Pubdate: Thu, 02 September 1999
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 1999 The Washington Post Company
Address: 1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/

WHO RULES THE STREETS?

"DRUG DEALERS are not going to be on the streets while I'm mayor." -- Mayor
Anthony Williams.

Yellow police tapes have been showing up on the streets of Petworth,
Columbia Heights and the Parkview areas in Northwest Washington. Already
familiar in several violence-drenched east-of-the-river neighborhoods, the
tapes in Northwest D.C. also mark the scenes of fatal shootings, most tied
together by a common enduring thread: drug dealing.

Dealers are on the streets and doing business on the mayor's watch.

Despite a decline in major crime rates, drug-related violence remains a
dangerous presence.

It is diminishing the communities where the slayings take place.

It threatens economic development, investment and tourism in a city that
needs all three, and it tears at the fabric of the city's rich social and
cultural life. Drug-related violence is a problem that city hall cannot talk
away.

Residents harried by nightly shootings will settle for nothing short of
getting drug sales and the dangers they entail removed from their
neighborhoods. From Capitol Hill to Anacostia, Columbia Heights and Park
View, the demand from residents shut in by open-air drug markets is to see
more police on the streets -- now and constantly.

The police department's decision, announced on Tuesday, to extend the police
summer mobile force beyond its original Sept. 30 termination date is a first
step. Those special officers apparently have made a difference in some of
the neighborhoods where they were assigned this summer.

Keeping those officers on duty for an additional month and deploying them to
other hot spots may provide protection for beleaguered communities. But law
enforcement's task of regaining permanent control of the streets is neither
an overnight job nor one to be left solely to the summer mobile force.

Only more patrolling of neighborhoods by beat officers and a stronger police
presence will convince drug dealers that the streets of Washington belong to
the law-abiding and not to them. At the moment, Mr. Mayor, drug dealers
don't believe it.

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