UNLIKELY FREEDOM FROM FEAR

For years, drug dealers and buyers claimed their streets. But residents are
finding new hope as criminals abandon the neighborhoods with the help of
new technology.

ANAHEIM--About a mile from Disneyland, on a narrow street with pitted
patches of dirt where sidewalks should be, a barefoot girl in a pink
sweatsuit skips rope. She counts aloud in Spanish as a group of laughing
children dash around her.

Rosario Zamora, 43, smiles at them from her doorway. These are her children
and those of her neighbors, but this is not the same Dakota Street she has
known for 20 years. There are no empty shell casings, no splatters of fresh
blood. She cannot recall the last time the children found tiny bundles of
crack cocaine on their way home from school. This street, hopeless for so
many years, has been resuscitated.

"We've lived forever inside," Zamora said. "Now our children are playing in
the sun."

A relative peace has fallen on this and other previously drug-plagued
communities across the country, and it's being credited in part to the
least likely of sources: the drug dealers themselves. Where once they
peddled their illegal wares on neighborhood curb sides, dealers now are on
the move. Under increasing pressure from police, they have abandoned
streets here and elsewhere, including parts of Los Angeles and New York, in
favor of a less risky strategy that is fast becoming an industry standard.

Dealers have learned to use their pagers and cellular telephones to move
their trade indoors. They have created a system of telephone codes and
couriers to connect with customers without being exposed to the eyes of
watching police. The technique is different from the way that drug dealers
have employed such electronic devices in years' past, and it has left
police scrambling to keep up.

"The days of buying straight off the street are gone," said LAPD Det. John
Hunter. "Everything, everything is call and deliver now."

While the street drug markets still exist in some places, some officers
refer to the new scheme as the "Domino's approach" to peddling drugs: "You
call us and we'll have it to you in 30 minutes or less."

The trend is having a fortuitous side effect on many beleaguered
neighborhoods by sweeping out the more unsavory and dangerous elements of
the open-air drug markets and giving residents a sense of safety.

"The crooks, without even trying, have actually helped make it happen,"
admits Anaheim police Lt. David Severson. The retreat from traditional
drive-thru drug markets is attributed to a simple fact--dealers don't want
to get caught--and the ready technology. Drug users are less willing to
shop at street corners routinely staked out by police. And dealers, in
their perpetual pursuit of more profit with less risk, aren't opposed to
exercising a little more discretion.

When police started advancing on the street-level drug dealers by posing as
buyers, collecting hours of surveillance videos and reinforcing patrols, it
was the dealers' turn to respond, said William McDonald, a research
consultant at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "They got
telephone numbers, they got beepers, and they got their customers to call
in," McDonald said. "And for now, until the cops develop a strategy to beat
this new pattern, the bad guys are on top of this game."

Declining Drug Arrests Officials say measures like community policing and
stricter laws for repeat offenders have contributed to a steady drop in
drug arrests nationwide. But they also say that the numbers, particularly
for the last five years, reflect the growing effectiveness of the
call-and-deliver business, a venture that experts are just beginning to
recognize.

In 1996, law enforcement officials nationwide arrested 216,342 people on
suspicion of dealing or manufacturing street-level drugs--the smallest
number since 1988, according to FBI statistics. Conversely, the number of
user-related arrests, including possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia,
climbed to an all-time high of 1.1 million. Robin Waugh, a DEA spokeswoman,
said the figures prove that drugs are being sold "just as regularly, just
not as blatantly."

The change has delivered a blow to drug cops who now must wade through
layers of security checks set up by wary drug dealers to net even the
smallest undercover drug buy. Officers who for years garnered most of their
undercover drug arrests from no-hassle, walk-up street sales are now
starved of connections. Said Waugh: "Everything is telling us drug use is
on the rise. So where are the dealers? We're not finding them as quickly as
we used to."

The neighbors who once had a street-level view of their decaying
communities hardly care. After years of walking their children past
prostitutes, of being awakened by gunfire and intimidated into silence,
they are celebrating freedom.

This mood is especially apparent in Anaheim, where Alfred Coy and other
residents are using the reprieve from drugs and crime to salvage a
neighborhood they virtually surrendered long ago. Coy, 33, lives on North
Anna Drive, a U-shaped street of khaki-colored, low-slung apartment units.
Drug dealers once infested the area. They casually rolled joints on the
sidewalk between sales. They ordered children to hide large stashes of dope
in their underwear. Residents became apathetic about their street, with its
broken sidewalks and sandbox yards. The gang members who ruled boldly all
day and night delivered a standing order that no one dared to challenge:
stay away, stay alive.

Now residents gather at impromptu meetings at the 40-unit apartment
building that Coy manages with his wife, Maria. Tenants are encouraged to
report crime and join his loose-knit block watch. His first-floor unit has
become an unofficial break room for Anaheim police, who stop by to sip
coffee with neighbors and dole out silver badge-shaped stickers to
children.

"We feel safer right now than we ever have before," said Coy, who moved
here four years ago. "We used to turn the corner and see 10 or 15 dealers
working at the same time. But they are nearly all gone."

Drug vendors had become so rooted on Dakota Street that few neighbors
noticed the first signs of relief when it began a year or so ago. "We were
not believing at first," said Zamora, who raised four children here, amid
the random shootouts and street brawls that would send her family
scrambling for cover. They would sometimes scrunch together in the bathtub,
or stretch out on the floor.

"All of a sudden we thought, 'They've left, but why?' " she recalled. "And
then we said, 'Who cares?' "

Police in other cities beset with drug problems also started to notice
fewer calls for help and a slow but steady drop in drug arrests. Last year
in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., drug dealers all but deserted the area near
Holiday Park, just steps away from the Atlantic Ocean. An area that was
once so clogged with potential buyers that dealers swaggered down the line
of cars to take orders suddenly cleared. Tourists looking for nearby
museums and galleries were no longer confronted by gang members peddling
dope.

"It was like an invisible street sweeper started coming through," Fort
Lauderdale Police Capt. Paul Urschalitz said. "Only we didn't order it, and
we sure as hell didn't know where it was taking everything."

Streets where drugs are openly bought and sold can still be found in many
cities. But the transition from open-air street markets to personal
delivery has forced the trade underground, where it can thrive.

"Where we could once do regular, routine drug sweeps and count on getting
15 or 20 arrests at a time, we're now coming up with nothing," Urschalitz
said. "The dealers have insulated themselves. Instead of staying put,
they're doing business everywhere, all over the place, in your backyard and
mine."

The system works like this: Customers page dealers, who call back and take
their orders. A meeting place is designated for an exchange that takes a
matter of seconds--at a bus stop, a grocery store, the post office, the
buyer's living room. Usually the dealers employ runners, or "mopes," to
deliver the drugs, a system that further insulates the supplier. Delivery
workers earn anywhere from $5 a sale to 50% of all profits. Numeric
beepers, which barely existed before 1991, and cellular phones are pivotal.
They are inexpensive and easy to acquire. For as little as $30 a month, a
customer can have both.

Drug dealers, especially, have elevated their use to a coded art form. One
pusher who deploys a four-man troop in Anaheim and Santa Ana under the
street name "Opie" says he instructs his runners and customers to use
designated codes whenever possible: *100 means a $100 sale, 711 and 55
delineates two easy drop-off spots--the phone booth at the local 7-Eleven
convenience store or the side parking lot of a nearby Arco station.

When calling the pager, buyers input the codes after their telephone
numbers, sending a trail of digits--sometimes up to 20 numbers long--across
the dealer's pager screen. The universal 911 signal at the end identifies
when an emergency delivery is needed. A double 911 signals big profits.

"That says to me, 'I'll pay more if you get it here fast,' " said the
dealer, who spoke on condition that he not be identified by his real name.
"You see that and it takes priority over anything else."

Codes provide an important defense for dealers if an arrest is made.
Officers may seize the pagers and immediately scroll through the bank of
numbers, hoping to glean leads on buyers or dealers. But the scrambled
string of numbers they often find is useless. Opie said he hasn't been
arrested for 18 months, a record stint of freedom for the 26-year-old.

"I used to get picked up like four times a year," he said. "But I don't see
the cops no more, and they don't see me."

He said leaving his perch on the corner of Standard and East McFadden
avenues in Santa Ana two years ago was a "management decision." Working the
neighborhood nearly six years allowed him to develop a regular crop of
customers, most of whom followed his suggestion to pack it up and move off
the street.

"If you're still slinging on the street corner, you're losing out," he
says. "It's like wearing a sign that says, 'Bust me.' "

Little-Known Change His take on the changing drug scene was evident
recently in Los Angeles, where a team of undercover detectives spent more
than two hours trolling for drugs one Friday afternoon. They scoured a
commercial strip of Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood that had always
been a "slam dunk" for witnessing street sales. No one was selling or
buying. Yet, when the same undercover detectives paged a suspected drug
dealer from a nearby pay phone, they received a prompt callback and--after
dropping the name of a reference--were guaranteed a delivery. The officers
had obtained the pager numbers the old-fashioned way: from a snitch looking
to cut a deal. Within minutes, they had two grams of cocaine in hand and an
18-year-old delivery man in custody.

"It may be the in-your-face sort of confrontation that's taken leave, but
don't think for a minute it's not still out there," said Alfred Blumstein,
a Carnegie-Mellon professor who researches how drugs move through the
American market. "Our problems haven't gone away.

"Those open-air markets are a street-level mainstay," said Blumstein, who
has published reports on national crime trends. "They've been around since
the beginning of time. I doubt that will change, even though transactions
are becoming more private and one-on-one."

Police in most cities haven't yet explored how the shift from drive-thrus
to deliveries is affecting neighborhoods, if they have linked the two
elements together at all, experts say. The Community Policing Consortium in
Washington is attempting to track the development by collecting data from
law enforcement agencies nationwide. Details are emerging slowly.

"People are probably so caught up in the successes of seeing neighborhoods
cleaning up and dealers disappearing that they're not really looking at how
the dealers are adapting," said consortium coordinator Carl Bickel. "I'll
bet most communities haven't figured out where the crime is going, or even
stopped to think about it yet."

Copyright Los Angeles Times