IN BALTIMORE, IT'S ALL OUT WAR

Fix previously looked at Frankfurt, Germany, which tackled its drug
problem with remarkable success. Baltimore's approach is different,
but it's working.

'The corner is relentless and certain. It can't be underestimated. It
can't be appeased with pretence or melodrama or the easy fatalism of
youth. It waits. It works. It finishes whatever it begins in its own
time, in its own way." -- David Simon and Edward Burns, in The Corner:
A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood.

BALTIMORE - Sergeants Todd Williams and Bryant Moore of the Baltimore
police wait in their unmarked maroon mini van on a ravaged street in
their city's central district, idling at the ready for the call from
the undercover boys on the corner.

To their right, a sullen string of row houses sits abandoned,
festooned with spray-painted tags reading RIP T-Kelly or RIP Lamont or
RIP Raisin 2000. And to their left, an overgrown lot the city has
razed to deny the dealers shelter. In this neighbourhood, like so many
others in this staggering city, the drug trade occupies almost every
alley and empty building and corner. Most of the residents here know
exactly what Williams and Moore and the undercovers have going down;
the police had to chase away the real dealers before they set up shop.
But the would-be buyers can take a while to catch on.

"Fifty-four," Williams' radio crackles. "I got one. Female, blue
jeans, red jacket." Williams throws the van into gear, rounds the
corner, crosses a line of traffic and pulls up beside the suspect,
opening his door even before the van brakes to a halt. The suspect, a
middle-aged black woman wearing gold earrings, a quilted red jacket
and brown leather loafers stares blankly as Williams handcuffs her and
delicately searches her pockets, pulling out a wad of small bills. The
woman's crime: asking the undercover boys for a rock of cocaine.

The so-called "reverse stings" that Williams and Moore and their
undercover boys conduct most Fridays compose an important part of
Baltimore's tough new plan for easing its drug crisis. After years as
America's most drugged out and violent city -- backdrop for the
television series Homicide and home to The Corner; the city where one
in every 10 residents is an addict and 1,000 people move away every
month -- Baltimore recently launched a plan to beat its drug
affliction and the crime it spawns. The city has flooded its most
troubled neighbourhoods with police, armed with a mandate of
"zero-tolerance;" it is busting buyers, closing drug corners and
funding the technology and the manpower to shut down mid- and
high-level dealers.

Yet Baltimore, in a pragmatic move that makes it a bit of an odd duck
among its neighbours, is also buttressing its war on drugs with a
hard-core focus on treatment. It is one of the only U.S. cities aiming
to provide treatment on request, within 48 hours.

The neighbourhood crackdowns have their critics, sure. Many of them
question the wisdom of arresting addicts while treatment, in spite of
new funding, is sometimes impossible to find. And up on the corner --
The Corner -- Jerome Smith, T.T., Charlene Mack, her son Bouncer and
Adrienne Melcher, standing there with her granddaughter in her arms,
will tell you the police campaign is nothing more than harassment,
pure and simple. But so far, the city's new strategy possesses one
critical characteristic missing in its predecessors: it seems to be
working.

Don't venture out after dark

An honest travel guide might introduce Baltimore this way: Baltimore,
the northeastern centre just a short drive from New York and
Washington D.C., has little to offer tourists. Outside of its
reclaimed waterfront, the city is a black hole (a common label), a
mess of burned-out buildings, abject poverty, violence and despair. Do
not even consider venturing outside after dark.

The description would go on to include just about every cliche ever
applied to American inner-city life, including "downtrodden,"
"festering" and "Third World" -- all apply here, times 10. It would
note that the city's murder rate -- a holy grail of the police force
is to bring the annual number of murders under 300 -- remains the
second highest in the U.S. even as neighbours such as New York and
Boston have slashed theirs. It would say that almost all crime here is
drug related. And that in many neighbourhoods, the real economy -- the
only economy -- is the drug trade.

It was not always this way. Until the 1970s, the city had nearly a
million residents and thrived as an industrial and transportation
centre. But in a demographic trend that spanned the U.S., whites fled
for the suburbs, and middle-class blacks began to leave as well.
Heroin and then crack cocaine began to take hold as successive mayors
and police commissioners failed to combat the problem.

The last mayor, Kurt Schmoke, came out in 1988 at his maiden speech to
the U.S. Conference of Mayors and said that drugs should be treated as
a medical issue, not a criminal one.

Crime continued to rise. As the murder rate fell 32 per cent in New
York and 10 per cent in Washington, it rose in Baltimore by 10 per
cent in the first months of 1995. That same year, Schmoke's own
parents were robbed at gunpoint in front of their home. The city
continued shrinking, sinking down below 700,000, then 650,000. Schmoke
fought on to serve another term, but, accompanied by a weak-kneed
police commissioner, the mayor could not turn the drug problem around.

Then on June 22, 1999, a young and inexperienced city politician named
Martin O'Malley stood at one of Baltimore's most infamous drug corners
to announce his candidacy for mayor. "Six months after I take office,
the open-air drug market of this corner and nine others will be things
of our city's past," O'Malley promised. "In the second year, 20 more
open-air drug corners will likewise be shut down, and, thus will the
people of this city easily measure our success or failure."

O'Malley promised to clean up crime, to cure the addicts, to foil the
dealers: to restore some dignity to Baltimore. He won the election
with more than 90 per cent of the vote.

Arrests For Spitting On The Sidewalk

One of O'Malley's first moves was to hire a top New York police
commander for the job of deputy commissioner. Edward T. Norris had
presided over the New York program widely credited for bringing that
city's annual murders down from 3,000 in 1993 to just under 700 in
1999. In New York, Norris had followed the crime-fighting blueprint of
John Maple, a crime consultant who advocates aggressive,
zero-tolerance policing, computerized crime tracking and weekly
meetings of top police to focus resources where they are needed.
Norris hired Maple to draw up a plan for Baltimore. Before long,
Norris was made commissioner.

Together, Norris and O'Malley boosted Baltimore police pay rates by 33
per cent. Following Maple's prescription, Norris named a tough new
head of the drug-enforcement section and empowered him with
surveillance technology and officers. He built a 75-member task force
to bring wanted felons in off the street. He started the reverse
stings and gave them plenty of publicity to discourage out-of-city
buyers. He set up stationary posts at the worst corners, ensuring that
police stayed 24-7, calling in paddy wagons at the sign of a crowd.
And he sent more than 100 extra officers to one of Baltimore's
hardest-hit areas, the Eastern District.

"We can't arrest our way out of this problem, but no way are we as a
police department going to sit back and wait for the health department
and the state's attorney [public prosecutor] to get on board," says
Major Jesse Oden, the new drug squad leader. "We have a serious
violent crime problem that's fuelled by the drug trade in this city.
We have to send a message that we are no longer soft on crime."

The officers on the street seem to love the mandate. One of them, a
25-year-old patrolman who joined as a cadet when he was 18, boasts
that he has arrested people for throwing paper on the ground and he
can't wait to see someone spitting on the sidewalk. He will arrest him
too, he says. He adds that he relishes the reaction he gets. "Hey, I
love it that they hate us because at least I know we doing our job,"
he says. "That's the only way you know you're really doing your job is
if they hate you."

Around 8 p.m. on a chilly Wednesday evening, no-nonsense officers
Jeffrey Soule and Kenneth Patzman cruise through the Eastern District,
ready to pounce no matter the problem. Patzman, a wiry former marine
with a thin blond moustache, knows his neighbourhood, and most of the
locals know him as well. He and Soule dash from radio call to radio
call, attending domestic disputes or complaints about dealers lurking
in alleys. Each time they pass a drug corner, Patzman slows the car
and the crowd scurries in all directions. On one darkened street,
they pull up beside a group of teens sitting on a stoop. Patzman tells
them to leave. He drives around the block and circles back a minute
later. Slowly, the teens shuffle away.

At another corner, Patzman pulls in front of a young man who vaguely
fits the dispatcher's description of someone seen dealing nearby. In
what is called a "jump out," he opens his door, almost hitting the
teen -- a black kid in a hooded sweatshirt and baggy pants -- and
searches his pockets. He finishes, finding nothing, then asks the
kid's name, writing the answer down in his notepad. "Thanks for your
cooperation," he says.

Sergeant Richard V. Piel Jr., a garrulous, if not charming Eastern
District shift commander who studies for a master's degree in history
in his spare time, says morale has gone through the roof since Norris
took over. Norris, who in New York faced criticism through several
high-profile brutality cases against his officers, has been straight
up with Baltimorians, Piel says. Norris has pledged to root out bad
cops, but he has also warned that as police become more engaged on the
streets, more aggressive, they will face criticism for their conduct.

Another reason for officers' affection for Norris: results. Drug
arrests in the Eastern District have doubled since August. Earlier this
month they totalled 1,704. There have been two major busts of mid-level
dealers. The reverse stings, though "a bullshit charge," as Lieutenant
Michael Tabor, the drug unit commander in the Central District puts it,
have dissuaded buyers from the tough-on-crime counties outside the city
from coming to Baltimore for drugs, and as every single person arrested
in Baltimore is debriefed by homicide police, the information they have
provided has helped solve murder cases. By the end of October, the
warrant task force had arrested 98 murder suspects -- this compared to
just 11 such arrests the year before. Month-to-month comparisons
between this year and last show homicides down by half, shootings down
by 54 per cent, burglary down by 20 per cent and aggravated assault
down by 23 per cent. Total crime, if you factor out drug charges, is
down 11 per cent for the year. And this year, for the first time in a
decade, the number of murders in Baltimore might just stop before 300.

K. and J. Saltus -- they give only their initials for fear of
reprisals -- stand and watch from the doorway of their brownstone row
house as Sergeants Williams and Moore make another arrest in the
reverse sting across the street. "I think it's time for a clean-up,"
says J., nodding his head toward the commotion.

The last 10 years have been hard on the neighbourhood as the dealers
moved in and many of the old home-owning families left town. "It makes
your head spin," says K. "All the time, constantly you get gunshots.
All the time, day and night here, gunshots, any time of day. To the
point where you can say 'One shot, sounds like a shotgun,' or damn,
that's three and it sounds like a nine-millimetre automatic."

Not long ago, K. says, the users who moved into the abandoned row
house next door set it alight, almost burning with it the Saltus'
home. "I got a nine-year-old boy in here," K. says. "It's good to see
it cleaned up."

Treatment Services Increased

Martin O'Malley made another important decision when he became
Baltimore's mayor. In spite of his tough-on-crime platform, he kept
Dr. Peter Beilenson, the city's health commissioner, in his job.
O'Malley knows there is no way the city can jail everyone it arrests
on drug charges. In fact, many of them, like the woman in the red
quilted jacket, are given the option of taking treatment, and promised
that if they can stay clean their record will be erased.

Beilenson was appointed in 1992 by Schmoke, the former mayor, and he
crusaded, with Schmoke's support, to bring more drug-treatment money
to the city. Beilenson won some battles, developing for example,
against strenuous political opposition, a needle-exchange program for
the city. The program has been a major success, demonstrably lowering
the rate of HIV infection among users and building a client base of
some 13,000 users. Beilenson began a city-wide treatment referral
line for users and persuaded the city to commit some of its own money
to its treatment budget. But in a city with 60,000 addicts, in 1994
Baltimore spent just $15-million a year on treatment. Finally, in 1997
the city secured $14 million in federal funding. Beilenson began
investing in methadone programs, detox beds and transitional housing,
and holding the programs to task for their performance, all of which
was dutifully charted by the health department. Beilenson pushes them
to provide not only job counselling, but job placement; not only
housing referrals, but housing placement. He knows that if recovering
addicts leave their treatment programs still unemployed and homeless,
they do not stand a chance.

Beilenson then hit up the state legislature for $25 million in
treatment money. With such funding he could provide good treatment on
request, within 48 hours, to anyone who wanted it. With such an
ability, he pledged, crime would drop by half and the city's economy
would gather steam. He staked his job on it, but the state provided
only $8-million, not even a third of what Beilenson requested. With
the help of a few smaller grants from non-governmental groups, the
city has been able to triple its treatment funding and double the
number of spaces it provides.

Beilenson expects that sooner or later the state will increase
treatment funding, and he says the existing programs are working.
Still, with fewer than 100 publicly-funded residential treatment
spaces and just a handful of detox beds, Baltimore is far from
reaching its treatment goal. And Beilenson recites this one stark
statistic to make his point: each month, Baltimore's hospitals report
between 500 and 700 incidences where users walk in and threaten to
kill themselves or somebody else. With that, they get a week in the
psych ward, with medication to help them through withdrawal. It is one
of the only ways to get immediate detox.

Karen Wirth, a 35-year-old heroin addict who used to run a real estate
office, knows this all too well. On Thursday, Nov. 16, she climbs into
the needle-exchange van beside a vacant lot in a mixed neighbourhood
in the Western District and announces, almost immediately, that she
needs help. "Do you know anything about Bayview Medical Center?" she
asks Michelle Brown, the needle-exchange director. "I mean I need
detox. I need emergency detox."

Wirth, who would look healthy if not for the dark, tired circles under
her eyes, goes on to explain that she works full time and has managed,
for the first time in years, to keep a job for more than 90 days, in
large part because her bosses accept that 80 per cent of their workers
are addicts, she says. Now that she has worked 90 days her health
insurance will kick in. Now, Wirth says, she can pay to get herself
cleaned up.

"You know, the press and the government and everyone else, they say
they want to give treatment," she says, standing outside now. "But if
you're me you can't get it." And Wirth considers herself one of the
luckier junkies. "How many junkies have insurance?" she asks.

About eight blocks uphill, Monroe Street turns from a mixed
neighbourhood into an all black one where the only whites swing by in
their pick-up trucks to buy drugs. Up at Monroe and Fayette, someone
has scrawled the word "Murder" on a vertical beam outside the New York
Convenience Mart. Jerome Smith, T.T., Charlene Mack and Bouncer and
Adrienne Melcher and her five-year-old granddaughter Geneva Green,
white elastic bobbles in her hair, are on the corner. Young men and
teenage boys mill around, working ground stashes in elaborate teams
that include lookouts, runners, the dealer and enforcers. Whenever the
cruisers come by, one of the boys calls "time out" and disappear for a
minute or two.

Melcher, holding a bottle of Cobra in a brown paper bag, says she has
been a junkie for years, but she complains she is sick and tired of
being targeted by the police. She wants to know why they aren't busy
arresting the white suppliers, the big guys in their condos downtown,
who send the drugs to the street. "That's not right to pick up the
junkies and put them in jail," she says angrily.

T.T., a thin addict in dirty black shoes with a golden teardrop
embossed in a tooth, adds that he's been around the corner long enough
to know how it works. "I been arrested a few times for drugs and I
also been a user," he says. "They arrest you and they don't give you
treatment," he says. The police presence here makes him bitter. "I
think they're really taking it out of hand because they spend more
time harassing than doing. You can't come here and tell me I can't
come here no more. I live five doors down. What are you saying, that I
can't go outside?"

"Police goes on the corner for five or 10 minutes, everybody leave.
Police goes away, everybody comes back," he adds. The crowd around him
nods.

In neighbourhoods like this one, police and health officials must
battle drugs and dealers, sure, but they will also need to end the
poverty, provide housing and jobs -- give people some hope. The city's
numbers so far show Baltimore is looking up. O'Malley, Beilenson and
the police say they will turn this place around. But after years of
drugs and murder and neglect, no one on this corner, including T.T.,
seems ready to accept that just yet.

"They ain't going to change nothing."