HAVE DRUGS, WILL TRAVEL

First In A Two-Part Series On Commuter Crime.

Office workers are not the only businesspeople to make the daily trek into
San Francisco. Drug dealers can hop on a bus or BART the same as anyone
else, and are doing it every day.

An Examiner analysis of months of police records bears out what police and
neighborhood activists long have suspected: Street-level pushers in
downtown San Francisco are largely from out of town, many hailing from
Oakland and Richmond.

In buy-and-bust operations that roped in hundreds of suspected dealers in
mid-Market, the Tenderloin and the Mission, about 40 percent of arrestees
gave addresses in the East Bay and elsewhere. Some examples:

Police in the Mission arrested 414 suspected drug dealers in the first five
weeks of what Capt. Greg Corrales dubbed Operation Reclamation. Of those,
185 suspects, or 45 percent, were listed as "out-of- towners."

At least 16 percent of the 193 suspects arrested for drug crimes by the
Rotating Narcotics Enforcement Team in the three highest-density drug
corridors, all close to BART stations, were nonresidents, tallies from the
last four months show. Another 25 percent were initially booked in as
homeless, transient or other, meaning they could come from anywhere.

Of the 16 crack-sale suspects arrested in January through undercover buys
in SoMa, at least 11 lived outside of San Francisco.

The City's criminal database is so antiquated that a comprehensive search
of records is not possible. One deputy public defender, Sandy Feinland,
said he was skeptical of the purported trend without more evidence.

"We see, hands on, dozens of police reports a day and almost all of our
clients have local addresses," he said.

The police response: Nonresident suspects often give phony San Francisco
addresses to keep local police ignorant of their profession -- and to
maintain fraudulent San Francisco welfare benefits.

Anecdotally, narcotics officers have known about commuter criminals for
years. One plainclothes officer in the Tenderloin, Darren Nocetti, said
that nearly every warrant he has served on a mid-level dealer has taken him
to the East Bay -- Oakland, Richmond, Vallejo, Antioch, San Leandro,
Berkeley, Rodeo, San Pablo, Pittsburg, Fairfield, Pinole, Concord and
elsewhere.

"I ask them why they come over to San Francisco, and they say, 'I can make
more money in a few hours here than I can in a full day or two days back
home,'" Nocetti said.

Impunity And Payoff

Big cities have always been magnets for vice. But deserved or not, The City
is especially plagued by its reputation for lenient prosecutors.

"That criticism is a little stale," said Liz Aguilar-Tarchi, the assistant
district attorney in charge of narcotics cases. She said her office has
responded to such attacks with more uniform prosecution. But it takes a
while for word of that change to reach the street.

The real problem is the judges, Aguilar-Tarchi said. Despite recent reform
efforts, San Francisco bails are still the lowest in the Bay Area, and the
criminals know it.

One drug dealer, who spoke with The Examiner on the condition that she not
be named, said her colleagues pay attention to such details, calculating
where to do business based on where the punishment is lightest.

But just as important as a lenient legal system is The City's large number
of addicts and vast demand for illegal narcotics. One measure of the
problem: In 1997 the Department of Public Health reported that San
Francisco led the nation in drug-related emergency-room visits.

The demand draws a long line of suppliers -- marginally employable young
men and women eager to strike it rich in San Francisco's black market.

"The money can be as addicting as the drugs," said the dealer, who sells
crack in the Tenderloin.

"You have to give them a better way of looking at things, a better aspect
to their lives, you have to broaden their horizons," she said. "A lot of
them don't have educations. What are they going to do, get a job paying $7
an hour? You can't tell them to just stop selling. That's like telling a
dope fiend to stop using crack."

A Drain On The City

The constant deluge of drug dealers costs The City not just in prosecutors'
time, but also in parole supervision and increasingly costly diversion
programs such as drug treatment. In lieu of sentences, dealers sometimes
get services and court-ordered volunteer work intended for drug addicts,
not sellers.

Because of the commuter crime problem, San Francisco courts are chronically
underfunded. The state pays for courts on a per-capita formula based on an
official population of 776,000. But add to that commuting workers -- legal
and illegal -- and the population swells, by some estimates, to twice that
number during the day.

City planners still have great hopes that San Francisco will attract more
residents and commerce to its high-density "transit corridors." That may be
a hard sell for suburbanites considering relocation -- precisely because
the drug dealers have been going there for years.

Evidence that the drug dealers commute into the mid-Market Street area
boosts poor and immigrant residents' claims that they are victims of
lawbreaking outsiders.

Assistant District Attorney Michael Menesini set up The City's first
street-level prosecutor's office on Sixth Street in January after active
members of the community complained that hordes of drug dealers set up shop
on their streets and intimidated residents.

"The decent people living in these areas shouldn't have to put up with
this," said Ross Laflin, a 31-year police veteran at Southern Station who
has been working undercover for 14 years and places the onus for commuter
crime squarely on the District Attorney's Office. "To trivialize drug
dealing is ludicrous."

The dealers are smart, said Judith Berkowitz, longtime neighborhood
activist with the East Mission Improvement Association. Drugs moved back
into Garfield Park near Cesar Chavez Street after a hiatus when the Bernal
Dwellings housing project opened next door. With the increased activity on
the street, the interlopers, mostly Latino gang members, are able to blend
into the Mexican barrio.

"These guys are in my neighborhood, but they're not my neighbors,"
Berkowitz said. "I don't know where they're from."

Heat In The Mission

After five weeks of nonstop daily busts starting last month, centering on
the 16th and Mission BART station, nonresidents got the message of
Operation Reclamation, Capt. Corrales said. Last week almost all of the
suspects arrested were local, suggesting that the police presence repelled
the out-of-town dealers.

"The word is pretty much out there that the heat is on and some of those
out-of-towners elected to stay home," Corrales said. But he is less
concerned with the message he is sending than his ability to inconvenience
the dealers.

"I don't want to deter them," Corrales said. "I want them to go to jail."

When the increased presence subsides, police say, out-of-towners will come
back.

Stepped-up enforcement downtown also makes it safer for dealers, Sgt. Ed
Santos of Southern Station said. No gangs have managed to monopolize the
mid-Market or Tenderloin because it is hard to start fights with so many
eyes on the street. The area has become a sort of no-man's land, with as
many as 25 dealers on a corner -- all jockeying for buyers' attention.

Even though the Oakland dealers and Richmond dealers do not coexist well,
Santos said, "They'll take the chance of getting caught, but won't take the
chance of shooting someone."

Lee, a marijuana dealer who lives in the Fillmore and now sells on Market
Street, said the out-of-towners recently invaded the Tenderloin, and were
hogging the street corners with the best business opportunities.

"It used to be an easy sale," Lee said. "Now all these people from Oakland
came in and brought the heat with them."

A 29-year-old homeless man by the last name of Moore, who alternately gave
his name as Roger and Carlos but said the police know him as Michael, has
been addicted to drugs most of his life and understands the dope dealers on
Sixth Street. Some of them come from as far away as San Jose and
Sacramento, he said, preferring to take the bus or train.

"This is like a melting pot," Moore said in between halfhearted requests
for a beer. "They come here to sell their drugs and when they leave, the
town can go to hell."

Keeping Police Guessing

Nocetti from the Tenderloin noted that two young women returned to the same
spot in mid-Market Street for years to sell drugs, and were arrested as
many as 20 times. Each time they gave a San Francisco address to throw the
police off track. Last year they both were arrested on warrants at their
real homes in Oakland and Concord.

Sometimes dealers will give old San Francisco addresses where they resided
before the dot-commers made The City unaffordable, or addresses of parents,
lovers or friends. A few tell the police they live in Geneva Towers, a
housing project in Visitacion Valley that was torn down years ago. All that
is done to avoid raising suspicion on their home turf.

Nocetti recalled one trip he made to Oakland to pick up a San Francisco
dealer he knew was living at the Rio Hotel, which he described as one of
about five cheap dives popular among drug dealers near the MacArthur BART
station. Walking to the suspect's room, he spied through an open window
another man with an outstanding drug- arrest warrant in San Francisco, whom
he also promptly arrested.

Driving back across the Bay Bridge with the two suspects in custody, he got
a call from an informant saying a third suspect staying in yet another room
saw the officers and waited until the coast was clear to return to the Rio.
Nocetti turned around and arrested the third man.

Not bad -- three separate San Francisco arrests in one Oakland hotel of no
more than two-dozen rooms. Such a concentration of commuting drug dealers
makes serving warrants a cinch, police say.

Obstacles To Enforcement

Dealers know that public transportation is safer than driving. If they
drive, they are likely to get flummoxed when they see a police car and make
a moving violation, allowing the police to stop and search them. In
California they can lose their cars if convicted of transporting drugs for
sale. "By coming in on BART, you're just like everyone else, you get lost
in the crowd," Santos said.

Attempts to clamp down on drug dealers using the trains so far have been
met with skepticism from the public.

Proponents of medical marijuana savaged BART police in November when they
brought a small, friendly drug-sniffing dog, Mattie, on the trains. The
force withdrew the K9 officers less than a week after starting. They netted
10 people on possession and one on possession for sale.

The dealers knew the stepped-up enforcement was temporary, said Gary Gee,
chief of BART Police.

"It lasted all of 11 hours -- three shifts," he said. "The first place was
at 16th and Mission. We cleared out the area. The place was tolerable. Then
when we left they all came back."

Overall, BART Police handled 53,000 cases last year, but only 200 involved
narcotics.

Without a legitimate cause to stop dealers on the train, there is little
that BART police can do to curtail the flow of drugs into San Francisco,
Gee said. What are they supposed to do? Random drug searches are as
repugnant to most and probably as unconstitutional as racial profiling.
Unless dealers actually sell dope on the train, BART police are powerless.

Intercity Rivalry

Police in other jurisdictions, however, can make a big impact.

In Oakland, community policing is not as widespread as it is in San
Francisco. But occasionally officers meet in small groups with the community.

Amy Petersen, a community organizer with the Safety Network Program in San
Francisco, said that at one meeting in her Temescal-Oakwood neighborhood of
Oakland, an officer was asked what she did when she found drug dealers on
Telegraph Avenue.

"She said, 'I take them by the collar and I say to them, you can't do this
here -- if you want to do that you should take a bus over to San
Francisco,'" Petersen recalled.

Fear of commuting criminals was one reason politicians in Marin County were
reluctant to invite BART in when the system was being built in the 1960s.
Gee added: "At city council meetings in San Rafael, people said they didn't
'want the troublemakers coming up here.'"

Such antagonism isn't universal, however. Nocetti talks daily with Eric
Riccholt from the Oakland police. They say they joke about forming an
intercity task force to combat commuting drug dealers, but have never had
the opportunity.

No One's Asking

San Francisco has been slow to react to the problem of out-of-town crime in
part because its information-technology capabilities are so limited.
Ancient computer databases at the police and Sheriff's Department at best
print out only lists of who was arrested on a particular day. If you want
to compile statistics about drug suspects' county of origin, good luck.

The police planning and research office tracks numbers of crimes by
location, but never has been asked to examine where the suspects live. Even
if they were charged with the task, it is unclear whether they could do it
without browsing through hundreds of thousands of paper booking cards.

Aguilar-Tarchi said that a new computer system, which could link most of
The City's justice system as early as next year, would be useful in
calculating totals for out-of-town arrests. It also would help generate
demographic profiles of people taking advantage of Proposition 36, the 2000
state initiative that allows first- and second-time nonviolent offenders
convicted of simple drug possession to get treatment instead of jail.

Still, so many defendants lie about their addresses that trends may be
impossible to calculate. If their true counties of residence were exposed,
out-of-town probationers could lose fraudulent welfare benefits from The
City, as well as treatment and other services, said Art Faro, division
director of community specialized services of The City's adult probation
department.

San Francisco has a better treatment system than most surrounding counties,
and it is easier to get into public-service programs, such as CalWorks.

"When we find out someone has a residency somewhere else, we try to contact
the General Assistance program and say, 'Hey, they don't live here,'" Faro
said.

But the drug money is so abundant, and the risks so low, they keep coming.
The widespread image of San Francisco as the place to peddle vice is
understandable, Faro said.

"San Francisco has been known as a mecca of free love, peace and drugs --
always has," he said. "That's the way it is. Some of that lifestyle is a
blight on our city."