by Maida Cassandra Odom, The Boston Globe
PHILADELPHIA - The narrow streets of this city’s “Little Puerto Rico” used to look like a busy carwash, with cocaine customers lined up in idling cars to make buys.
These days the same streets are virtually deserted, but the sidewalks and front steps of decaying row houses in the neighborhood have blossomed with children running at play, elderly people chatting, and small knots of men and women just hanging out.
The mayor, John Street, has declared war on street-corner drug dealers in low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia like Little Puerto Rico, and so far he is winning. It is a war of visibility that does not rely on mass arrests in street sweeps. Since May, uniformed police officers have been posted on 300 corners identified as open-air drug markets, and their presence has pretty much chased away the cocaine and heroin dealers and their customers. Operation Safe Streets, a first step in the mayor’s $ 300 million plan to obliterate urban blight, has changed life this summer in neighborhoods where for more than 15 years drug-dealing on street corners has been a dangerous fixture. It has virtually disappeared, the number of violent crimes has decreased, cooperation between residents and police has surged, and enrollment in drug-treatment programs has spiked, according to city officials.
“We just show our presence,” said Stephen Lyons, a police officer who does street duty. “It’s like a game of cat and mouse, and right now we’re winning.”
Ines Vega, a resident for 13 years of North Philadelphia’s “Badlands” - an area that encompasses Little Puerto Rico - is grateful for the visible police presence.
“It’s safe for summer. It keeps the buyers out,” Vega said. “The streets are more calmer. There used to be so much traffic. Now you can walk.”
Street declared the operation “an unqualified success” during an interview last week.
“I wanted to bring this part of the community under control,” the mayor said. “And I realized we weren’t going to be able to arrest our way out of it.”
Street refused to disclose how much the city is paying in overtime to officers like Lyons, who said he has averaged an extra 30 hours a week since the operation began.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has quoted a city official as estimating that Safe Streets costs the city about $ 4 million a month.
Similar operations undertaken in other cities have usually displaced drug trafficking to other areas, rather than wiping it out, according to Edward Tully, executive director of Major Cities Chiefs, which represents the heads of the 60 largest police departments in the United States and Canada.
“Open-air drug dealing is a problem in every community in the United States. Philadelphia is not alone,” Tully said. “As long as the demand exists, it will be serviced.”
Street and the police commissioner, Sylvester Johnson, who together devised Safe Streets, said it will need continued community support to remain effective.
So far the police operation has proved to be popular with city residents. Last Monday night, after the Safe Streets program was scaled back in a part of South Philadelphia, a 12-year-old girl was one of four people wounded in a gun battle that erupted on a street corner there. Neighborhood residents have since demanded that the police presence in the neighborhood be restored to its previous level.
Since the city launched the operation, drug dealers have been forced indoors, and an unprecedented number of tipsters have reported the dealers’ new locations in residences to police. In the four months from Jan. 1 to May 2, when the operation started, about 250 people called police with tips about drug dealing.
But in the three and a half months since then, that number has jumped to 7,000, Johnson said. The police commissioner said the department tries to raid each new drug-dealing location within 24 hours of its being reported.
Because other dealers have switched to peddling their illegal wares from bicycles, Johnson said, police have increased bicycle patrols, following suspected dealers the same way regular officers have shadowed them on street corners.
In its latest phase, the operation has deployed more undercover officers.
“It’s like a chess game,” Johnson said. “As we changed, they changed. We understand that.”
Deayoung Park said cycling on drug patrol adds an element of surprise.
“It’s a gratifying feeling when you come up on somebody from behind on a bike. They never see you until it’s too late; then they get this look,” he said.
The impact of the Safe Streets program was almost immediate. Major crime dropped by 12 percent in May, and by 16 percent in June, compared to the same months in the previous year.
During the period between May and mid-August a year ago, 37 of 85 murders in the city were ruled to be drug-related. This year, of the 81 murders committed during that same period, 16 were drug-related.
The numbers of robberies and aggravated assaults fell by about 20 percent compared to May to mid-August 2001, Johnson said. Antidrug patrols have been aided by a new state program that allows authorities to seize a vehicle from a driver who does not have a proper license, insurance coverage, or registration.
City health department officials have reported a 30 percent increase in people enrolled in drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, Street said.
Johnson said the biggest payoff has been the improved quality of life in affected neighborhoods.
“To me, numbers are not important. Last year we made 37,000 arrests for drugs, confiscated over $ 4 million in cash, $ 48 million in drug confiscations, and as far as most law enforcement people would say, we” were “doing a good job,” the police commissioner said. “But I say it doesn’t matter. If you still can’t come out your house, and kids still can’t come out and play, then we haven’t done anything.”
Johnson said some residents have complained that the city is spending too much money in drug-infested neighborhoods, rather than in their own. “And I tell them they might not have open-air drug sales, but their children are the buyers in these other neighborhoods. So this is helping them, too,” he said.
Johnson said Street would disclose in the next two weeks the cost of the operation.
Street said he considers it more important “to improve the quality of life of people living in these neighborhoods,” and for that reason he has so far avoided addressing the cost issue.
“Less crime, less violence - that’s pretty good evidence of success,” the mayor said.” But the other thing is the new bond between the police and community. I have never seen anything like the new bond between the police in the neighborhoods and the people.”
Before Operation Safe Streets began, Street said, “because police were driving by drug dealers for years and not doing anything, people believed police must be in on it.”
Officer Michael Soto said that when children see him in the Badlands now they yell, “Hi, cop!” For the first time in years in those neighborhoods, Soto said, “You see kids riding bikes, parents outside, families together.”