THROWING POLICE AT PROBLEM WON'T END IT

The woman on the radio, Cynthia Crossen, depressed me so much that I had to
shut her up. She is the author of a book, "The Rich - And How They Got That
Way," and Tuesday on the radio she was saying there are now 4 million
millionaires in America and "hundreds" of billionaires.

As I am neither of the above, I turned off the radio and stopped my car at
the Northeast Market, Monument and Chester streets, to be among my own kind.
That is, people who are not among the 4 million, and wonder how we got left
behind.

The Northeast Market is a couple of blocks east of Johns Hopkins Hospital,
right there in the heart of the Eastern Police District. Millionaires, you
will not find here. Billionaires, not even close. The thriving business of
the district is narcotics traffic, which is going so marvelously that it has
destroyed entire neighborhoods and now has brought 120 extra police officers
to the area, assigned this week to help quell the shooting and killing that
springs from the ruthless heroin and crack cocaine business.

Several decades, and various so-called wars, into the drug age, we have
learned certain things but not others. We know that drug use does not come
from nothing. It is bred out of all manner of desperation. The father who
has disappeared, and the overmatched mother left behind. The teen-age kid
who becomes head of the household. The young men who figure out an economic
system that is designed to make them feel gratified for jobs at McDonald's
while the woman on the radio mentions 4 million American millionaires.

What we have not learned, apparently, is that we cannot turn everything over
to the cops and await miracles. The police do not touch the things that go
on in people's homes, nor should they. They do not control the depressing
schools. Nor do they write the gun laws. And they do not build high-rise
housing projects that isolate human beings until these buildings are torn
down and create the massive rubble now seen at Broadway and Fayette.

Outside the Northeast Market, a half-dozen people stood at Monument and
Duncan streets this week talking about the area. Robin Hopson was one. She
is 41, a day care worker who makes certain her 10-year-old child is in the
house, for the night, by 6 p.m. "Because of all the shootings," she said.

John Hammer was another. He is a chef, 56, and owns a home a few blocks from
the market. He was upset about the city condemning properties and not
offering fair market value. But who can measure fair market value on streets
of rubble?

Then a fellow in a basketball T-shirt approached. He asked everyone, "Did
you hear that noise last night?"

"What noise?" I asked. "Gunfire?"

This question caused much general hilarity. "Gunfire?" said Hammer. "Nah,
you get so used to that, you don't even hear it any more."

J. D. Harris, standing next to him, nodded in agreement. He is 46 years old
and a fine citizen at this point in his life. For 29 years, however, he
trafficked in heroin, a habit he says he picked up in Vietnam. He arrived
here in 1973, from New York.

"Came down here for one reason," he said. "To sell drugs and make money." He
sipped slowly from a can of grape soda. "Now I have to show these kids that
they shouldn't do it."

"How?" he was asked. "Weren't there people who told you the same thing 29
years ago?"

Harris is now a drug counselor at the Maryland Center for Veterans Education
and Training. "Yeah," he said, "but I went through it. I know what's on
their minds. I tell them, 'There's a better way.' They say, 'I don't have no
skills.' I say, 'Man, you're in a drug organization. You're middle
management in that organization. You have distributors. You already have
business skills.'"

Maybe not skills to become a great big millionaire, like 4 million other
Americans, for this takes not only business skills but a knowledge of
politics. In this country, we now choose between two men, for example, who
take pains to explain they will not let American military strength fall into
disrepair. Never mind neighborhoods of rubble, it's our missile defense
system that we are supposed to worry about.

Then we have Al Gore wanting to pay down the national debt. At what cost?
The National Taxpayers Union puts it at $2 trillion over 10 years - enough
to take up the entire non-Social Security surplus without anything left over
for tax cuts.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, wants tax cuts to take the breath away.
But Citizens for Tax Justice says the money would go to the rich. Around
half the benefits would go to families with incomes of more than $250,000 a
year. Middle-class families would get less than $1,000 off their taxes,
while families making $1 million would get about $50,000 in tax cuts.

Such numbers boggle the mind outside the Northeast Market. This is an
entirely different America we see here. Instead of stock portfolios, we have
the street corner stock in crack cocaine. Instead of tax breaks to protect
money, we have the gun to protect everything.

And now we have sent in the police, in the belief that they alone can change
the nature of things.