A PURELY COSMETIC MEASURE

`Order-Out' Zones Only Shift Problems Elsewhere

As expected, the Las Vegas City Council voted Wednesday to expand the
"order-out" zone in which police and the courts are authorized to play
"Let's make a deal" with prostitutes and petty drug dealers, setting them
loose to ply their trades, providing they promise to take their business
elsewhere, not returning to the block where they were arrested for the next
year or so.

Las Vegas City Attorney Brad Jerbic argues that once the "order-out" zone
is expanded to include all the areas where such activities now occur, they
will simply disappear. The new areas added Wednesday "are the last places
where land of opportunities still exist for prostitutes," Mr. Jerbic
proclaimed.

And if we can just cut off the supplies of heroin from Southeast Asia and
cocaine from Bolivia, eager entrepreneurs will never start growing and
importing the stuff from Mexico and Colombia, respectively.

Mr. Jerbic is wrong, and history proves it. After the original "order-out"
zone was created in 1996, business owners from the immediately surrounding
areas to which the street crime had been pushed formed a committee to
demand the first expansion of the zone. Since then, the city has found it
necessary to expand the zone again every two years like clockwork, as the
criminals simply migrate to areas of lower enforcement, carrying with them
the unwelcome blight their illegal activities bring.

The eventual solution into which the leaders in the city (and Clark County,
which has echoed the policy) are backing might as well be called an
"order-in" zone. That is to say, some day they will have "ordered out" such
activities from all but some small remaining area, which will by default
become the location where such activities are tolerated. The question is:
Where should that area be? The suburban centers of Summerlin and Green Valley?

"Order-out" zones avoid dealing with underlying issues these politicians
fear to confront. What they are saying, by implication, is that the hookers
and drug dealers should go back to the predominantly minority neighborhood
of the West Side. (Or else why does the "order-out" zone omit the parts of
town west of Interstate 15?)

These are purely cosmetic measures -- probably unconstitutional to boot --
which will only continually shift the problem to new areas, where new
groups of citizens will then arise in righteous indignation ... like a bad
housekeeper who just keeps sweeping the dirt under some new and different rug.