JAIL IS JUST BUSINESS INCUBATOR FOR DURHAM'S DRUG TRADE

DURHAM -- For years, we've complained about the Durham County Jail being
the most dominant feature of our town as seen from the incoming Freeway. We
were all wrong.

Rather than a humiliating commentary on the values and priorities of the
community it serves, the jail should be regarded as a tribute to the
free-enterprising spirit. According to Durham Sheriff Worth Hill, our
Stalinesque pokey is a veritable business incubator.

And it's serving the richest trade in town: drugs.

Durham's gangs are practically running the jail, to judge from what the
sheriff told the County Commissioners the other day, and using the county's
hospitality as their own recruiting depot and boot camp. Gangs, of course,
when they aren't shooting up DATA buses, manage Durham's booming narcotics
trade.

According to Paul Martin, who is in a position to know, drugs are a
$10-million-a-day habit. That's $3.65 billion a year rippling through the
local economy: about $1 billion more than Duke University's total impact on
Durham County.

Martin now works for the Sheriff's Office, but you may remember him as the
city police captain who, nine years ago, led a Crime Area Target Team that
conducted more than 500 drug busts and made more than 3,500 arrests before
running afoul of local politics. Toward the end of 1995, Martin's CATT
squad was disbanded in a curious Police Department reorganization. By the
sheerest of coincidences, in 1996, the city's murder rate set a record of 42.

This week, we see Durham's Finest are reorganizing again, bringing back a
citywide CATT to go with two specialty gang units. Hmm.

Well, best wishes to them, for in a recent conversation, Martin said,
"Durham is in a crisis and it's going to break loose." He foresees a turf
war like Durham has never seen. Think Chicago in the '20s.

Narcotics, after all, is a business, and it's been an open secret for 40
years that Durham is a regional hub. Just as the Research Triangle draws
high-tech and biomedical enterprises, so the crack, smack and meth exchange
attracts bullish entrepreneurs who, like all businessmen, must compete in
their chosen market. The competition is stiff. It also produces stiffs.

"In Durham," Martin said, "violent crime is just a reaction of a number of
individuals to a large underground economy they are trying to control."

Such business practices, however, have unfortunate consequences for
everybody else's quality of life and property values in a city with a bad
case of denial. Crime in Durham is no mere "image problem," and
self-congratulation over window dressings like the American Tobacco Project
doesn't do a thing to change the facts of life in Cripsville -- a
quarter-mile down Blackwell Street.

"You have a downtown area," Martin said, "and to north, south, east and
west, you have prime drug-dealing territory."

Surprise? Dope has boomed since the '60s, and gangs first made their marks
here 20 years ago. What to do about it? Wring hands, hold a vigil, convene
a conference, hire a consultant? Midnight basketball, maybe.

From Martin's point of view, Durham's crime/drug/gang situation is the
product of racial politics, "to some extent incompetence and an element of
corruption" and a philosophy he calls "vulgar Marxism" that rationalizes
crime away as an aspect of class warfare.

"These political beliefs and these attitudes don't reflect what people see
in the real world," he said.

In the real world, people see the biggest thing in Durham is a jail. Can't
miss it.

Jim Wise's Sense of Place appears each Saturday.