ANTIDRUG MESSAGE FOR SUBURBAN BUYERS

Hartford, Conn., Activists Launch Crusade To Curb Drug Violence As Gang
Members Get Out Of Prison

HARTFORD, CONN.

The crackle of a bullhorn suddenly cut through the quiet of a summer
evening in one of West Hartford's upscale neighborhoods.

"No more drugs in Hartford! No more drugs in Hartford!" the marchers
chanted as astounded homeowners and local police looked on.

The protesters were black and white as well as Hispanic, and most had come
from the city's impoverished, drug-ridden North End. They were pointing a
finger at what one calls "the goose that lays the golden egg" - the white
suburbanites who cruise into the heart of the city, make their buys, and
then come back to their comfortable towns.

"We have to change the face of drug use in this country," says the Rev.
Michael Williams, a protester. "Eighty percent of the drug users in this
country are white.... If we can impact the buying of drugs in our
community, then we can severely curtail the drug trafficking that occurs
there. This is a real war on drugs."

For Mr. Williams and the other 20 protesters, ridding the community of
drugs is more than rhetoric. It's a matter of survival. Hartford's North
End is currently under siege as gang members, swept up into prison during
an intensive crackdown in the mid-'90s, are now being released - and many
are looking for payback instead of a paycheck.

The problem is not unique to Hartford. Other cities with large gang
populations, from Chicago to Los Angeles, are coping with a similar influx
of returnees.

"The prisons are definitely turning people back into the streets,
particularly if they're young, who are worse than when they went in," says
Jeff Tauber, a former judge and executive director of the Center for
Problem Solving Courts outside of Washington. "People aren't cured by jail
or prison. If anything, they get better at what they were doing before they
went in. They get more hardened."

That has helped wreak havoc and frustration in Hartford. Many of the
returning gang members have found new drug dealers on their old turf, and
police say that has sparked violence. In the first six months of this year,
the number of shootings spiked upward. So far, there have been 18 murders
this year, compared with 17 for all of 2000.

The situation peaked on the Fourth of July, when then- 7-year-old Takira
Gaston was shot by a stray bullet from a gang turf fight a block from where
she was riding her scooter. She survived, but the shooting has galvanized
the community.

"It took a little girl to get shot before they want to start looking for
murderers. What about the body count before that?" asks one North End man
hanging out on the corner about two blocks from where Takira was shot. "You
still got adult human beings being shot here every day."

Since the July 4 shooting, the city has intensified police presence in the
area. Last week, state troopers and federal marshals started to help round
up thousands of known parole violators and crack down on the dealers.

While that is welcome, it's not enough for the Rev. Cornell Lewis and his
small band of activists. After the shooting, they started protesting
regularly outside of known crack houses and on street corners, demanding to
know from the dealers, "Who shot Takira?" Eventually, they want to organize
anonymous phone trees and community watch groups to tip off police when a
drug deal happens.

They also decided it was time to involve the middle class. Mr. Lewis got a
list of 100 people arrested at a recent drug sweep at one of the local
housing projects. Seventy-seven were from the suburbs.

"We went directly after the dealers. Now we're going after their
customers," he says. "People who come in to buy get a slap on the wrist,
then go home to the safety of the suburbs."

An analysis of drug-use and prison-rate data for the magazine Scientific
American found that blacks were far more likely to go to prison for drug
offenses than whites, "even though use of illicit drugs overall was about
the same among both races. Blacks account for 13 percent of those who use
illegal drugs but 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for possession,"
the magazine found.

"A lot of the users may be in the middle-class community, but it's the
lower-class communities that take the brunt," says Mr. Tauber. "It's not
just as dealers, but the community as a whole that's devastated, and that's
really tragic."

Such impact is evident at the corner of Enfield and Capon in Hartford's
North End. The neighborhood is filled with boarded-up houses and abandoned
stores. Young men in T-shirts and gold chains hang outside of a closed
Laundromat. They lean into the open windows of expensive cars that sit
double-parked for a while, and then drive away.

When a reporter approaches, they scowl and dissipate. But one young man on
a shiny red road bike hangs back. He won't give his name, and he's angry at
how much it took for the community to take action. Yet, he also understands
that many people here see drug dealing as the only way to survive.

"You try to leave the street life, but if you've been in jail, nobody wants
to hire you, so you gotta turn back to the street to survive," he says. "If
they put more jobs out here, that would take a lot of drug dealers off the
streets, because a lot of drug dealers got kids - half of them out here are
just trying to feed their families."

He looks around at the empty street, and goes on. "If you don't feed your
family, you still get arrested for being a deadbeat dad, so what do you do?
That's the question: What do you do?"

Then he speeds off on his bike.