Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 6, 1995                   TAG: 9505100029
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

AWAKE IN WASENA

After all, these folks haven't become vigilantes, meting out street justice to whoever doesn't look just right to them.

They have gathered to talk about the problems they've experienced, taken their concerns to city officials and, when they didn't see sufficient improvement, raised a stink.

This, after two years of putting up with the raucous, aggravating, intimidating and occasionally dangerous activities that go along with a market in illegal drugs. Anyone who has had his or her sleep interrupted by such goings-on knows: Two days of this is more than enough.

The problem was never as bad as it has been for years in some other neighborhoods with higher levels of poverty, the police say. No question about it.

Illegal drug use and, therefore, sales go on in the best of neighborhoods.

That doesn't make the problems created by the drug trade more tolerable, nor does it mean they should be tolerated - by law-abiding residents of Southwest, Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, South - whatever - Roanoke, or any other neighborhood.

Police have done a superb job of cleaning up the open-air crack market that once thrived in Northwest. Through community policing in high-crime areas, they are building partnerships with residents to improve the safety and livability of the city's housing projects. They work, still, in neighborhoods where crime is a bigger problem than in Wasena, and their resources will go only so far. Understood.

But this is why neighborhood residents are right to name the problem and denounce it, loudly and often. They are right to make it clear that drug dealing will not be tolerated - before it becomes an intolerable way of life. And they are right to take actions - assuming they are legitimate and legal - against activities that should be accorded zero tolerance.

For as has been shown time and again in the frustrating "war" on drugs, victory on one block is likely to send the skirmish to the next street or the next neighborhood. There ought to stand a wall of resistance in every one of them. As the civilian veterans of this fight can attest, there are ways to fight back, peacefully.

Florine Thornhill, who as head of the Northwest Neighborhood Environmental Organization must be some sort of general in this fight, advises residents to face troublemakers and let them know people aren't going to look the other way, but will try to shut them down.

There's strength in numbers, and a unified show - whether in recording details of drug deals, purchasing rundown property, cleaning up overgrown lots, simply being visible - does make a difference.

Should Wasena residents panic? No. Police statistics don't indicate a marked increase in crime in their neighborhood over the past couple of years. Should they be watchful, organized and bold? Oh yeah.