In Modern Los Angeles, Security Carries a Heavy Price

In the late 1780s, not long before he took part in the storming of the Bastille, the great French aphorist Chamfort described his country.

“Society is made up of two classes: those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.”

You might look a long time for a better description of the emerging Los Angeles. That’s something that has been on my mind a lot this week--along with the burglary, the security system and the gun.

Two weeks ago, I came home shortly after 3 in the afternoon. I’d picked up a few things for dinner and, as I put them away, the cat brushed welcomingly against my legs. Then I heard a noise from the direction of the master bedroom. Assuming that one of her new kittens had escaped the service porch again, I went to retrieve it.

In the bedroom, I found not an errant kitten but a shambles: Clothing strewn on the floor; family pictures and a vase of cut flowers had been knocked over; the antique rosewood box in which my wife, Leslie, kept her everyday jewelry was gone.

Stunned, I stood numbly in the doorway. Then, I heard footsteps down the hall in the den, whose French doors open onto the back garden. I hurried that way. Small objects, jarringly out of place, were scattered on the hall floor--a bottle of Leslie’s perfume, a radio, a portable phone.

The den doors were open, as were the heavy, exterior wrought-iron gates that normally cover them. The gates’ deadbolt hung there, broken. A flicker of movement at the top of the garden wall was my only glimpse of the thief.

I called the police. A sergeant patiently explained there had been so many burglaries in the Wilshire Division that day that no officer could come by before 9 p.m. The officer who arrived about then looked at the twisted lock and, like her colleague who took fingerprints, pronounced it “scary.”

“You know, Mr. Rutten,” the second officer said, “I think I’d be glad I didn’t catch this guy.”

The next day, we swallowed hard and did what we had resisted doing for the more than 10 years we’ve lived in the mid-Wilshire area: We called a private security company to have one of their systems installed. The firm is the largest in the state. You’ve seen their signs planted on lawns all over the area: a blue octagon with the word SECURITY in white letters and, beneath it, a yellow bar emblazoned with the warning “Armed Response.”

The “security consultant” who came by was a friendly, sympathetic, low-key fellow. He took my check and signature and left me with a glossy, color brochure describing their services.

Leafing through it was a sour, melancholy experience. It chronicles the life of an affluent, apparently all-white community whose constant guardians are watchful computers and armed, uniformed men of its private patrol.

The only person of color in the brochure is “Linda,” the crisply uniformed Latina housekeeper, who the impeccably dressed woman executive on the opposite page admits to her home via the touch-tone telephone.

According to my security consultant, our Los Angeles neighborhood--Melrose on the north, Olympic on the south, Wilton on the east and La Brea on the west--contains more than 1,900 of his company’s clients, the largest such concentration in the nation. One reason is that many of my neighbors seem to see themselves in the brochure--residents of an affluent, mostly white community surrounded on three sides by poor, mainly minority people.

For most of my neighbors, the last 10 years have been good. A decade of income-tax cuts and restrained social spending by government at all levels has accorded the comfortable a new level of luxury and ease. There are lots of Lindas to clean the houses and mind the gourmet babies and lots of Ramons to cut the lawns on which they play.

What many of my neighbors do not see--nor care to see--is that back in the neighborhoods to which Linda and Ramon and tens of thousands of hard-working people return each day, the misery level and the distance from those who have continues to grow, along with the crime rate in all our neighborhoods.

There are hidden costs beyond counting in this shortsighted arrangement. There’s the price of my security system and the money for all those walls and iron gates that spring up everyday like toadstools. There is the human cost of allowing the conscienceless hand of the market to allocate as basic a right as personal safety.

Hence our new security system. There is, of course, another alternative. I have a gun--a 12-gauge shotgun with which I killed game birds as a boy. While waiting for our system to be installed, I fetched it and a handful of shells.

Last Sunday night, our burglar--or his colleague--returned. Shortly after midnight, my wife and I awoke to the sound of his hitting the gates on the den doors. I sprang from the bed, jammed three rounds into the gun and moved toward the sound. He was gone, but a close look the next morning revealed a fresh set of pry marks above the lock.

Warily, shotgun in hand, I surveyed the house and yard, my wife close behind. Our circuit complete, Leslie returned to bed to read herself to sleep. I was too anxious--and enraged--for the consolation of books. Still clutching the shotgun, I stalked down the hall to the den, and sat on the couch facing the French doors and garden.

“I’ve had it with this,” I thought. “If he makes another pass at those doors tonight, I’m going to blow the bastard in half.”

On the walls around me, hung my wife’s collection of English and Irish architectural drawings and prints. In the tall, white bookcases that frame the doors, were our library of art books; the signed first editions of our friends’ novels; volumes of psychology and philosophy, music and poetry: Freud and Cioran, Jefferson and Lincoln, Milosz and Mandelstam, Yeats and Joyce, Augustine, Aquinas and John of the Cross.

Civilized comfort within, savage want without, and myself in the middle with a gun in my lap--suddenly wondering to which world I belonged.