STREET IS PLACE TO HURRY AND WAIT

Drama And Tedium Are The Order Of The Day As Officers Try To Dent
City'S Drug Business

Four Denver patrol cars moved like chess pieces on the street, hiding
in alleys, sitting at curbs, trying to stay within 30 seconds of two
neighborhood police officers working an undercover "buy and bust" operation.

Bruce Gibbs, 36, and policewoman Snow White, 44, were posing as an
interracial couple, cruising near Five Points. They were having no
trouble finding drugs. At 10:45 a.m., they made two heroin buys north
of lower downtown.

At 11:15 a.m., they purchased several grams of heroin across from the
Samaritan House homeless shelter. There was a steady stream of buys,
followed instantly by arrests and then 30 minutes of paperwork.

Then it was back to the streets.

The assignment is one the community police officers like: quick and
effective. They weren't trying to build complicated narcotics cases
against dealers. They were trying to force the thriving street dealers
out of neighborhoods.

"Community policing" is a term used to describe officers who focus on
a specific neighborhood's crime problems. In northeast Denver, it's
the drug trade.

Denver's Mayor Wellington Webb and Interim Police Chief Gerry Whitman
say community policing will be a key component of law enforcement in
the future because it targets crimes that drive neighborhoods into
decay.

It was nearly 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon and the undercover officers
had just purchased a "40" -- two $20 rocks of crack cocaine -- from a
young man who had been down this road before.

Sgt. John Spezze, who runs the District 6 Neighborhood team, watched
from an unmarked, cream-colored pickup with longtime partner Sgt. Jim
Kukuris, who runs the district's impact team. They observed the drug
deals visually and monitored the audio body-wire traffic.

Once again Spezze yelled into the radio: "It's a bust." All four
marked cars leaped from their hiding spots.

Officer Mike Lemmons slammed his squad car into gear, the engine
already whining hard. The sudden acceleration threw everyone back in
the seat, then sideways as he made a hard left turn and crossed
oncoming traffic.

Gibbs, in tattered jeans and a blue knit cap, walked quietly away from
the buy, looking back over his shoulder toward the suspect as Lemmons'
car rounded the corner, on the sidewalk, and slammed to a stop. Gibbs
jumped back, surprised, then disappeared around the corner as the
suspect ran.

Lemmons tore from the car, sprinted into a grocery-liquor store where
the suspect fled and had him handcuffed in less than a minute. But the
hours of steady momentum were about to grind to a halt.

"I don't got nothing here," the teen said. "You got
nothing."

The store owners looked on, bewildered. By the time officers searched
the youth, whatever remaining crack he had, along with the two marked
$20 bills, was missing.

"Did he throw it?" he asked the store owners. They looked at him
blankly.

"If you saw it, please tell us where. This guy was dealing crack
cocaine right outside your door."

But the owners had no clue. The cops searched through the store,
looking under potato-chip racks and peering into the spaces between
pop bottles and whiskey cases for the little plastic-wrapped rocks and
the money. They found nothing.

The officers suspected the young man had shoved both the money and the
drugs, wrapped in pieces of plastic wrap, into his rectum after
darting into the store. At Denver Medical Health Center, nurses gave
the kid an IV laxative and waited for the inevitable.

It had been cold and gray since morning. It had snowed just after noon
but the streets were warm and the snow melted as it fell. Now the sun
tried to shine.

All day the street work had gone well. The juvenile arrest slowed
things, but afterward the team went back to the street, working until
10 p.m. It was a 14-hour day for most of them.

The officers knew that most of those they had arrested in the street
sweeps would be out of jail, on bail, later that night. But they had
accomplished more than sending a few people to jail.

"They'll get slapped with area restrictions," meaning people convicted
can't return to the neighborhood again, Spezze said. "We tell them,
they're going to have to deal somewhere else. If they are caught back
here, it's a violation of probation."