OAKLAND DRUGWAR STRATEGY A SUCCESS

Key Is Teaming Of Cops, City Agencies

OAKLAND The war on drugs takes many forms, especially in Oakland, where
an innovative city policing program has reduced drug activity four times
more effectively than traditional methods, according to a recent study by
the University of Cincinnati.

For Oakland's Beat Health Unit, arresting the bad guys is just the first
step in the long process of solving community problems.

With a gun and handcuffs in one hand and a city buildingcode book in the
other, Beat Health officers work with residents and property owners to
drive out drug dealers by making neighborhoods inhospitable to lawbreakers.

Oakland's program, which was founded nine years ago, is part of a national
trend in which police work more closely with other local agencies, such as
building inspectors and public health officers, to fight the illegal
activity and neighborhood blight.

In San Francisco, police work closely with building inspectors to close
crack houses in the Tenderloin and Hunters Point. In Los Angeles, which
began its program after the riots in 1992, officers keep records on problem
properties, and the city has sued owners to clean up their buildings or
vacant lots. In Contra Costa County, the sheriff's department has used its
program to chase street dealers out of residential neighborhoods in North
Richmond and Bay Point.

"It's an interagency kind of thing; where our officers cooperate with the
health department, the (Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control), building
inspectors, the Fire Department and other agencies," said Sherman Ackerson,
spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department. "This is the core of
community policing. . . . We help residents solve their problems."

In many cities, police have always worked with other regulatory officials.
"But the difference is that in the past two years, we've really began
training to let them know how these other agencies work and what we can do
together," Ackerson said.

Oakland Strategy A Success

Recently, university researchers found that Oakland's program significantly
reduced crime.

The crux of the police strategy in Oakland is to work hand in hand with
city inspectors and other agencies to aggressively fight antinuisance and
building code violations.

Sometimes it means providing a police escort for city street sweepers, as
was the case earlier this month in East Oakland, where drug dealers were
holding the sweepers at gunpoint, refusing to let them into their territories.

"They were being intimidated into not cleaning the streets," said Officer
David Cronin. "We ended up escorting them so they could clean the streets."

Other times the war on drugs takes the form of building a fence between
properties to cut off a drug dealer's escape route and drive him out of the
area. It can also mean boarding up an abandoned building that squatters
have turned into a crack house, or pruning back overgrown vegetation,
removing trash and towing away abandoned cars.

"There's nobody who has taken responsibility for these properties, so in
the meantime they get taken over by the drug dealers, the criminals, anyone
who wants to," said Officer Joe Quintero, another member of the Beat Health
Unit, pointing to piles of condoms, syringes, torn clothing and assorted
trash inside an abandoned home across from Greenman Recreation Field in
East Oakland.

"We've called the city to have it boarded up," Quintero said. "All it takes
is for one kid to come in here and stumble on a sexual predator or start a
fire or whatever."

The owner of the home in the 1100 block of 70th Avenue died earlier this
year and her home had been taken over as a crack house and prostitution
den. Quintero said police hadn't been able to locate her family. Piles of
trash had collected outside in the weeds, which used to be a tidy lawn.

Sometimes the Beat Health officers take on singlefamily homes, but other
times it's apartment buildings, motels or even businesses. Small or large,
the Beat Health Unit believes that cleaning up blighted properties has a
positive domino effect on the whole neighborhood.

"On many of these streets, it's just one or two houses that are really
blighted, but they're an eyesore and a problem for everyone," Cronin said.
"If those homes are cleaned up and renovated, then it improves the quality
of life for the whole neighborhood."

Involving The Property Owners

If property owners want to take charge but they don't know how, they
collaborate with police and are invited to enroll in a free landlord
training seminar the Beat Health Unit puts on in conjunction with the
Rental Housing Association of Northern Alameda County and the Oakland
Association of Realtors.

If the property owner refuses to take charge, the police unit and city code
compliance department step in to hire a private contractor to carry out the
cleanup and send the owner the bill. Just boarding up a building costs
about $5,000. If it's not paid, it goes on the tax bill as a lien.

"Overall this year, we anticipate doing over a million dollars worth of
work, which will ultimately go to lien," said Raymond Derania, code
compliance manager for Oakland.

Professor Lorraine Green Mazerolle of the University of Cincinnati has
found that the Beat Health Unit is four times more effective at reducing
drug activity than the patrol division. She presented the results of her
study at the national conference of the American Society for Criminology in
San Diego earlier this month.

"A lot of police departments are now starting to use this approach, but the
Beat Health Unit was a pioneer in using these kinds of civil remedies,"
said Mazerolle.

Her $200,000 study, which was funded by the National Institute of Justice,
randomly assigned 50 city blocks to the Beat Health Unit and another 50
blocks to the patrol division.

Mazerolle and her coinvestigator Jan Roehl, with the Justice Research
Institute in Pacific Grove, returned to Oakland a year later and studied
the same areas again, comparing the level of drug activity before and after
the police interventions. They found there was a lasting decrease in drug
activity in the 50 blocks that had been assigned to the Beat Health Unit.

"What we know is that the decline is sustained over a oneyear period,
which is actually a very strong finding," Mazerolle said.

"The patrol division didn't have a decrease," she said. "They had an
increase (in drug activity). That's a significant finding. . . . What that
shows is that if the patrol division goes through on a driveby and makes a
few arrests, well, that actually makes things worse."

From Drug Tip To City Project

In the case of Toni Williams, police raided her home after receiving a tip
that there was drug dealing there. The cops never found the drug dealer;
instead they found Williams and her four children living in a dilapidated
home with dangerous dry rot and substandard plumbing and electrical systems.

No arrests were made, but the Beat Health Unit didn't go away. They took on
Williams as a project, assembling a team of social service and city
inspectors to take a close look at the home and start mobilizing resources
that Williams needed to better take care of her family.

The first step was to direct Williams, a 44yearold heroin user and former
prostitute, to a rehabilitation program and alert social service workers to
the family's plight.

The next step was to contact Williams' landlady and direct her to renovate
her property to correct health and safety code violations. Cronin worked to
shepherd the project through the bureaucratic maze. This month Williams is
moving into temporary housing arranged by her landlady, who is her aunt,
for a few weeks while repairs are undertaken.

Williams, who has done a lot of running from the law, said she never
thought she'd call a cop her friend. But Cronin proved her wrong.

"Everything he could do to help me, he would," Williams said, glancing at
her 3yearold daughter, Tonisha, snuggled in Cronin's arms, her child's
head resting on the policeman's shoulder contentedly.

"My kids love him, too. . . . Most cops after they come busting into
somebody's home, they don't care what happens after that."

©1997 San Francisco Examiner