school nights a week and assorted fast-food parking lots.

An hour’s drive away, “down below” in Los Angeles, are the clubs, funky discos, hip eateries and trendy clothing stores teens covet--the places pumped into their TV sets.

In the view of many young people, Antelope Valley officials and fundamentalist preachers--often one in the same in these communities--are embarked on a kind of Children’s Crusade, leaving their kids in the High Desert with nothing to do, nowhere to do it and plenty of God-fearing rules to abide by.

“It is overly conservative Christians--almost to the point of fanatical Christians. . . . They are imposing their values on everyone else,” said La Dawn Best, 17, a senior at Quartz Hill High School.

“Everyone’s just trying to classify our whole generation as the generation that’s going nowhere and that has no values and that’s not doing anything,” La Dawn said. “They’re treating the whole student body as criminals, even though most of them aren’t.”

Even Lancaster’s mayor, Larry C. Roberts, says officials might have gone too far.

Still, the day before he made that statement in an interview, Roberts joined his conservative Christian counterparts on the City Council in a vote to stiffen fines against the parents of those who violate juvenile curfew and anti-graffiti laws.

“I’m pretty certain that that’s not the most popular thing we just did among young people, and it does seem a bit harsh,” he said. “Jeez, when I was a kid, I can’t even tell you the things I’d do. . . . I can’t remember that I would ever get in before 10 o’clock.

“This is a highly Republican, ultra-right community for the most part, and those are the parents who think we have to crack down on kids and crack down on everything,” Roberts said.

What makes it difficult to legislate teen behavior are questions like: Is IBS (which stands for Insane Bud Smokers) a gang, or simply a crew of friends?

The young men of IBS--dressed in oversize plaid shirts, baggy pants hemmed with staples and Raiders caps pulled down low over their brows--are the kind who inspire neighbors to peek out their windows to see what they’re up to.

*

Jeremy, 16, and his friends said they spend most of their time hanging out in his parents’ garage in Palmdale, shooting pool. Their discussions include the pros and cons of buying a gun.

“It’ll get like the (San Fernando) Valley in 10 or 15 years,” said Jeremy, speaking on the condition his real name not be used. “But right now I don’t think anybody out here has the guts to kill anybody.”

He said the city’s rules will do little to curb his lifestyle.

“The more they come down on it, the more people are gonna do it, cause it’s a rush to them,” he said. “We’re not doing it to destroy anything, we’re just bored.”

In the last 10 years, juvenile crime in Lancaster has risen, along with the population. In 1993, there were 1,077 cases filed against juveniles, three times the number in 1985, according to statistics provided by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Nearly one-quarter of those crimes involved murder, rape, robbery or aggravated assault.

Still, compared to the gang battles, crack deals and drive-by shootings in Los Angeles’ toughest neighborhoods, the Antelope Valley remains a haven. As tough as the members of IBS talk, when they light up a joint, they do so outside: Jeremy’s parents forbid smoking in the garage.

La Dawn has never been in trouble with the law. A socially conscious teen-ager, she recently cruised the Antelope Valley Mall in Palmdale seeking supporters for a petition to stop the use of the Confederate flag and uniform on Quartz Hill High School’s “Rebel” mascot.

Yet she, too, is irked by the rule saying that “juvenile groups of four or more will be dispersed” at the mall.

“What’s the point of going to the mall if you can’t hang out?” she asked. “I think that’s a biased thing--they target kids who they stereotype as a problem kid or kids who would be involved in gangs.

“Who are those kids? Probably minority kids and boys,” said La Dawn, who is African American.

Probably the regulation most resented by teen-agers in Lancaster is the curfew.

After 10 p.m., no one under 18 is allowed to loiter about the streets, parks or public places of Lancaster. Sheriff’s deputies run occasional sweeps targeting specific locations.

City officials said the law is not intended to keep youths closeted in their homes. But to teen-agers, it has a chilling effect.

“I would like to hang out past 10, say, if I was going to a party or if something was going on,” said Joe Garcia, 16, waiting for a bus to take him to the mall. “They had a teen night once, but it only went to 9:30, so everyone could get home on time. But when you’re there you just want to stay until you get tired.”

One of the few places kids can hang out after dark is Hang n’ Java, just down the street from City Hall in Lancaster. Here, accompanied by the wailing of local musicians covering Neil Young tunes, kids can shoot pool and get a legal dose of caffeine.

“It’s so boring that kids don’t have anything to do, so they just hang out here,” said owner Julie Murakami.

In Palmdale, those who prefer deep house music roll out to La Villa, a restaurant that twice a week turns into a discotheque after 10 p.m.

Just outside the Lancaster city limits on pockmarked Challenger Way, Brian Gregory and Dan Bunce inch their hot rods forward so that the front tires of each car rest squarely on a green line long ago painted on the roadway.

As the two teen-agers rocket off the line in a dark gray cloud of burning rubber, a crowd of about 150 young people lines the street under a three-quarter moon. Curfew has been in effect for almost an hour.

In the din of supercharged engines, Dan’s ’67 Camaro gets trounced by Brian’s ’63 Nova, which has a Corvette engine secreted under the hood.

Saturday night street races are a tradition in Lancaster--a burst of speed, danger and excitement in which the drivers nearly sail off the edge of the grid at 100 m.p.h. But as fast as they go, they never quite break through the boundary. Applying the brakes just before they cross into Edwards Air Force Base, they make a U-turn and head back toward town, rejoining their friends on the side of the road.

Dan gets out of his Camaro and stands stoically beside it. A friend who identifies himself as “Uncle Charlie” lights up a translucent blue water pipe for smoking marijuana, offering hits to those nearby.

“This is basically all there is to do out here,” said Dan, who wears a khaki baseball cap emblazoned with the word hemp. “There isn’t much recreation for teen-agers in the Antelope Valley because the City Council won’t let them have any functions or parties that aren’t secured properly.

“All they can do is shoot pool or party,” he added as two more cars gunned their engines and barreled down the highway. “Or go ‘down below.’ ”