BIAS ALLEGED IN DRUG SWEEP

NAACP Chief: Small-Time Black Dealers Are Focus

Calling last week's drug sweep "a waste of taxpayer dollars," the president
of Roanoke's NAACP chapter is complaining that police are targeting black
street dealers while turning a blind eye to the suppliers and consumers who
drive the city's crack trade.

"We're getting tired of this," Martin Jeffrey said of the Roanoke Police
Department's most recent undercover operation in which 76 people were
charged with selling small amounts of crack and other drugs.

Of 64 adults charged in the sweep, all but 13 were black, according to court
records. The race of the remaining defendants, all juveniles, was not
available last week.

Jeffrey said the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
has voiced concerns in the past that the city's annual drug sweeps are too
narrowly focused on street sales in Northwest Roanoke.

"Why isn't there a broader net cast, instead of always labeling this one
area of town?" Jeffrey asked. Police should devote their efforts to
arresting major suppliers and users, he said, and "not just come in every
year and sweep up a bunch of black kids and say we're cleaning up the city."

Authorities say race plays no part in their drug investigations.

"What they do is target drug sales, and where the sales are, they go,"
Police Chief Atlas "Joe" Gaskins said of his vice detectives' efforts.

Ever since the late 1980s, when crack first infiltrated Roanoke, the vast
majority of visible street dealing has occurred in low-income and public
housing portions of Northwest Roanoke. Some portions of Southeast,
inner-city Southwest and Old Southwest are also affected.

The many law-abiding residents who live in those neighborhoods welcome the
drug sweeps, Regional Drug Prosecutor Tom Bowers said.

"People can say we're focusing on the black community, but we're not,"
Bowers said. "We're focusing on drug dealing, the drug problem, and how the
problem affects the quality of life for everyone in the city."

And while previous drug sweeps have yielded a high number of arrests in
places like the Lincoln Terrace housing project, this year's operation found
drug dealing scattered throughout the city. Authorities said it is a
lingering result of last year's effort to shut down open-air crack markets.

Jeffrey said he did not object to police going after street dealers as long
as they balanced their attack by addressing the entire problem, from the
upper-level suppliers to the users and addicts who create a seemingly
endless demand for the drug.

"I'm not discounting the fact there is a visible street problem, but the
street problem is only symptomatic of a much bigger problem," he said.

Jeffrey's concerns were echoed by Jerome Miller, head of the National Center
on Institutions and Alternatives, an Alexandria-based group that advocates
reform of a criminal justice system it maintains is biased against young
black men.

Miller, author of the book "Search and Destroy: The Plight of
African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System," says drug raids such
as the one last week in Roanoke are part of a national trend.

"I think it's a public relations effort with a heavy racial twist," Miller
said. "It's meant to reassure the majority white population that we've got
this drug problem under control and it's not going to creep into your
community."

In reality, Miller said, research has shown that drug use is higher among
whites than blacks. Yet police seem content to concentrate on where the
drugs are sold - usually in predominantly black neighborhoods by cash-hungry
youths - instead of looking to stanch the demand by arresting more white
drug users, he said.

"The drug war has really been a war on the black community," Miller said.
"There's no way the police are going to go into the suburbs or the white
areas and do this. ... It's much easier to go out and arrest the small guys."

Discounting that theory, Roanoke police say they have adopted a colorblind
philosophy.

Lt. R.A. Bower, head of the police department's vice bureau, said he could
not provide a racial breakdown of arrests from last week's sweep because
police keep no such records.

"We just don't do it, because we don't care," Bower said. "We're after drug
dealers; we're not after numbers like that."

Roanoke police do arrest drug users by conducting "reverse sting" operations
with undercover officers posing as dealers, said Bowers, the drug
prosecutor. The city has even established a Drug Court program that offers
court-supervised treatment for users and addicts.

Norborne Berkeley, head of the Drug Court, said he did not have exact
figures on the program's 84 participants, but estimated it had about a 50-50
mix of blacks and whites.

As for going after the larger suppliers, Bowers said, that's not as easy at
it may sound.

The city's crack culture "is not like a pyramid where there are seven or
eight levels and they're all right here in Roanoke," Bowers said. Instead,
small groups or individuals often act independently, traveling to places
such as Washington, D.C., and New York to buy their cocaine in bulk and then
returning to Roanoke to turn it into a profit.

When authorities do arrest the higher-ups, Bowers said, their cases are
often transferred to U.S. District Court in Roanoke, where the potential
punishment is stiffer because of mandatory sentencing guidelines.

That leaves the street dealers to city police, who make no apologies for
arresting the people they say pose the most disruption - and danger - to
neighborhoods.

"The federal government has the resources to do the boats and the planes,"
Gaskins said. "What I have to be concerned about is the quality of life and
keeping the community safe."

Just because a high-level drug dealer goes to federal court doesn't
guarantee a stiff sentence. Leonardo Rivera admitted moving as much as $33
million worth of cocaine a year through his New York-based operation, using
Roanoke as a holding area, yet he was sentenced to just eight years in
prison last year after agreeing to cooperate with investigators.

By comparison, a Roanoke jury in 1990 sentenced Kip Nathaniel Davis to 25
years in prison for selling a single, $20 rock of crack - one of the first
in a series of tough punishments handed down by city juries in drug cases.

In part because of the reputation of Roanoke juries, a vast majority of
defendants in state court elect to plead guilty and be sentenced by judges.
Statewide sentencing guidelines recommend about one-year sentences for
first-time drug dealers, and two to three years for repeat offenders.

That means that many of the people arrested in the city's annual drug sweeps
are no strangers to the system.

All the sweeps do is temporarily displace dealers and create vacancies for
their replacements, Jeffrey said. To arrest street-level dealers and no one
else, he said, "is a waste of taxpayer dollars."

Laurence Hammack can be reached at 981-2393 or laurenceh@roanoke.com