NEW INTERVENTION

Novel Police Tactic Puts Drug Markets Out Of Business

Confronted by the Evidence, Dealers in High Point, N.C., Succumb to
Pressure

Some Dubbed It Hug-a-Thug

HIGH POINT, N.C. -- For over three months, police investigated more
than 20 dealers operating in this city's West End neighborhood, where
crack cocaine was openly sold on the street and in houses.

Police made dozens of undercover buys and videotaped many other drug
purchases. They also did something unusual: they determined the
"influentials" in the dealers' lives -- mothers, grandmothers,
mentors -- and cultivated relationships with them. When police felt
they had amassed ironclad legal cases, they did something even more
striking: they refrained from arresting most of the suspected dealers.

In a counterintuitive approach, police here are trying to shut down
entire drug markets, in part by giving nonviolent suspected drug
dealers a second chance. Their strategy combines the "soft" pressure
from families and community with the "hard" threat of aggressive,
ready-to-go criminal cases.

While critics say the strategy is too lenient, it has met with early
success and is being tried by other communities afflicted with overt
drug markets and the violence they breed. Overt drug markets --
street-corner dealing, drug houses, and the like -- constitute one of
the worst scourges of poor communities. Such markets foment violent
clashes between dealers, as well as robbery by addicts desperate for
drug money.

Property Values Suffer.

Businesses and families move out -- or avoid moving in. Many
residents who remain feel under siege. Police often rely on sweeps --
mass arrests of street-level dealers -- to eradicate drug-related crime.

But those rarely provide more than short-term relief. In High Point,
police believe that the combination of extensive investigation of the
entire market and community involvement has helped solve the problem.

In May 2004, after accumulating evidence in the West End, police
chief James Fealy invited 12 suspected dealers to a meeting at the
police station, with a promise that they wouldn't be arrested that night.

Encouraged by their "influentials," nine showed up. In one room, they
met with about 30 clergy, social workers and other community members
who confronted them with the harm they were doing, implored them to
stop dealing, and offered them help. The suspects, however, "were
slouching in their seats and one guy even seemed to be dozing off,"
recalls Don Stevenson, pastor of a local congregation, the First
Reformed United Church of Christ. "Their attitude was, 'This is just
another program and it will blow over.'" Then the alleged dealers
moved to a second room where they encountered a phalanx of
law-enforcement officials: police, a district attorney, an assistant
U.S. attorney, and representatives of the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and
others. Around the room hung poster-size photos of crack houses that
had been the dealers' headquarters. In front of each alleged dealer
was a binder, laying out the evidence against him or her. There were
even arrest warrants, lacking only the signature of a judge. The
law-enforcement officials made an ultimatum: stop dealing or go to
jail. Several suspected dealers with violent records had already been
arrested and were facing maximum charges.

The same fate, officials emphasized, awaited anyone in the room who
returned to dealing drugs.

The district attorney promised to seek the maximum possible
sentences, and the assistant U.S. attorney threatened to bring
federal charges, which, he stressed, don't allow for parole.

Police from surrounding areas warned them against trying to relocate
operations, noting that their names were flagged on statewide
law-enforcement computers. Rev. Stevenson recalls that the alleged
dealers "seemed to be paying a lot more attention." The West End
street drug market closed "overnight" and hasn't reopened in more
than two years, says Chief Fealy, who was "shocked" at the success.
High Point police say they have since shut down the city's two other
major street drug markets, using the same strategy. Police in
neighboring Winston-Salem, N.C., as well as Newburgh, N.Y., have
deployed the strategy with success, and word is spreading.

Encouraged by the National Urban League, which wants to see the
approach replicated nationwide, police departments in Tucson, Ariz.,
Providence, R.I., Kansas City, Mo., and elsewhere are gearing up to
try it. "It's the hottest thing in drug enforcement," says Mark A. R.
Kleiman, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who
specializes in illicit drug issues and isn't involved in the project.
Some police and prosecutors object to the approach. "Why not slam 'em
from the beginning and forget this foolishness?" says Karen Richards,
county prosecutor in the Fort Wayne, Ind., area. The Urban League
tried to convince her and the Fort Wayne police to try the strategy,
but Ms. Richards didn't support it. She draws a distinction between
addicts, who she believes should get social support, and dealers, who
she believes deserve incarceration. "Drug dealers are drug dealers,"
she says. "They won't have an epiphany and end up as model citizens."
In Winston-Salem, many officers at first dubbed the initiative
"hug-a-thug," though few do so now that they've seen it in practice.
In High Point, the West End neighborhood had been a major drug market
for almost 15 years, with 16 known crack houses operating at the
start of the initiative. A traffic jam began almost every afternoon,
as buyers, many destined for homes in the suburbs, converged on the
area seeking crack, according to residents and police. Charlie
Simpson, who owns and operates a radiator-repair shop in the West
End, says he frequently saw drug dealers "on all four corners,
selling drugs out of their pockets." The dealing drove away business
"because women were afraid to come, men didn't want to bring their
wives, plus they didn't want to leave their car overnight." The
neighborhood of modest clapboard bungalows became the city's crime
capital. Lucille Dennis, 89, who has lived in the West End for half a
century, says that before the initiative, she suffered three
break-ins within a year and a half, and she stopped sitting on her
porch for fear of getting robbed. After the West End initiative,
violent crime -- defined as murder, rape, robbery, aggravated
assault, prostitution, sex offenses, and weapons violations -- dropped.

More than two years later, violent crime remains more than 25% lower
in the area, according to police statistics. Since the initiative,
there hasn't been a single murder or rape reported in the West End.
"I don't know exactly how to phrase it," Mrs. Dennis says, "but you
just don't see as many people riding around doing nothing." It isn't
clear how well such an approach would work in big cities, which have
much higher absolute numbers of crimes.

High Point has about 90,000 residents and Winston-Salem has 190,000.
In Kansas City, a city of about 500,000, Police Chief James Corwin
says, "Will it work in Kansas City? I don't really know." His police
department has almost finished the undercover investigation of a drug
market it has targeted. The initiative hasn't eradicated illegal drug
use -- and it doesn't aim to. "This is not a war on drugs," says
Chief Fealy. Rather, he says, the goal is to shut down overt drug
markets because "street-level dope-dealing is what drives a
significant amount of crime." The police had been trying to drive
dealers out of the West End for years. "We were actually doing a
sting every month in [West End] making dozens of arrests," says High
Point Assistant Police Chief Marty Sumner. "But the market persisted."

It's a pattern seen nationwide. In a report published last year by
the American Enterprise Institute, authors David Boyum and Peter
Reuter point to government statistics that show arrests per dollar of
cocaine and heroin sold in the U.S. soared tenfold from 1981 to 2001.
Moreover, the percentage of arrests that led to incarceration also
shot up; in 2001 more than half the inmates in federal prisons were
convicted of drug crimes, up from just 5% in 1981. Yet, during that
same two-decade period, the street price of cocaine and heroin,
measured in constant dollars, dropped by two-thirds, suggesting it
isn't more difficult to deal. Indeed, the authors estimated that the
risk of arrest per individual cocaine sale is less than one in 15,000.

When police do sweep in, Chief Fealy says, they often capture
"targets of opportunity" -- dealers who are easy to nab. Hardened
dealers expect dragnets, so they rarely conduct sales themselves or
have significant amounts of drugs in their possession. Drug dragnets
can actually worsen the problem, because some residents resent the
heavy-handed tactics, which can inflame racial tensions.

Many community members "wonder whose side are the police on," says
Janet Zobel of the National Urban League. Either out of a sense of
futility or suspicion, many residents stop cooperating with the
police. The High Point strategy was the brainchild of David Kennedy,
a 48-year-old professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal
Justice. In the 1990s, when he was at Harvard University, Mr. Kennedy
helped develop Boston's anti-gang strategy, a community-involvement
approach credited with drastically reducing violent crime. But the
drug initiative was a much harder sell. Mr. Kennedy says he had been
trying for more than five years to convince police departments across
the country to try it. When Mr. Kennedy first approached
Winston-Salem, "We all told him he was crazy," says Police Chief
Patricia Norris. Mr. Kennedy says he would ask, "When do you think
what you're doing now is going to start working?" Chief Fealy took to
the idea the first time he heard it in 2003. He came to High Point
from Austin, Texas, where he had been assistant chief and commanded
the security detail for then-Gov. George W. Bush. Before his job
interview in High Point, Mr. Fealy drove around the city and was
struck by the open drug dealing. "It was just so blatant and
in-your-face," he says. Poring through crime statistics, he saw "well
over 60% of our homicides were directly drug-related, and almost 100%
of our person-on-person robberies." He decided to give Mr. Kennedy's
idea a try. First, police crunch data to find the "hot spots" most
plagued by violent and drug-related crime.

Then they engage in months of undercover research to understand the
local drug market and identify the players -- big and small. Police
are accustomed to spending months undercover only to nab a major
criminal, such as an organized-crime boss. "So putting three months'
work into investigating 20 corner rock dealers" normally would be
considered a waste of time, Assistant Chief Sumner says. But there is
a payoff. "A market is something that requires a large number of
actors," says Mr. Reuter, who is an economist as well as an
illicit-drugs expert. "If can you can get all the actors out, you can
disrupt the system." Randy Dejournette, one of the alleged dealers
invited to come to the second-chance meeting at the police station in
2004, says "everybody's gone" from the streets in the West End -- and
that's one reason he says he doesn't deal now. "I'm not going to go
out there by myself and sit on the corner and look dumb." The High
Point police knew who were the lookouts, the runners, the petty
dealers and the big wheels.

Analyzing the overall market led them to suppliers they might not
have found otherwise.

Assistant Chief Sumner points to Kevin Cotton, a six-foot-two man
with a tattoo that read "thug life," who was a major source of drugs
in a neighborhood targeted by police.

An informant told them that he not only supplied dealers, but robbed
and intimidated them. He "controlled the market," Mr. Sumner says.
But because he didn't live in the area, "we probably never would have
focused on him." Police made enough undercover buys to warrant
federal charges, then arrested Mr. Cotton because they felt his
record was too violent for him to be offered a second chance.

He's now serving 20 years in federal prison. Arresting violent
offenders is one key to making the initiative work. It removes the
dominant actors in the market and sets a powerful example.

But the other key is that police refrain from arresting suspects who
haven't become hardened, violent criminals.

These are often young people -- Mr. Dejournette, for example, was 19
when he was invited to the second-chance meeting. For them, police
try to implement a communitywide intervention, choreographed to send
three clear messages: If they return to dealing, they'll go to jail;
their community will help them turn their lives around but won't
tolerate drug crime any longer; and the police and community are
working together to combat dealing. At the second-chance meeting,
police lay out their evidence in a deliberately theatrical way. The
Winston-Salem police edited hours of undercover surveillance footage
into a short video that showed each suspect making at least one sale.
"Raise your hand when you see yourself committing a felony," the
prosecutor told the suspects, according to two people who were there.

They started raising their hands, and "that was a thing of beauty,"
police captain David Clayton recalls. "They knew we had 'em." Alleged
dealers are told that they have been put on a special list. "Every
one of my assistants has your name," the district attorney told the
suspects at the West End meeting. "And if they don't prosecute you as
aggressively as they can, I'll fire 'em." Even the public defender --
who would likely represent them in court -- warned that the cases
were so tight there would be virtually nothing he could do to help
them. Immediate enforcement bolsters that message.

The three suspected dealers who didn't attend the West End community
meeting were arrested the next day. One person who attended the
meeting but tried to sell drugs days later was also arrested. Police
and community groups advertised the arrests by posting fliers
throughout the neighborhood with pictures of the suspects. The threat
of going to jail is coupled with a message of support from locals.
Jim Summey, pastor of the West End's English Road Baptist Church and
a leader in the community's anticrime crusade, sums up the message:
"We are against what you're doing, but we're for you." Mr.
Dejournette recalls, "We wasn't expecting that....It did make an
impression on me."

So did something deeply personal: the fact that his mother, Annette
Dejournette, was, in her words, "disappointed," "ashamed" and "hurt"
by her son's actions.

She convinced him to attend the meeting even though he had been
afraid it was a ploy to arrest him. Ms. Dejournette works as a clerk
in a thrift shop. Money is tight, and often the electricity or phone
will get cut off, her son says. "Momma be sitting back crying and
stressing, and that make me want to go back outside [on the streets]
and really do something to stop my momma from crying, but she the one
who talks me out of it." The fact that the police are giving
nonviolent dealers a second chance has encouraged community
cooperation. West End residents have been increasingly calling police
to report minor offenses, such as truancy or drunkenness. Ms.
Dejournette says she went up to several police officers and city
officials and "thanked them for trying to help my son." The
Winston-Salem neighborhood where the approach was launched last year
has proved tougher.

The area, centered on the Cleveland Avenue Homes housing project, has
fewer community institutions, such as churches, than West End does.
Turnover in its public housing is extremely high. Mattie Young, 78,
president of the Cleveland Avenue Homes residents' council for almost
18 years, says the initiative eradicated open drug dealing during the
first four months.

But since then, she says, it has begun to creep back, especially at
night. Police captain David Clayton says that much of the new dealing
may be due to one "very dangerous individual" recently identified by
residents, whom police are seeking.

Still, comparing the year before the initiative to the year after,
major property crimes, such as robbery and burglary, dropped by 35%,
according to police figures. In the three neighborhoods where High
Point has implemented the initiative, a total of 40 alleged dealers
attended the second-chance meetings.

Since then, six have been arrested for dealing.

Another 10 have been arrested for various other crimes, from robbery
to possession of marijuana.

The rest -- 24 out of 40 -- have stayed clear of the law, police say.
After a dispute with his boss, Mr. Dejournette lost a job with the
city parks department. Now, he says, "I fill out applications, but I
never get that call back." He works odd jobs, many through a brother
who does construction, but he doesn't make the $200 a day he says he
made running errands for dealers.

In April, Mr. Dejournette was arrested but not charged for a nondrug
offense, so he is "teetering on the edge," as Assistant Chief Sumner
puts it. Latisha Fisher, 32, of Winston-Salem, says she had been
dealing drugs on and off since she was 15. After going to a community
meeting and seeing herself on a police undercover videotape, she took
her second chance.

Her first job was at a fast-food restaurant. The pay: $6.50 an hour.
"I toughed it out" for eight months, she says. "My church and family
helped me." This summer, she landed a job on an assembly line
manufacturing earth excavators, making $8.50 per hour. Yon Weaver, a
High Point city employee who helps ex-offenders or suspects find
jobs, says only 10 to 15 companies in the area are willing to hire
people convicted of a crime.

Of the 40 suspected dealers called in to the community meetings,
about 10 contacted his office for assistance. He knows three have
found jobs. Some suspected dealers have simply dropped out of sight.
Police say they don't think dealers merely relocated, because no new
drug hot spots have emerged since High Point's three markets closed.
Rev. Stevenson says the alleged dealers "are still God's people, and
I want them to do well and have productive, law-abiding lives." But
noting that two murders took place within a block of his church
before the initiative, he doesn't gauge the effort's success by
whether dealers turn their lives around. "It sounds a little ugly,"
he says, "but my first priority is the community."