NEW YORK CITY DRUG PROGRAM EXACTS PRICE ON BROOKLYN NEIGHBORHOOD, RESIDENTS SAY

A few months ago, narcotics detectives in Brooklyn began to swarm about
a tree-lined stretch of Rugby Road about a mile south of Prospect
Park. Their main target was Jose Sierra, a short, chunky 32-year-old
with a gold tooth who lives with his wife and three children in a
$400-a-month apartment at the intersection of Rugby Road and Newkirk
Avenue.

The detectives suspected that Mr. Sierra, employed as a midnight-to-8
a.m. stock checker at the local Shop Rite, was also selling heroin --
$10 packs stamped with the words "Happy Heroin" -- from the lobby of
his building. They pursued Mr. Sierra aggressively, and he and his
friends and relatives were repeatedly tailed, stopped, frisked,
questioned. So too were suspicious characters seen around the building.

Then two weeks ago, detectives raided Mr. Sierra's apartment at dawn.
The search turned up 12 glassine bags of heroin. Street value: $120.

It was, police officials said, an effective, straightforward example
of Operation Condor, the undercover narcotics program that has
resulted in more than 21,000 arrests across the city this year. They
chose Rugby Road because of an unusually large number of heroin
arrests there during the last year, mostly concentrated around Mr.
Sierra's building.

But victory on Rugby Road came at a price. While recognizing the clear
gain of a modest heroin bust, many there say that the aggressive
tactics used against Mr. Sierra -- and others -- have too often swept
up innocent bystanders, too often increased tensions in the
neighborhood, too often left them feeling as if police officers had no
sense of proportion.

The major sentiment on this two-block stretch of Rugby Road near
Midwood, expressed by two dozen people who were interviewed, is that
the New York Police Department has in some fundamental way
misunderstood what they expect from law enforcement. They describe a
police precinct that mindlessly imposes the mores of Mayberry on what
is a classic rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood -- working class,
Democratic, ethnically dazzling, full of swaggering, striving
characters who are not greatly shocked by a little human vice.

They describe officers swooping into the neighborhood like urban
warriors, watching residents from rooftops, circling in unmarked cars
and surveillance vans, seemingly oblivious to the rhythms of the
neighborhood: who just moved in, who is home from college, who has a
bad temper. Residents say the police never seem to know. Yet at the
same time, sometimes comically, every scarf is a gang color, every
neighborhood scuffle a prelude to gang warfare, every neighborhood
nickname a menacing gang moniker. "Wear a little bit of gold, they ask
you questions," said Royale Gibbs, 21, who lives on Rugby Road.

Almost every black or Hispanic teenager on the street has a story of
being stopped and frisked, often several times a month, sometimes in
the lobbies of their own apartment buildings.

One teenager, asked how many times he had been stopped in the last
year, started counting with the fingers on one hand, then moved on to
his other hand, then went back for round two on the first hand before
giving up altogether because his friends were laughing so hard at his
misfortune.

They howl in laughter as they recite, in perfect unison, the phrase
they hear all too often from police officers -- "You fit the
description" -- and they tell stories of being ticketed for spitting,
for riding bicycles on the sidewalk.

Or they offer a helpful hint on how to guarantee arrest: demand a
badge number.

White residents and older people said that they largely escaped this
sort of treatment. But that does not mean they do not worry about it.

"I'm glad I'm not a 20-year-old African American," said Maggie M.
Weber, 38, a white New York University student who lives with her
husband and two children in an elegant, Victorian-style home just up
Rugby Road from Mr. Sierra's apartment building.

She and other white residents, pleased with the street's rising
property values and the new stores popping up on Newkirk Avenue, said
that yes, of course, they wanted strong police protection, but not at
the expense of a racially harmonious neighborhood.

"I want to feel safe in my neighborhood," Ms. Weber said, "but so do
my neighbors who are African American and have 20-year-old sons. These
are my neighbors."

Since Patrick Dorismond's death last month during an encounter with
undercover narcotics officers in Manhattan, questions have been raised
about the need for programs like Operation Condor, in which hundreds
of detectives have been pressed into overtime duty to conduct similar
undercover drug buys.

Critics have suggested that Mr. Dorismond, the fourth unarmed man --
three of them black -- to be killed by police officers in 13 months,
was approached by undercover officers mainly because he was black and
fit their stereotypes of a drug dealer, though he actually was an
off-duty security officer.

The department has attempted to counter claims of racial profiling by
showing that Operation Condor detectives are sent to whatever
neighborhoods are shown, based on recent drug arrests, to be in need
of more help.

And this, the police said, is how Rugby Road came to be designated for
Operation Condor. According to police statistics, there were 35 heroin
arrests last year on a one-block stretch of Rugby Road, from Newkirk
Avenue to Ditmas Avenue. It is a statistic that conjures up images of
severe urban blight, a place perhaps under siege by drug dealers.

But this is not the case on Rugby. The homes are large, solid,
well-maintained -- some selling in the $400,000 range. Last week, one
house was getting a fresh coat of blue paint, and another was crawling
with workmen doing a major renovation. One homeowner, a Russian woman
who gave only her first name, Inna, confided that she never locked her
door.

Ann D. Rose, 38, a writer, moved to the neighborhood with her husband
a few months ago from Park Slope, and she walks regularly along Rugby
Road with her 2-year-old son, Eli. Never, she said, has she been
accosted by a drug dealer.

On a recent afternoon, she slowly made her way down Rugby, allowing
her son to explore at his own pace. She waved hello to Ms. Weber, then
went past Mr. Sierra's apartment building, past Mr. Sierra's cousins,
past Michael McDonald, a gregarious 23-year-old who, according to a
police wanted poster, is a dangerous gang leader named Nightwing.

Her son reached out and squeezed the front tire on Mr. McDonald's
bicycle. Mr. McDonald, who said he has been arrested many times but
never convicted, and who denies the gang leader charge, smiled at Eli.

"I feel safe," Ms. Rose said, dismissing the need for more intensive
police protection on Rugby. She and others argued for a less
adversarial form of policing -- more officers who walk a regular beat
in the neighborhood and, that way, get to know people, and be known
themselves. "Giuliani, he's out of control," Mrs. Rose said. "That's
creating hostilities."

Upon closer inspection, most all of the 35 heroin arrests that put
Rugby Road on the Operation Condor list came from in and around Mr.
Sierra's apartment building at 584 Rugby.

"If you want heroin, you go there," said Inspector Judy J. McGinn, the
commanding officer of about 450 narcotics detectives who work in south
Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Inspector McGinn defended using Operation Condor to go after Mr.
Sierra, whom she described as a career criminal. At some times, she
said, heroin buyers were double parking on the block outside the
apartment. Addicts were shooting up in the lobby, dumping needles on
the sidewalk. "I like to try and get at the root of the problem," she
said.

As for the complaints of unrelenting police harassment, Inspector
McGinn said that people were often subject to police questioning in
the large apartment buildings that line the next block of Rugby, from
Newkirk Avenue to Foster Avenue.

That particular block, a favorite of immigrant families struggling out
of poverty, has a long history of drug activity, she said. Many of the
building owners have signed agreements with the police allowing
officers to roam the properties and arrest anyone who does not live
there for trespassing.

On one recent afternoon, a group of nine young people -- all black --
gathered in the lobby of one of the apartment buildings.

All of them said they had lived on the block for several years or
more. All nine had stories of recent stop-and-frisks.

Tashika Nelson, 16, said she had been searched four days earlier when
an officer saw her looking out the lobby window.

"I was upset, but it happened before," she said.

Jeffrey Smith, 17, said he was searched five days earlier, in the same
lobby.

Nelson James, 18, said he was searched on the day of Patrick
Dorismond's funeral because he was wearing a Haitian flag tied around
his head, something the officer interpreted as a gang symbol.

"They see black people chilling, that's a gang," Mr. James
said.

Meanwhile, 50 yards away, at the corner of Rugby and Foster, a quiet
18-year-old -- he identified himself only as John -- waited for his
younger brother to get off a school bus. John, who is white, wore a
Lands' End jacket and stood flipping through a John Irving novel.

He said he has lived in the neighborhood his whole life. Asked whether
he had ever been stopped and frisked by police officers, he did not
hesitate with his reply: "Never."

Inspector McGinn said that it was not her intention to turn Rugby Road
into some sort of spotless law enforcement utopia, a Mayberry in Brooklyn.

If the residents truly want the police to cool it and back off, they
will listen, she said. But many business owners and residents were fed
up with the heroin dealing outside Mr. Sierra's apartment, Inspector
McGinn said. They wanted help, demanded it. "We're really there to
serve the community," she said.

As for Mr. Sierra, who faces drug-related charges, he remains free for
the moment. And so he spends his days outside his apartment building,
endlessly raging against the police. Although he has struggled with
drug use, he said, he is not a drug dealer. He accuses them of
planting heroin in his apartment, of threatening his 14-year-old son,
of plotting to make him the next Diallo or Dorismond. Rugby Road,
after all, is in the 70th Precinct, he noted, the same one where Abner
Louima was brutalized by two police officers 1997.

"I'm going to Connecticut," Mr. Sierra said, pacing in his apartment.
"I don't want my kids raised in this chaos."