HOW NEW YORK TACKLED CRACK

Just a few months ago, New Yorkers were celebrating their city's lowest
monthly murder rate since 1962.

The figure of 32 deaths is still huge by UK standards, but compare that to
more than 2,000 a year, at the height of the so-called Crack-Cocaine
Epidemic in the late 1980s.

In an editorial this February, The New York Times columnist Bob Hebert
wrote: "The recipe for success has been more cops, smarter policing, fewer
guns, a drastic decline in the use of crack and better behaviour by young
people."

Buy or bust

The New York Police Department would agree with all of that.

Press liaison officer, Detective Walter Burns, spent seven years himself on
the narcotics beat.

"It was simple. It was enforcement. We went on a buy or bust policy and
it's not as big a problem as it once was."

Mr Burns says huge numbers of officers "curtailed the sale" of crack.

Many of the ringleaders of the boom period 12 years ago are still in prison
or dead - with the predominantly black and Hispanic American communities
sickened into action against the tide of killings and robberies within
their midst.

The resources and investment speak for themselves.

Forty thousand officers serve in New York - nearly a third of the total in
England and Wales.

City authorities say that in the era of Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, the "broken
windows" (or zero tolerance) strategy - which came down hard on minor
offences - began to persuade young men heading towards a life peddling
crack rocks on the street, that they'd live longer, not doing it.

So can New York afford to relax now about the menace of crack?

"No, of course we're not over-confident, but there's nothing else coming up
to replace it. We're not afraid of any new drug problem," says Mr Burns.

Sentences

In 1988, President George Bush senior made his vow to "end the scourge of
drugs" one of his presidential campaign slogans, given the immense social
concern surrounding the crack-related crime.

His son has other more pressing priorities now, in the form of the war on
terrorism.

There are on-going concerns about the way in which harsh drug laws,
designed to accompany the crack-down on crack, discriminate against
non-whites, and give too little focus to the powdered-cocaine problem.

Sentences for possession of crack rocks are much higher than for its less
solid constituent.

Matthew Briggs, is from the Drug Policy Alliance, based in Manhattan.

He said: "It's facile to just make a simple connection between enforcement,
and solving the problems.

"Crack largely burned itself out in New York City.

"All that money spent on escalating the war on drugs was not spent on
reducing the basic harm that drugs can do to our communities.

"It was not spent on better treatment or social programmes, and it racially
polarised the city for many years to come."

'Fertile swamps'

Sometimes, anecdote provides revealing evidence of changes going on in
street and drugs' culture.

A leading New York rock musician I was interviewing at his Downtown
apartment a few weeks ago, told me: "This is the first time in 10 years
that I am being offered drugs like cocaine and heroin routinely on the
block where I live."

A question mark looms also over the extent to which the "crack problem"
ever really went away in the city at large.

For Manhattan where the focus and the money always is, there's no doubt
that the hellish crack-houses largely disappeared - as for much of Brooklyn
and Queens.

But this is a big place, and the pockets of utter desperation like East New
York, on the city's edge, remain fertile swamps.

The cynic suggests they always will be - however many officers walk the streets.