A KEY ELEMENT OF THE STRATEGY IS TO BUILD TRUST BETWEEN POLICE AND COMMUNITIES.

A key element of the strategy is to build trust between police and communities.
PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A unique initiative to clean up open-air drug dealing neighborhoods is being tried in several cities in the country.
It hinges on an unusual partnership among the police, the residents in the neighborhood and a small, select group of drug dealers.
Providence is one of six cities in the nation that are trying this unusual initiative, at the recommendation of the National Urban League.
The program is called the High Point Initiative, named for the small North Carolina city that used the pilot program on a ghetto in its West End nearly three years ago. The police there tried it for the same reason that Providence is testing it now -- because nothing else stopped the plague of drug dealing in the poorest neighborhoods.
The idea came from a college professor who helped produce Boston's anti-gang project in the mid-1990s. But it took several years for David Kennedy, head of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, to persuade any police department to give his anti-drug dealing initiative a try.
"Overt, chaotic public drug-dealing is one of the most destructive things a community can have," Kennedy said, "whether there's somebody standing on the street corners or in the apartments, it doesn't matter."
The drug markets bring crime and violence into communities that are already struggling, Kennedy said, and police efforts to curtail the dealing, such as drug sweeps, usually cause distrust in the community. At the same time, children in the neighborhood are lured by the fast money of drug dealing -- and real jobs are seen as the path of suckers.
His solution incorporates what the police are already doing, with something they've never tried before.
How it works
The police start by going after the street-level drug dealers and their hierarchy in the worst drug-plagued area, or beachhead. The next step is unusual: The police select a few nonviolent offenders, the dealers who are young and have the potential to be rehabilitated. Instead of arresting them, the police give the dealers a second chance and turn them over to the community groups, such as the Urban League, which provide jobs, education and counseling.
The approach encourages the community to trust the police, Kennedy said, which leads residents to work with the police to prevent more drug dealers from returning. The dealers with a second chance serve as an example to the younger generation.
His initiative attracted the National Urban League, which invited Kennedy to its annual conference in the summer of 2005. He was on a community policing panel with Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman, whose department had been recognized as a model. It took a year before the Providence Police Department agreed to try the High Point Initiative, which is also being used in Winston-Salem, N.C., Kansas City, Mo., Tucson, Ariz., and Newburgh, N.Y.
Kennedy, the Urban League and High Point police officers visited Providence several times to explain the concept, and several high-ranking Providence officers went to High Point to observe.
"We were open to it because we were tired of being a narcotics-arresting machine," said Esserman, who knew Kennedy from when the professor was at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "And there's something compelling about a second chance." The Urban League of Rhode Island was eager to try it. "It seemed like an opportunity to transform the neighborhood," said Luis Aponte, an administrator at the Urban League and a Providence city councilman. "The conditions were also ripe. We had the presence of a police chief who demonstrated the willingness to work with the community, and the Urban League was often called in to be a conduit between the police department and the community."
Differences and similarities
During a visit to High Point, Lt. Thomas Verdi, head of the Providence police narcotics unit, was struck by how different High Point was from Providence. The North Carolina city, 20 miles southeast of Winston-Salem, is half the size of Providence, and the ghettos there have more green space. "They don't have the housing developments, the high-rises. They don't have the [housing] projects like us," Verdi said. "They don't have the gang problems we do. We have dozens of beachheads."
But the High Point police said the problems were the same -- drug dealers five deep on corners, gunfire, prostitutes, robberies and murders. After the initiative in May 2004, the decade-old drug markets closed and haven't revived.
Finally, the Providence police signed on, for the same reason. "Doing something is better than being skeptical and doing nothing," Lt. George Stamatakos said.
The police decided to tie the initiative into an aggressive drug investigation that the narcotics unit had been working on since early last year. The detectives were going after the drug-dealing networks across Providence -- from the street dealers to those supplying the drugs. By the time the months-long investigation ended last fall, the detectives had caught 104 drug dealers, seized four kilos of cocaine and grabbed four handguns.
The dealers were arrested all across the city, but a third had been caught in one neighborhood -- the Lockwood Plaza and surrounding streets in Upper South Providence. It was no surprise to the police or the residents. What was a surprise was how the neighborhood improved after the initiative was worked through.
"We've had a huge degree of success here, and nobody wants to lose it," Stamatakos said. "It's kind of a point of pride. We said it wouldn't work, and we're working hard so it will."
There's still skepticism. "Time will tell," Verdi said. "It's somewhat unrealistic to believe a year and a half from now there will be no drugs in Lockwood without police intervention."
Isn't it possible that crime is down because so many drug dealers have gone to jail? Not necessarily, the chief says.
"I don't believe just the arrests would have eliminated the problem," Esserman said. "I believe this strategy has a chance. We have enormous support from the community, because these are their children being given a second chance. The police department is not seen as an occupying enemy."