TECHNOLOGY REDUCES DRUG DEALERS' STREET PRESENCE

Communities find relief as pushers do business with pagers, cell phones

ANAHEIM -- About a mile from Disneyland, on a narrow street with pitted
patches of dirt where sidewalks should be, a barefoot girl in a pink sweat
suit skips rope. She counts aloud in Spanish as a group of laughing
children dash around her.

Rosario Zamora, 43, smiles at them from her doorway. These are her children
and those of her neighbors, but this is not the same Dakota Street she has
known for 20 years. There are no empty shell casings, no splatters of fresh
blood. She cannot recall the last time the children found tiny bundles of
crack cocaine on their way home from school.

This street, hopeless for so many years, has been resuscitated.

``We've lived forever inside,'' Zamora said. ``Now our children are playing
in the sun.''

A relative peace has fallen on this and other previously drug-plagued
communities across the country, and it's being credited in part to the
least likely of sources: the drug dealers themselves.

Where once they peddled their illegal wares on neighborhood curb sides,
dealers now are on the move. Under increasing pressure from police, they
have abandoned streets here and elsewhere, including parts of New York, in
favor of a less risky strategy that is fast becoming an industry standard.

Dealers have learned to use their pagers and cellular telephones to move
their trade indoors. They have created a system of telephone codes and
couriers to connect with customers without being exposed to the eyes of
watching police.

The technique is different from the way that drug dealers have employed
such electronic devices in years past, and it has left police scrambling to
keep up.

``The days of buying straight off the street are gone,'' said Los Angeles
police detective John Hunter. ``Everything, everything is call and deliver
now.''

While the street drug markets still exist in some places, some officers
refer to the new scheme as the ``Domino's approach'' to peddling drugs:
``You call us, and we'll have it to you in 30 minutes or less.''

The trend is having a fortuitous side effect on many beleaguered
neighborhoods by sweeping out the more unsavory and dangerous elements of
the open-air drug markets and giving residents a sense of safety.

``The crooks, without even trying, have actually helped make it happen,''
admits Anaheim police Lt. David Severson.

The retreat from traditional drive-through drug markets is attributed to a
simple fact -- dealers don't want to get caught -- and the ready
technology.

Drug users are less willing to shop at street corners routinely staked out
by police. And dealers, in their perpetual pursuit of more profit with
less risk, aren't opposed to exercising a little more discretion.

When police started advancing on the street-level drug dealers by posing as
buyers, collecting hours of surveillance videos and reinforcing patrols, it
was the dealers' turn to respond, said William McDonald, a research
consultant at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

`Bad guys on top'

``They got telephone numbers, they got beepers, and they got their
customers to call in,'' McDonald said. ``And for now, until the cops
develop a strategy to beat this new pattern, the bad guys are on top of
this game.''

Officials say measures such as community policing and stricter laws for
repeat offenders have contributed to a steady drop in drug arrests
nationwide. But they also say that the numbers, particularly for the last
five years, reflect the growing effectiveness of the call-and-deliver
business, a venture that experts are just beginning to recognize.

In 1996, law enforcement officials nationwide arrested 216,342 people on
suspicion of dealing or manufacturing street-level drugs -- the smallest
number since 1988, according to FBI statistics.

Conversely, the number of user-related arrests, including possession of
drugs or drug paraphernalia, climbed to an all-time high of 1.1 million.

Sales still high

Robin Waugh, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokeswoman, said the
figures prove that drugs are being sold ``just as regularly, just not as
blatantly.''

The change has delivered a blow to drug cops who now must wade through
layers of security checks set up by wary drug dealers to net even the
smallest undercover drug buy. Officers who for years garnered most of their
undercover drug arrests from no-hassle, walk-up street sales are now
starved of connections.

``Everything is telling us drug use is on the rise. So where are the
dealers? We're not finding them as quickly as we used to,'' Waugh said.

The neighbors who once had a street-level view of their decaying
communities hardly care.

After years of walking their children past prostitutes, of being awakened
by gunfire and intimidated into silence, they are celebrating freedom.

Few notice

Drug vendors had become so rooted on Anaheim's Dakota Street that few
neighbors noticed the first signs of relief when it began a year or so ago.

``We were not believing at first,'' said Zamora, who raised four children
here, amid the random shootouts and street brawls that would send her
family scrambling for cover. They would sometimes scrunch together in the
bathtub, or stretch out on the floor.

``All of a sudden we thought, `They've left, but why?' '' she recalled.
``And then we said, `Who cares?' ''

Police in other cities beset with drug problems also started to notice
fewer calls for help and a slow but steady drop in drug arrests.

``It may be the in-your-face sort of confrontation that's taken leave, but
don't think for a minute it's not still out there,'' said Alfred Blumstein,
a Carnegie-Mellon professor who researches how drugs move through the
American market. ``Our problems haven't gone away.''