Unlikely Freedom From Fear

About a mile from Disneyland, on a narrow street with pitted patches of dirt where sidewalks should be, a barefoot girl in a pink sweatsuit skips rope. She counts aloud in Spanish as a group of laughing children dash around her.

Rosario Zamora, 43, smiles at them from her doorway. These are her children and those of her neighbors, but this is not the same Dakota Street she has known for 20 years. There are no empty shell casings, no splatters of fresh blood. She cannot recall the last time the children found tiny bundles of crack cocaine on their way home from school.

This street, hopeless for so many years, has been resuscitated.

“We’ve lived forever inside,” Zamora said. “Now our children are playing in the sun.”

A relative peace has fallen on this and other previously drug-plagued communities across the country, and it’s being credited in part to the least likely of sources: the drug dealers themselves.

Where once they peddled their illegal wares on neighborhood curb sides, dealers now are on the move. Under increasing pressure from police, they have abandoned streets here and elsewhere, including parts of Los Angeles and New York, in favor of a less risky strategy that is fast becoming an industry standard.

Dealers have learned to use their pagers and cellular telephones to move their trade indoors. They have created a system of telephone codes and couriers to connect with customers without being exposed to the eyes of watching police.

The technique is different from the way that drug dealers have employed such electronic devices in years’ past, and it has left police scrambling to keep up.

“The days of buying straight off the street are gone,” said LAPD Det. John Hunter. “Everything, everything is call and deliver now.”

While the street drug markets still exist in some places, some officers refer to the new scheme as the “Domino’s approach” to peddling drugs: “You call us and we’ll have it to you in 30 minutes or less.”

The trend is having a fortuitous side effect on many beleaguered neighborhoods by sweeping out the more unsavory and dangerous elements of the open-air drug markets and giving residents a sense of safety. “The crooks, without even trying, have actually helped make it happen,” admits Anaheim police Lt. David Severson.

The retreat from traditional drive-thru drug markets is attributed to a simple fact--dealers don’t want to get caught--and the ready technology.

Drug users are less willing to shop at street corners routinely staked out by police. And dealers, in their perpetual pursuit of more profit with less risk, aren’t opposed to exercising a little more discretion.

When police started advancing on the street-level drug dealers by posing as buyers, collecting hours of surveillance videos and reinforcing patrols, it was the dealers’ turn to respond, said William McDonald, a research consultant at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“They got telephone numbers, they got beepers, and they got their customers to call in,” McDonald said. “And for now, until the cops develop a strategy to beat this new pattern, the bad guys are on top of this game.”

Declining Drug Arrests

Officials say measures like community policing and stricter laws for repeat offenders have contributed to a steady drop in drug arrests nationwide. But they also say that the numbers, particularly for the last five years, reflect the growing effectiveness of the call-and-deliver business, a venture that experts are just beginning to recognize.

In 1996, law enforcement officials nationwide arrested 216,342 people on suspicion of dealing or manufacturing street-level drugs--the smallest number since 1988, according to FBI statistics.

Conversely, the number of user-related arrests, including possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia, climbed to an all-time high of 1.1 million.

Robin Waugh, a DEA spokeswoman, said the figures prove that drugs are being sold “just as regularly, just not as blatantly.”

The change has delivered a blow to drug cops who now must wade through layers of security checks set up by wary drug dealers to net even the smallest undercover drug buy. Officers who for years garnered most of their undercover drug arrests from no-hassle, walk-up street sales are now starved of connections.

Said Waugh: “Everything is telling us drug use is on the rise. So where are the dealers? We’re not finding them as quickly as we used to.”

The neighbors who once had a street-level view of their decaying communities hardly care.

After years of walking their children past prostitutes, of being awakened by gunfire and intimidated into silence, they are celebrating freedom.

This mood is especially apparent in Anaheim, where Alfred Coy and other residents are using the reprieve from drugs and crime to salvage a neighborhood they virtually surrendered long ago.

Coy, 33, lives on North Anna Drive, a U-shaped street of khaki-colored, low-slung apartment units. Drug dealers once infested the area. They casually rolled joints on the sidewalk between sales. They ordered children to hide large stashes of dope in their underwear.

Residents became apathetic about their street, with its broken sidewalks and sandbox yards. The gang members who ruled boldly all day and night delivered a standing order that no one dared to challenge: stay away, stay alive.

Now residents gather at impromptu meetings at the 40-unit apartment building that Coy manages with his wife, Maria.

Tenants are encouraged to report crime and join his loose-knit block watch. His first-floor unit has become an unofficial break room for Anaheim police, who stop by to sip coffee with neighbors and dole out silver badge-shaped stickers to children.

“We feel safer right now than we ever have before,” said Coy, who moved here four years ago. “We used to turn the corner and see 10 or 15 dealers working at the same time. But they are nearly all gone.”

Drug vendors had become so rooted on Dakota Street that few neighbors noticed the first signs of relief when it began a year or so ago.

“We were not believing at first,” said Zamora, who raised four children here, amid the random shootouts and street brawls that would send her family scrambling for cover. They would sometimes scrunch together in the bathtub, or stretch out on the floor.

“All of a sudden we thought, ‘They’ve left, but why?’ ” she recalled. “And then we said, ‘Who cares?’ ”

Police in other cities beset with drug problems also started to notice fewer calls for help and a slow but steady drop in drug arrests.

Last year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., drug dealers all but deserted the area near Holiday Park, just steps away from the Atlantic Ocean. An area that was once so clogged with potential buyers that dealers swaggered down the line of cars to take orders suddenly cleared. Tourists looking for nearby museums and galleries were no longer confronted by gang members peddling dope.

“It was like an invisible street sweeper started coming through,” Fort Lauderdale Police Capt. Paul Urschalitz said. “Only we didn’t order it, and we sure as hell didn’t know where it was taking everything.”

Streets where drugs are openly bought and sold can still be found in many cities. But the transition from open-air street markets to personal delivery has forced the trade underground, where it can thrive.

“Where we could once do regular, routine drug sweeps and count on getting 15 or 20 arrests at a time, we’re now coming up with nothing,” Urschalitz said. “The dealers have insulated themselves. Instead of staying put, they’re doing business everywhere, all over the place, in your backyard and mine.”

The system works like this: Customers page dealers, who call back and take their orders. A meeting place is designated for an exchange that takes a matter of seconds--at a bus stop, a grocery store, the post office, the buyer’s living room.

Usually the dealers employ runners, or “mopes,” to deliver the drugs, a system that further insulates the supplier. Delivery workers earn anywhere from $5 a sale to 50% of all profits.

Numeric beepers, which barely existed before 1991, and cellular phones are pivotal. They are inexpensive and easy to acquire. For as little as $30 a month, a customer can have both. Drug dealers, especially, have elevated their use to a coded art form.

One pusher who deploys a four-man troop in Anaheim and Santa Ana under the street name “Opie” says he instructs his runners and customers to use designated codes whenever possible: *100 means a $100 sale, 711 and 55 delineates two easy drop-off spots--the phone booth at the local 7-Eleven convenience store or the side parking lot of a nearby Arco station.

When calling the pager, buyers input the codes after their telephone numbers, sending a trail of digits--sometimes up to 20 numbers long--across the dealer’s pager screen.

The universal 911 signal at the end identifies when an emergency delivery is needed. A double 911 signals big profits.

“That says to me, ‘I’ll pay more if you get it here fast,’ ” said the dealer, who spoke on condition that he not be identified by his real name. “You see that and it takes priority over anything else.”

Codes provide an important defense for dealers if an arrest is made. Officers may seize the pagers and immediately scroll through the bank of numbers, hoping to glean leads on buyers or dealers. But the scrambled string of numbers they often find is useless.

Opie said he hasn’t been arrested for 18 months, a record stint of freedom for the 26-year-old.

“I used to get picked up like four times a year,” he said. “But I don’t see the cops no more, and they don’t see me.”

He said leaving his perch on the corner of Standard and East McFadden avenues in Santa Ana two years ago was a “management decision.”

Working the neighborhood nearly six years allowed him to develop a regular crop of customers, most of whom followed his suggestion to pack it up and move off the street.

“If you’re still slinging on the street corner, you’re losing out,” he says. “It’s like wearing a sign that says, ‘Bust me.’ ”

Little-Known Change

His take on the changing drug scene was evident recently in Los Angeles, where a team of undercover detectives spent more than two hours trolling for drugs one Friday afternoon.

They scoured a commercial strip of Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood that had always been a “slam dunk” for witnessing street sales.

No one was selling or buying. Yet, when the same undercover detectives paged a suspected drug dealer from a nearby pay phone, they received a prompt callback and--after dropping the name of a reference--were guaranteed a delivery. The officers had obtained the pager numbers the old-fashioned way: from a snitch looking to cut a deal.

Within minutes, they had two grams of cocaine in hand and an 18-year-old delivery man in custody.

“It may be the in-your-face sort of confrontation that’s taken leave, but don’t think for a minute it’s not still out there,” said Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie-Mellon professor who researches how drugs move through the American market. “Our problems haven’t gone away.

“Those open-air markets are a street-level mainstay,” said Blumstein, who has published reports on national crime trends. “They’ve been around since the beginning of time. I doubt that will change, even though transactions are becoming more private and one-on-one.”

Police in most cities haven’t yet explored how the shift from drive-thrus to deliveries is affecting neighborhoods, if they have linked the two elements together at all, experts say.

The Community Policing Consortium in Washington is attempting to track the development by collecting data from law enforcement agencies nationwide. Details are emerging slowly.

“People are probably so caught up in the successes of seeing neighborhoods cleaning up and dealers disappearing that they’re not really looking at how the dealers are adapting,” said consortium coordinator Carl Bickel. “I’ll bet most communities haven’t figured out where the crime is going, or even stopped to think about it yet.”