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The glitter of Hollywood began to show signs of tarnish shortly before World War II, when studios—and their owners and stars—began moving to the flossy, faddish suburbs. The original Hollywood neighborhood had deteriorated to the level of seedy respectability when hippies and a punk element, turned on by drugs, arrived in the mid-1960s. From 1969 through 1975, the robbery, burglary and homicide rates in Hollywood climbed nearly twice as fast as for Los Angeles as a whole; narcotics and liquor violations rose more than five times as fast. Last year there were 2,168 prostitution arrests in Hollywood—ten times the average for the city's 16 other police divisions. The streets teemed with whores, transvestites and the S-M crowd dangling slave bracelets and chains. Alarmed, L.A. Police Chief Edward M. Davis assigned his executive officer, Captain Ken Hickman, 37, to clean up the mess with 180 extra men.
Touring Hollywood in his unmarked blue squad car, Hickman pointed out the sights to TIME Correspondent Joseph Boyce. Driving by one apartment building, Hickman recalled, "Until recently, the whores there had a ten-year-old boy acting as a lookout." Entering an "encounter parlor," he was greeted by a woman in halter and shorts—and told that she holds "rap sessions." Then why the mattress on the floor? "That's to make the customers comfortable," the woman explained. Replied Hickman: "It's easy to see you're trained therapists."
Usually Hickman finds little cause for humor. Along Selma Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, male and female teenagers, many of them runaways, line up under the guise of hitchhiking. Grandfatherly "chicken hawks," men in their 50s and 60s, haggle with "chickens," teen-age boy hustlers, through the windows of Cadillacs. Blonde prostitutes boast of earning $600 a night from Mexicans who have illegally sneaked across the border and pay premium prices for a fair gringa. Brunettes and blacks can at best count on around $300 a night.
It used to be much worse. "Prostitution activity is way down, both male and female," claims Hickman, who is proud of the cops' new "juvenile sweeps." In one of them last month, his men picked up 61 teen-agers on charges ranging from auto theft to narcotics violations. Most of the arrests are made in the new discos and coffee shops, many appealing to homosexuals, that have filled the entertainment vacuum left after the demise of such nightclubs as the Trocadero and the Mocambo. Hickman speaks with contempt of the masochists who keep repeating, as policemen handcuff them, "I love it, I love it." Says he: "Our policemen feel they are taking part in a perverted sex act."
Disco and coffee-shop owners are variously hostile and hospitable to the cops. At Arthur J's, four men began openly selling drugs at a table; another time, a 15-year-old girl ran out of the ladies' room screaming, "Oh my God, I broke the needle off in my arm!" Shirley Norris, the manager, hired her own night guard—and then gathered signatures for a petition demanding extra police protection. Now she's seeing "familiar faces back again" —her old "straight" clientele.