DRIVING OUT THE OUTLAWS

Project Safe Neighborhoods Aims To Let Honest Folks Take Down Bars, Put
Violent Criminals Behind Them

With several locks on each door, it takes Sarah Franklin a while to let
visitors into her home. Walking through her house, the walls lined with
generations of family photos, a visitor notices bars on the windows. At the
rear, bars secure both her back door and the porch door.

"It's just like a jail," Franklin said as she stood in her back yard. "It
is a shame that we have to live like this."

Franklin lives in English Avenue, a neighborhood just west of downtown
Atlanta that is sometimes known as the Bluffs. She says it's not uncommon
to hear gunshots, find used needles in the front yard or come home and find
something --- say, a lawn mower --- stolen from the grounds.

Atlanta police and federal prosecutors say that English Avenue, the nearby
Vine City and Washington Heights neighborhoods and their surroundings are
among Atlanta's worst areas for violent crime.

In 2000 and 2001, those communities recorded 26 homicides, 60 rapes and 523
robberies, police report, out of the total of 277 homicides, 611 rapes and
8,603 robberies in Atlanta.

Police hope to drive those numbers down. On Friday, Atlanta Police Chief
Richard Pennington announced his department and the U.S. attorney's office
were joining Fulton County prosecutors, federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms agents and FBI agents in a new program intended to crack down
on violent gun crime and drugs in English Avenue, Vine City and surrounding
communities. The Atlanta team will operate under a national umbrella
program called Project Safe Neighborhoods.

"When I first rode through the neighborhood, I said to myself that people
should not have to live like that," said U.S. Attorney Bill Duffey. "It's
like a western --- the outlaws have terrorized and taken over the town."

In fact, the area turned so lawless that in 1999, three teenagers were
charged with firebombing the Atlanta police miniprecinct in Vine City.

Police Maj. Vincent Moore, tapped to lead Atlanta's new Neighborhood Task
Force, said the top priority would be to reduce gun-related crime. "Those
are the areas where a lot of the gun violence has occurred," Moore said,
"where the homicides and gun assaults are happening. And guns and drugs
often cross paths."

Tuesday was Moore's first day on his new job. He had commanded Zone 1,
which oversees police enforcement in the portion of the city that includes
the neighborhoods to be targeted by the task force.

Moore spent much of Tuesday meeting with officials in the agencies that
will join the task force. The group, Duffey said, should be in operation by
the beginning of next year. But officials haven't yet determined how many
officers will be assigned to the task force.

With Project Safe Neighborhoods, people who commit violent crimes, or are
charged with serious and repeated drug offenses, will be prosecuted in
federal court, Duffey said.

Now most offenders arrested by Atlanta police face prison terms with a
possibility of parole. But when prosecuted on federal drug or gun charges,
Duffey said, criminals must serve their full sentence, without parole. "We
have enhanced penalties to provide real sentences and real incarceration
times," he said.

Alphonso Auston lives in the Bluffs with his family, which includes six
children between the ages of 2 and 14. He doesn't allow his kids to play
outside without an adult around. Across the street from his home is an
abandoned structure he said has been used as a crack house.

"There are a lot of drugs running around here. A lot of drug addicts, who
come and steal your stuff off the porch while you are in the house," said
Auston.

Tuesday, across the street from the rebuilt Vine City police miniprecinct,
men and women sat on milk crates along Vine Street, smoking cigarettes. A
steady stream flowed into a corner grocery to buy candy, pork rinds or the
kind of cigars some drug users hollow out to fill with marijuana.

"I am glad that [the authorities] are coming in here; we need it," said
Cesar Martes, manager of the shop. "There is a lot of violence and a lot of
drugs around here. All those guys down there, they do what they want. Even
in front of the precinct."

Although he doesn't live in Vine City, Anthony J. Thomas Sr. has been a
member of Cosmopolitan AME Church on Vine and Foundry streets since he was
a student at Morris Brown College in 1951. On Tuesday he was showing a
property owned by the church to a potential buyer. The door and windows of
the frame house were boarded up. Thomas said the house was secured that way
because crackheads had begun nesting there.

"The boards keep the honest folks out," Thomas said. "It doesn't work for
the dishonest folks."