Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Instead of running, face them and let them know what you're trying to do," advises Florine Thornhill, elderly head of Roanoke's Northwest Neighborhood Environmental Organization Inc. "I walk out there where they are."
Her group has driven out some crack dealers by buying up rental houses, fixing them up with government money and private donations and selling them to stable families. The organization is renovating four homes now, including one formerly used for selling drugs. Sometimes, Thornhill said, she has even asked crack dealers to keep an eye out at night for break-ins at a house undergoing renovation.
She likes for city cars and trucks to be seen in her neighborhood, especially when they come to clear overgrown lots. That rankles the drug dealers. "They can't stand to see where cleanness is." She said it makes them feel edgy, exposed.
Thornhill has compassion for some of the young drug dealers - many couldn't find legitimate work - but she doesn't turn a blind eye to their violence. "If we see anything very ugly, we report it."
She and her neighbors do get frightened. "We see them transporting the drugs."
Thornhill was saddened to hear about Wasena's troubles. "Wasena has such a beautiful neighborhood," she said. "I hate to see this happen. They have the same problem we've had for years and years. The main thing I can say to them is, 'Don't be afraid of anybody.'"
The Rev. Greg Jackson, president of the Loudon/Melrose Neighborhood Organization in Northwest Roanoke, says residents should not attack crime directly. Instead, he says, do it through housing.
"It is easier to have a rallying cry around housing," he said. "It gives the neighborhood more control."
His neighborhood group, like Thornhill's, is trying to buy troublesome houses and move in law-abiding families. If they get them, he said, "we can control who comes in."
"There's a lot you can do, other than becoming vigilante. No.1, they've got to get organized," says Stephanie Mann, the Orinda, Calif., author of "Safe Homes, Safe Neighborhoods: Stopping Crime Where You Live" (Nolo Press, 1993).
She advocates activism among residents on streets known for drug dealing. "The neighbors have to document and start taking pictures. They can even put signs out, letting them know they're very visible."
She says some drug customers avoid streets where neighbors post signs saying things such as "We're a safe neighborhood," "We keep drugs out" or "Our children come first."
One California neighborhood - she thinks it is near Oakland - set up a card table in the street and residents watched their soap operas outside when drug business was in its own prime time. "The customers wouldn't stop."
At those times, too, neighbors may simultaneously go out and start watering their lawns. "It's the united approach that's going to work," Mann says.
Besides writing down details of witnessed drug deals - the dates, times, models of cars and license numbers - neighbors can also document in a journal how the noise, fear and disruption affects their family life, such as children not being able to sleep and feeling below-par when they leave for school the next day.
Mann said urban churches can regain their connections with their immediate neighborhoods by becoming the sentries in drug wars. Churches are geographically scattered and can do all kinds of outreach needed by a drug-ridden community. She suggests that churches work together, and each appoint a neighborhood coordinator to work on the problems.
"If everybody does it, there's going to be no place these [drug] people can go to."
Roanoke Vice Lt. Ron Carlisle grew up on Marshall Avenue in Old Southwest - a place where older couples kept their big homes and yards immaculate.
The people died off in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and slumlords - some of them prominent Roanokers - bought their houses and split them into apartments. "Those are the people you can thank for the deterioration of Old Southwest," he said. With heavy tenant turnover, the wear and tear has left many of those properties in shabby condition.
His advice for neighborhoods dealing with drug dealers in rental houses and apartments? "They could find out who owns rental property in their neighborhood and make them more responsible for who they're putting in there."
City housing officials and some Roanoke neighborhood leaders are investigating the possibility of hiring more staff and setting up an "occupancy permit program" to force upgrading of the kinds of low-rent houses and apartments that drug dealers often use.
"It'll take the people who're making money off somebody else's poverty or somebody else's addiction," and make them keep up the property, says Aubrey Hicks of the Old Southwest group called Amos 5:24.
by CNB