Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 24, 1995 TAG: 9501240098
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It must, block by block, family by family, person by person, decide that it will not tolerate illegal drugs.
Not on the streets, where quick transactions of drugs for money or guns can erupt without warning into violence. Nor in the crack houses, where dealers have retreated from police but still intimidate neighbors and keep right on taking care of business. Nor in the houses of the Roanoke Valley's "better" neighborhoods where, behind closed doors, affluent addicts snort lines of coke from kitchen countertops.
"Mean streets, clean streets," an in-depth report published Sunday on the state of the drug war in two small cities, chronicles Roanoke's success in reclaiming its inner-city streets through a combination of community policing, undercover police work and neighborhood involvement; and Lynchburg's struggle to duplicate its neighbor's results.
As the story notes, Lynchburg is at a disadvantage. U.S. 29, which runs through the city, has become a north-south corridor for drug trafficking. Interstate 81, which passes through the Roanoke Valley, apparently has lost favor with traffickers.
But, even with its innovative, aggressive police work and luck, Roanoke can hardly declare victory.
The police will never win this battle alone. Indeed, community policing works because law-abiding residents are full partners.
Police have shut down open-air drug markets, and the results are good. Roanoke's "crack alleys" are just city streets once more. The drug traffic is disrupted. But, predictably, the action has shifted to other neighborhoods. Though now conducted more discreetly, the results still are increased danger and dread among law-abiding people who just want to live peacefully and should be free to do so.
The drug trade will not collapse until people who don't see themselves as part of the ugly side of it recognize their part in the deterioration of the social fabric.
People who look the other way, who don't want to get involved, who fear or fail to call the police, share in some culpability. The same choice of materialism over humanity that attracts poor kids to big-buck drug sales is at work among landlords who knowingly rent apartments and houses to drug dealers.
And those lines of coke on the kitchen counter in suburbia run straight into city neighborhoods teetering between renewal and decline.
Users who think they do no harm because they have the money to buy addictive drugs without stealing should think about Carl Slaughter, a 14-year-old kid in Lynchburg who cares more about his life and his family than the hundreds of dollars his friends flash from their drug deals.
Carl spends his free time at a community center. Right next door, drugs are being sold. Worry about Carl.
by CNB