DRUG LOITERING - GET THEM OFF THE STREET

The goal of City Councilman David Pepper's new ordinance is to make drug
dealers feel uncomfortable doing business in Cincinnati.

"If we don't solve this issue, we are going to have a ghost town," he told
the Enquirer editorial board last week.

City Council obliged on Wednesday, unanimously passing a drug-loitering law
modeled after that of other major cities, including New York and Seattle.
The ordinance will let police disperse and possibly arrest people who are
engaged in public loitering for the purpose of open-air drug dealing.

Citizens in Cincinnati neighborhoods who feel threatened by drug dealers on
street deserve security. This ordinance provides police with another tool
to push the pushers off the sidewalk. But its success will depend on the
judgment of the street cops, some of whom worry about being accused of
racial profiling if they tell groups of people to move along because they
are suspected of being drug dealers.

That is a valid concern. Most open-air drug dealing occurs in Cincinnati's
poorer neighborhoods, and police can't assume that everybody standing on
the sidewalk in these neighborhoods is dealing drugs. The law states that
the race or ethnic background of the person or the racial or ethnic make-up
of a neighborhood within which a person is loitering will not be considered
in determining a person's specific intent.

Good. What we don't need is more strife between the police department and
its citizens. What we need is more trust and cooperation, and that is what
this new law aims to create. Indeed, it was calls from concerned citizens
begging for help that led Pepper to propose it.

The new law specifies obvious signs of open-air trading that police can
cite when invoking the ordinance - passing or receiving items to or from
cars, operating as a lookout, warning someone else of a police presence,
loitering in an area that is notorious for unlawful drug activity.

This law doesn't aim to arrest dealers so much as to force them to move
their operations elsewhere. The theory is that any business, even an
illegal one, can't be successful if it has to constantly relocate.

Curbside drug dealers are like cockroaches. If you shine a light on them
they will scurry away. This ordinance helps turn on the lights.