HARTFORD NEIGHBORHOOD TAKES ON DRUG TRADE

HARTFORD - When a 7-year-old girl was shot in the face on the Fourth of
July, caught in the crossfire of a drug dealers' dispute, a neighborhood
long overrun by violence and drugs was finally shocked into action.

No more protests outside police headquarters. No more solemn sermons
from the pulpits of local churches.

This time, residents of this city's North End marched straight to the
drug dens.

Three times since the shooting, angry neighbors have rallied on corners
monopolized by cocaine and heroin dealers, corners where violence has
escalated dramatically in the last six months.

''Who shot Takira?'' they've shouted into a bullhorn, referring to the
young victim, Takira Gaston, shot as she played on a pink scooter.
They've kept shouting, even as brazen dealers in gold medallions stared
them down from a balcony. ''We want the shooters! We want names!'' the
crowd has demanded.

Some names were whispered into organizers' ears at rallies on Friday,
Sunday, and last night. But that may not be the demonstrators' biggest
coup.

The real victory, community members say, is making so many neighbors
angry enough to pour out of houses where they have been stewing in
isolation, cowering in fear, or simply trying to ignore the decay
outside, where stately homes alternate with empty lots and boarded-up
buildings. In fact, one woman burst into grateful tears on a street
corner last night as a small but raucous group chanted outside an
abandoned storefront.

This tragedy, some say, could be a turning point.

''We want the neighborhood back and we won't stop until we have it
back,'' said Prince Webb, 75, who has lived here for more than 30 years.
''No one is safe in their homes, no one is safe in the street, and the
police can't do it all. We have to take it back, and we're going to do
it.''

Hartford is an island of poverty - the eighth-poorest city in the
country - in America's richest state. High unemployment and dropout
rates, along with drug peddling and the strife it brings, have been
facts of life in the North End for so long, some neighbors said, that
those who couldn't afford to move somewhere safer gave up fighting.

''It's been a constant diet of violence,'' said the Rev. James Lane of
the North End Church of Christ. ''And with that, there's been a lack of
a sense of community, a sense that somebody else is going to do it.''

But nobody else has. And now Takira Gaston, celebrating Independence Day
with her family just a week ago, has a new home, Yale-New Haven
Hospital. Her condition has improved from critical to stable, but she'll
need multiple surgeries to reconstruct her face after the bullet - shot
from an abandoned corner market down the block from where she was
playing - tore through her cheeks, knocked out teeth, and shattered her
jaw.

''What if it happens again? She got shot, but they don't stop shooting,
do they?'' asked Marci Powell, Takira's aunt. ''My 5-year-old is inside
right now while I'm sweeping the porch, because I'm afraid of what will
happen.''

Police said yesterday they have identified two suspects, but no arrests
are imminent.

The streets of Hartford are getting more dangerous than they've been
since the gang-infested days of the early and mid-1990s.

Last year, there were 18 murders in the 171/2 square miles that make up
Hartford. Seventeen homicides have already occurred this year, most of
them drug-related, said Hartford Police Lieutenant Neil Dryfe. And the
first six months of 2001 have seen 415 incidents in which a gun was
fired.

When scores of gang members were sent to prison in the 1990s, convicted
on racketeering charges, their places on street corners were taken by
younger men, Dryfe said. Now the gang members are getting out, returning
to their old haunts, and fighting with the upstarts.

To make matters worse, Dryfe and community activists say, the younger
crop work in small ''crews'' controlling a street or a corner, instead
of establishing formal gangs. Owing allegience to no one, they've become
increasingly trigger-happy, observers say.

Dryfe, public information officer for the Hartford police, also says
police have let down their guard. Plagued by scandal in recent years,
they've had trouble recruiting new officers and, as a result, manpower
along with morale has declined.

But Dryfe promises that under its new chief Bruce Marquis, the
department will boost visibility in high-crime neighborhoods even as it
works with state and federal authorities. Still, he said, police need
all the help they can get from the neighborhood.

''We wish they were doing it more, not just when a tragedy happens,''
Dryfe said. ''This is supposed to be a partnership.''

But organizers promise that their nascent movement will outlast the
shock of Takira's shooting. The goal is to shame and harass drug dealers
until they pack up and move out of the crack houses for good, said the
Rev. Cornell Lewis, the main organizer of this week's rallies.

''People know where they live, where they eat, where they park their
cars, and where they sleep at night,'' said Lewis, an associate pastor
at the North End Church of Christ, who has the words ''Spirit of Nat
Turner'' printed in marker on his plastic water bottle. ''Let's see how
they like it when we show up at 8 o'clock on a Saturday morning.''

Lewis says he knows it can be done, because he did it on his own street
six years ago, when the rape of a young woman in broad daylight brought
his frustrations over drugs and crime to a boil.

The minister, who works as a substance abuse counselor, set up a
nine-week antidrug vigil. He organized street blockades, deploying video
cameras and halogen spotlights to drive away customers. Neighbors used
binoculars to write down license plate numbers, then called the police
as often as they could.

After nine weeks - and several threats to Lewis's life - the dealers
closed shop, never to return. The remaining neighbors threw a street
party to celebrate.

Now Lewis is helping residents a few blocks away, where Takira was shot,
plan the same kind of campaign. ''It's a war of attrition,'' he said.

Of course, it takes more than a grass-roots awakening to stomp out the
drug trade. Dealers can always find another place to squat, said
community activist Carl Hadrick, until the demand for drugs wanes, until
poorly educated young people can get jobs.

''At the march on Friday, [men recently released from prison] came up to
me and said, `Brother Carl, you know I used to hustle. I don't want to
do that anymore. Can you get me a job?''' said Hadrick, executive
director of the Hartford Youth Peace Initiative. ''But to be honest, I
don't have anything.''

And then there's the problem of fatalism. Asked what the community could
do to respond to the violence, Powell, Takira's aunt, shook her head and
said, ''They could take some of the innocent people away to live
somewhere else. We just need to let the dealers have Hartford. Let them
keep it.''

Lewis and his fellow activists are praying that kind of attitude is on
its way out.

''I equate [Takira's shooting] with the Alabama church bombing that
killed those four little girls,'' said Joshua Blanchfield, a University
of Hartford student. ''It's so horrific, it's a galvanizing thing.''