Druggies and drive-by shootings wrecking your neighborhood? Streets not safe for kids? The police can't handle it? Who can you call? For residents of 15 federally aided apartment buildings in a crime-ravaged section of Venice, California, known locally as "Ghost Town," the answer is Nation of Islam Security. On September 11, the Louis Farrakhan affiliate, with headquarters in the local mosque of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, won unanimous Los Angeles City Police Commission approval for a permit for unarmed nighttime foot patrols. This cleared the last hurdle in the firm's year-long struggle to win a $ 53,676-a-month contract from Alliance Housing Management, which operates the low-rent housing complex with funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It also ended a lobbying effort by the local branch of the B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League to kill the deal. The ADL opposed granting patrol rights to the Nation of Islam because the group remains unabashedly racist, violent and anti-Semitic, and has links in other cities to drug-running gangs. Jewish residents of one of Southern California's oldest Jewish communities Venice is part middle-class, part slum say movement proselytizers have been papering the neighborhood with anti-Semitic leaflets accusing Israel of having enslaved Ethiopian Jewish immigrants. Latinos, who comprise some 40 percent of the complex's residents, say they don't want a Black Muslim group patrolling their homes, but fear assault if they speak out. Jewish civil rights activist Stanley Sheinbaum, who heads the Police Commission, was briefed on the Nation of Islam's Jew-baiting and affinity for anti-white violence.
But he reportedly defended the group's right to express itself freely. In its bid to block the patrol contract, the ADL had earlier appealed to HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, saying it would be "as inappropriate for the Ku Klux Klan or any other racist group to be providing security under government contract as it would for the Nation of Islam." ADL representatives did not appear before the police commission. The FBI dissuaded them after they received death threats holding them responsible if the deal fell through. No other local Jewish or non-Jewish group appeared; the American Jewish Committee reportedly debated registering its distress, but ultimately declined. Sheli Teitelbaum / Los Angeles