EXPIRING DRUG-FREE ZONES END A CITY ERA

Neighborhoods - Residents Have Mixed Feelings About the Demise of the
Controversial Exclusion Policy

Albert Johnson cuts through an alley near Northeast Simpson and MLK.
Police say the area is a waiting room for junkies, though just blocks
from the police precinct and in the heart of one of Portland's
expiring "drug-free zones."

Johnson pleaded guilty a year ago to possessing heroin. He became one
of the hundreds of Portlanders to get banned from the city's
drug-free zones. That meant he could only travel his neighborhood to
get to work, home or necessary social services, not to visit friends,
buy socks or grab a beer.

Officer Mark Zylawy stops his cruiser. Johnson says he's just walking
home. Zylawy tells him the drug exclusion laws are ending.

"They're going away? Cool," says Johnson, 63.

The exclusion made it hard to move around, Johnson says. On the other
hand, he used less heroin after his exclusion, though he still uses
"now and then." And he tells Zylawy the neighborhood may be safer for
the law: "I'm for it."

Johnson's split feelings mirror a city divided on its 15-year
experiment to bar people arrested for open drug and prostitution
crimes from wandering through big parts of the city for 90 days (one
year after a conviction).

Neighborhood activists pushed the exclusion ideas, tired of seeing
drugs dealt on downtown and inner eastside streets. Business groups
and cops praised the law, and other cities copied it. Civil rights
advocates attacked it as racist and unconstitutional, since no
conviction was needed to exclude someone.

Though narrowed over the years, the law survived dozens of court
challenges and political battles until a report released this week
showed police disproportionately banned African Americans from drug
zones. Mayor Tom Potter -- who was police chief when the law began --
declared it dead. It will end Sunday.

In Northeast Portland and other drug zones, the law touched daily
life in ways so subtle and complex that the effect of its demise is
hard to estimate. Police say it was one tool to limit criminals'
freedom to buy and sell drugs, helping curb crime and maybe push some
addicts into rehab.

Opponents say the law didn't fix the addiction that drives drug use,
and indeed, officers repeatedly arrest the same people for drug
crimes and trespassing, the charge for entering a zone while
excluded. And critics say the law made people with arrest records
afraid to take part in their communities or engage police. But even
critics admit drug dealing is down since the law's debut, though no
one knows how big a role the zones played.

"It's hard to calculate the impact it had over the long term," says
Police Chief Rosie Sizer. Sizer was a sergeant in Old Town when the
law passed and drug dealing on street corners was brazen. The levels
are down since then, she says, but she doesn't know how much of that
is due to the drug zones or other changes.

Economic improvements in the Pearl and Northeast Portland are pushing
drug trade into outer East Portland, for instance. And Sizer says
drug dealers are adopting "a new business model" using cell phones
and pagers to set up purchases in easily moved locations. That makes
the zones, with their focus on open-air neighborhood drug markets, less useful.

Still, the end of the zones will probably have a big impact on
Northeast Portland, where police averaged more than one new exclusion a day.

"Most people in Northeast, especially most African Americans, knew
someone who had been excluded," says Jo Ann Bowman, a Northeast
resident and executive director of Oregon Action, a social justice
charity that opposed the law.

"What you were doing was excluding people from their community, from
going to their places of worship, from going to community services,"
Bowman says.

In Bowman's neighborhood, people are ambivalent about the law's
expiration. Marvin Hopkins, whom Zylawy arrested in 2005 for selling
marijuana, says he's sad to see the zones end.

"Sometimes it works for the bad, but sometimes it works for the
good," Hopkins says. Police sometimes stop excluded people who are
causing no real problems, he says, but also use the law to limit the
trouble criminals cause.

"A lot of people are happy about it" ending, says Carl Campbell, 45.
"They go to jail and come right back anyway." Campbell says he's
"been in jail a hundred-some times" on cocaine charges and more and
has been excluded 40 or 50 times from the North Portland zone.

Zylawy often dealt with people like Campbell, the "frequent fliers"
in what he calls the "no-fly zone." The officer, who has patrolled
Northeast Portland for 16 years, drives slowly through the heart of
the North drug-free zone, steering with his left hand and typing
names into a computer with his right, to see who has warrants or
exclusions. Zylawy not only knows suspects' names by heart, he also
has their birth dates memorized.

What good are the drug zones, if these same criminals keep coming
around? Plenty, says Zylawy, who averages about one exclusion each
workday. Before the law, hordes of addicts wandered around causing
trouble and "you had no legal authority to get them off the street."
The exclusion law "helps us get some of the people gone who need to
be gone at that given moment," he says.

Sizer notes that in 2005, when an older version of the law expired,
police saw "an immediate influx of people who had been excluded for
drug activities." She fears an accompanying increase in thefts and
violent crime may happen in the zones.

That worries Howard Weiner, owner of Cal Skate Skateboards in Old
Town and public safety co-chairman of the Old Town-Chinatown
Neighborhood Association. More users needing a fix means more
shoplifting, Weiner says.

"I don't know how many times we've chased somebody down the street
because they took two T-shirts or a sweat shirt, because they just
need $5 or $10," he says.

Politicians and police want to replace the exclusion law with an
increase in jail space and money for addiction treatment. That would
offer drug criminals a choice: a jail bed or a treatment bed, says
City Commissioner Randy Leonard, a foe of the exclusion zones who
proposed the new plan.

But the details for the new treatment-focused plan aren't set yet.
Sizer and Weiner both say that the zones' demise may give the
clearest picture of their impact over 15 years.

"One of the things I would advocate for is to do analysis of the data
six months from now," Weiner says.