COPS SET SUN ON DRUG DEALERS

Iris Marrera falls into a restless sleep to the sounds of gunfire. Several
times a night, she creeps into her sons' bedroom, praying that they haven't
been shot.

"The gunfire is loud, sometimes it feels like it's right there," she said.

"One night they woke up screaming that the bullets were going to hit them.
They were under the covers, crying."

Marrera, 31, a cafeteria worker for Little Flower High School, lives on 9th
Street near Indiana Avenue with her four children, who range in age from 9
to 13.

Neighbors have planted trees and keep their porches clean on her block, but
nearly every corner is ruled by hordes of brazen drug dealers. Many of the
druggies hang out at Fairhill Cemetery where they smoke and sell crack.
They hide their stash in the old cemetery's high weeds.

Marrera said she is desperately waiting for Operation Sunrise, a
police-helmed operation that seeks to chase the drug dealers, prostitutes
and other low-lifes out of the Kensington/Fairhill neighborhoods, to get to
her neighborhood.

"We need help," she said.

Help is on the way. Today, Operation Sunrise will begin sweeping though
this troubled neighborhood.

Police have invested heavily in Operation Sunrise. It is an all-out,
multi-agency attack on drugs and crime that began in an area east of
Kensington Avenue in June 1998, to much fanfare.

Cops moved in force, on the ground and in the air; the feds were involved;
teams of city inspectors boarded up abandoned buildings, and other agencies
offered help to addicts.

Since its inception, homicides in the area have dropped 42 percent. There
have been 11,693 arrests, which is about 16 people a day. Of that number,
9,645 were drug-related. Police have seized more than $7 million worth of
dope and $1.3 million in drug money.

The operation was divided into four phases. Phase One ended in December
1998, and it moved to Phase Two, west of Kensington Avenue. That ended in
June 1999, and Phase Three began in March 1999 as the crackdown continued
to move west.

Phase Four, which starts today will cover 5th Street to Germantown Avenue,
York Street to Tioga.

Pat Marston, a Kensington resident for 23 years, said Operation Sunrise has
made things easier for besieged residents of her block who used to fall
asleep nightly to the sound of gunfire.

"It's a little bit better," said Marston, who lives in Phase Three. "At
least you can sit on your step a little while."

But to some residents, Operation Sunrise has been a disappointment. They
still see the drugs, and still feel violated by crime.

Town Watch leader Jay Wiley, who lives in Phase Two, said overall, things
have improved since Sunrise. The operation was in his neighborhood for 10
months, ending last spring. But lately, the same old problems are creeping
up again.

Recently Wiley steered his white Buick by abandoned homes that were once
sealed but are now ripped open and used as drug houses again.

He pointed to corners manned by hooded drug dealers and drove past vacant
lots where dirty diapers and beer bottles poked out of overgrown weeds.

"The dealers store their drugs in these lots," he said bitterly. His angry
face was shielded by the car's tinted windows.

The hookers were busy once again on Kensington Avenue, desperately trying
to flag down passing motorists. About a block away, bleary-eyed drug
addicts stumbled out of narrow alleys.

Deputy Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, who heads the operation,
admits police are as frustrated as residents.

"All the stats are there, but this is bigger than law enforcement," he said.

"We lock up 10 drug dealers today, and there is a good chance that 10 more
will be in the same spot tomorrow. The heroin here is pure and cheap and
people come from all over to get it."

Getting rid of drugs in any area is a difficult task, police and community
leaders agree. The cops were so bogged down in Phase 3, that it took longer
than they expected to get to Marrea's desperate neighborhood.

During a recent interview, Johnson said the city needs the neighbors to
help, but the war on drugs is complicated by the number of residents who
are involved or have relatives involved in the illicit trade.

In sections of Operation Sunrise, drugs represent the neighborhoods' entire
economy, he said.

"If you take that away, you need to put something in its place," Johnson
said. "Until we get a partnership with the community, clergy and
businesses, it won't get better.

"Now it's a cancer that has spread. It's being dealt with now, but it's an
epidemic."

Johnson preached a new style of policing. Instead of targeting the dealers,
narcotics investigators are now going after the buyers as well.

"Can we get rid of every house, every dealer? I don't think so," Johnson
said. "But if you have no buyers, you have no sellers."

Instead of just being thrown in a jail cell when busted, drug counselors
talk to the buyers about their addiction in hopes they will seek help.

Sylvester said police stress education, treatment and prevention as the
long-term cure for the neighborhoods.

He visits prisons where lifers have made a 40-minute video called "Youth
Project" for him to take to schools. The film shows hard-core inmates
talking about how guns and drugs will land kids in the cell next door.

Police are working with the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and going after
drug organizations. They have taken down about 20 organizations that run
the corners and supply the drugs to the dealers.

Of those arrested, 99 percent are taken to federal court.

And the bad guys get serious time, he said.

Some of the small-time dealers may wind up working in different
neighborhoods, but police are trying to get rid of drug dealers not just
displace them.

For 25 years Kensington/Fairhill has been plagued by drugs and nothing was
ever done.

But it wasn't always that way.

In the 1940s and '50s, Kensington-Fairhill was a thriving neighborhood.
There were factories that employed most of the working class men and women
who lived in the area.

By the 1960s, the factories closed and the jobs disappeared.

Herb Wetzel, executive director of the Redevelopment Authority, said that
in 1950, the city had 300,000 manufacturing jobs, most in North Philadelphia.

By 1990, that number had plunged to 50,000. That's the same number of
manufacturing jobs the city had in 1860.

Families began to move, and the ones who replaced them were poor and
unemployed. The neighborhood began to slide downhill.

Then the drugs came.

Wetzel said this job-flight was something the city could not control. The
jobs either went to other cities or disappeared from the economy.

He said things can't go back to the way they were.

"There's no question of going backwards," he said. "You now have to manage
a totally different process - the downsizing of a city."

"I don't think it can go back to the way it was 30 years ago, but it can
become a neighborhood to be proud of," said Herman Eidler, past president
of the Greater Philadelphia Association of Realtors, who rents and sells
property in the Kensington area.

"I think you gotta get rid of the blight, you have to cut out the bad spots.

If there is a row of vacant homes, they have to be eliminated. Those lots
could be paved and turned into off-street parking or basketball courts."

The only real shred of hope is for neighbors, the churches, community
activists, and businesses to work together to rebuild this area, neighbors
and officials said.

But many neighbors are too scared to get involved.

"I don't think the drugs will ever go away," Marston said. "It doesn't make
me feel good."