Pubdate: Mon, 24 Jun 2002
Source: BBC News (UK Web)
Copyright: 2002 BBC
Contact: http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/talking_point/forum/
Website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/558
Author: Matt Wells

HOW NEW YORK TACKLED CRACK

Just a few months ago, New Yorkers were celebrating their city's lowest 
monthly murder rate since 1962.

The figure of 32 deaths is still huge by UK standards, but compare that to 
more than 2,000 a year, at the height of the so-called Crack-Cocaine 
Epidemic in the late 1980s.

In an editorial this February, The New York Times columnist Bob Hebert 
wrote: "The recipe for success has been more cops, smarter policing, fewer 
guns, a drastic decline in the use of crack and better behaviour by young 
people."

Buy or bust

The New York Police Department would agree with all of that.

Press liaison officer, Detective Walter Burns, spent seven years himself on 
the narcotics beat.

"It was simple. It was enforcement. We went on a buy or bust policy and 
it's not as big a problem as it once was."

Mr Burns says huge numbers of officers "curtailed the sale" of crack.

Many of the ringleaders of the boom period 12 years ago are still in prison 
or dead - with the predominantly black and Hispanic American communities 
sickened into action against the tide of killings and robberies within 
their midst.

The resources and investment speak for themselves.

Forty thousand officers serve in New York - nearly a third of the total in 
England and Wales.

City authorities say that in the era of Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, the "broken 
windows" (or zero tolerance) strategy - which came down hard on minor 
offences - began to persuade young men heading towards a life peddling 
crack rocks on the street, that they'd live longer, not doing it.

So can New York afford to relax now about the menace of crack?

"No, of course we're not over-confident, but there's nothing else coming up 
to replace it. We're not afraid of any new drug problem," says Mr Burns.

Sentences

In 1988, President George Bush senior made his vow to "end the scourge of 
drugs" one of his presidential campaign slogans, given the immense social 
concern surrounding the crack-related crime.

His son has other more pressing priorities now, in the form of the war on 
terrorism.

There are on-going concerns about the way in which harsh drug laws, 
designed to accompany the crack-down on crack, discriminate against 
non-whites, and give too little focus to the powdered-cocaine problem.

Sentences for possession of crack rocks are much higher than for its less 
solid constituent.

Matthew Briggs, is from the Drug Policy Alliance, based in Manhattan.

He said: "It's facile to just make a simple connection between enforcement, 
and solving the problems.

"Crack largely burned itself out in New York City.

"All that money spent on escalating the war on drugs was not spent on 
reducing the basic harm that drugs can do to our communities.

"It was not spent on better treatment or social programmes, and it racially 
polarised the city for many years to come."

'Fertile swamps'

Sometimes, anecdote provides revealing evidence of changes going on in 
street and drugs' culture.

A leading New York rock musician I was interviewing at his Downtown 
apartment a few weeks ago, told me: "This is the first time in 10 years 
that I am being offered drugs like cocaine and heroin routinely on the 
block where I live."

A question mark looms also over the extent to which the "crack problem" 
ever really went away in the city at large.

For Manhattan where the focus and the money always is, there's no doubt 
that the hellish crack-houses largely disappeared - as for much of Brooklyn 
and Queens.

But this is a big place, and the pockets of utter desperation like East New 
York, on the city's edge, remain fertile swamps.

The cynic suggests they always will be - however many officers walk the streets.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart