LOUISVILLE SLUGGERS, BURLY FRIENDS ARE EFFECTIVE DETERRENTS, RESIDENT SAYS

Resident Greg Parent has seen it all before.

Fourteen years ago, dealers had overrun a section of Ste. Catherine
St. between St. Marc and St. Mathieu Sts. - an obnoxious bunch who
yelled at each other, harassed pedestrians and sprinted back and forth
across the street to make deals.

So Parent put the word out through a local weekly newspaper on Nov. 1,
1989, giving the dealers an ultimatum: Scram by Nov. 15, 1989, or be
scrambled.

To help, he enlisted the aid of a few burly friends who worked as
movers and bouncers. He rounded up a few baseball bats, too.

Simply put, a little vigilante justice would be the
answer.

But before he and his group could swing into action, the Montreal
police did their dirty work. Ten arrests and $100,000 worth of crack
cocaine later, Parent finally had a little peace of mind.

Parent, a soft-spoken Tupper St. resident for 18 years, doesn't look
like a vigilante. He's actually a McGill University law professor.

But everyone has a boiling point. For Parent in 1989, it was when
dealers tried to hawk cocaine to his elderly mother and sister.

With a new group of dealers back in his neighbourhood now, he hints it
won't be long before the old Louisville Slugger is brought out of retirement.

And he's not the only one on the street seriously considering
vigilantism as a way of cleaning up the problem on Tupper.

"I realize that resources are limited these days, but there are ways
of discouraging (dealers) from being in the same place all the time,"
Parent says.

"But the police don't do it. So (the dealers) have become more brazen,
and now there are more and more of them."

Parent shows little patience for the dealers. He's not looking for
trouble, he says, but he is not willing to back down either. He openly
photographs deals being made in the middle of the day. In turn, the
dealers simply wave back at him and continue with the
transaction.

"If we wanted to, we could be calling the police every three hours
because there's always something going on around here," Parent says.

He understands that living downtown means having to put up with the
odd vagrant, addict or drunk, but in recent months the situation has
gotten out of control.

"If you've lived in an area for a long time and you like the area and
it wasn't that way when you first moved there, it's a little
disillusioning. You expect the neighbourhood to get better and you
figure the quality of life will improve. That has not necessarily been
the case here."

Even police officers are frustrated, but they know they can't go
banging down people's doors for no reason.

"When the police don't do anything to stop it, the addicts become like
gangs, and they start hunting desperately for dealers," Parent says.

"And when the dealers aren't there at 4, 5, 6 a.m., they get frantic
and go bananas."