Pubdate: 6-14 April 1999
Source: Weekly Planet (FL)
Copyright: Weekly Planet Inc. 1999
Contact:  1310 E 9th Avenue  Tampa, FL 33605
Fax: (813) 248-9999
Website: http://www.weeklyplanet.com
Author: Susan Eastman
[Susan Eastman can be reached at BUSTING ROBLES PARK

It was played for maximum dramatic Impact. After 10 Months
investigating drug deals inside Robles Park Village public housing
project, police swept in and made mass arrests. On April 15, 23 young
African American men were rounded up, handcuffed and charged with drug
possession and sales. Police had a total of 321arrest warrants. By
Thursday, April 29, they still had nine outstanding warrants.

After watching the arrests replayed on television and touted as a
major dent in Tampa's drug trade and reading about it in the daily
newspapers, Robles Park resident Demonterio Wilson, 33, said the whole
thing is mostly blowing smoke. Wilson sat on a kitchen chair perched
on the front stoop of a Robles Park apartment on a hot day last week
with four friends passing the time before work. The men traded quips
and opinions on the meaning and motivation that drive such drug sweeps.

Drug stings, Williams and his friends said, take place in the most
vulnerable and poorest communities. The police make a big splash, and
residents feel good. The arrests grow out of a police policy that
Wilson and his friends say has educated them in fear. At any time,
most young black men know they might be stopped and hassled and
possibly arrested by the police. The apparent crime is for walking
down a street or driving a car while black. The police are on a
mission in African American neighborhoods, Wilson said, because the
rest of society wants to believe that all of its problems reside on
the streets of poor black neighborhoods. Targeting the black community
for drug stings is a cheap and easy way to lead the public to believe
that something is being done about the nation's drug addiction.

Most of those arrested in Robles Park were charged with selling
minuscule amounts of marijuana, between two and four grams - enough
for a couple of joints. Of the 23 arrested for drug charges, 13 had
charges related solely to marijuana possession and sales, and 40 had
charges that included either cocaine or counterfeit substance in
addition to marijuana charges. Police made 56 indvidual drug buys,
netting 150.8 grams rock cocaine and 386 grams of pot, which is about
three quarters of a pound of pot.

"It's false advertisement," Wilson said. "They show it on the news
like it's a big drug bust, but it's not. That's all it is, it's just
an illusion to the people in this state, to have people think they a
doing something about drugs."

According to Tampa Police Department Lt. Louis Potenziano, the bust
was financed with $50,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development. Undercover officers and informants bought drugs
repeatedly from dealers during the sting to show most of those
arrested had a business selling drugs on Robles Park streets. The
police also sold drugs to users to make possession arrests. Armed with
that history, they waited until they could bust everyone in one big
shakedown.

"If you can show a continuing pattern of behavior, if we go in there
over a 10 month period and make buy after buy, it really shows what
these guys are," said Potenziano, who is commander of the city's Quad
Squad, a special unit that targets street level dealers. "These guys
are not a one-time deal." Wilson said he wouldn't mind police taking
out street level dealers in Robles Park if he saw the same undercover
scrutiny and police aggressiveness tackling pot smoked in apartments
in Hyde Park or heroin snorted by young hipsters in Carollwood.

"If you are going to be undercover, do your job. If you want to clean
up the drug dealers, make it citywide," he said. "Whenever they want
to do something to stop violence or drugs, it's always in the urban
community. What about stings everywhere else?"

The arrests in Robles Park are just one more example of a public
policy gone awry, critics say, a policy that targets poor communities
by throwing more young African. American men in jail. Most of those
arrested were 17 or 18 years old. When they get out of jail, they,
won't be able to vote and will have a harder time getting into schools
or jobs where they can use their talents in legitimate enterprise. If
such sweeps were happening to young people in the white community,
activist Connie Burton said, the emphasis would be on rehabilitation
not imprisonment. The mass busts are acceptable, she said, because
young black men are being locked up and labeled incorrigible.

"I used to support the concept (of fighting drugs) because I thought
we would start at the top and work our way down," said Burton, who
lives in Robles Park. Her son, Narada, 19, was arrested in the drug
sweep. "Now I see that this war on drugs is a war on the black
community. There is no one willing to stop drugs at the top or stop
drugs coming into our community. We can't see it solved by hungry
people going to jail."

All of the young men got felony charges upgraded because Robles Park
is located across the street from the Sacred Heart Academy on Florida
Avenue. It is a misdemeanor to possess less than 20 grams of
marijuana, but if the pot is sold, it is an automatic felony. Because
Robles Park is located within 1,000 feet of a school, sales carry
mandatory prison sentences of three years.

While he didn't deny that there was drug dealing going on inside
Robles Park, Wilson said that most of the trade was just small time
dealers making small amounts of money on a ready and willing economic
opportunity.

"It's targeting the underclass," he said of the, bust. "Ninety percent
of those people don't have a job. You got to do what you got to do."

Robles Park was quiet on an early weekday afternoon last week. A few
people sat on stoops talking. A grandmother escorted her grandson
along a sidewalk while he sucked on a grape flavored shaved ice.
Police said that quiet showed the bust had been successful short term.
But long term, they know arresting street level dealers isn't going to
solve the drug problem or help the young men selling drugs on Tampa's
street corners into well paid jobs in mainstream society.

"There has got to be a solution beyond just arresting them because we
are still arresting them over and over again," said Potenziano "These
kids have got to be able to find jobs."

Potenziano believes that there are jobs out there for the youths and
education opportunities. The question, he said, is how you force
someone to take advantage of the opportunities for legitimate and
legal enterprise. "There is no magic pill," he said. "We just don't
have the answers."

Still, he said, removing street level dealers, even temporarily,
eliminates the biggest impact that the drug trade has on neighborhoods
- - other crime, plummeting home values and fear.

"People that live in these neighborhoods are saying we want you to do
this. They want to be able to invite friends over without them having
to weed through guys selling drugs in front of their house. They want
the quality of life to be improved. These guys are making it miserable
for their own mothers, brothers, aunts, uncles, fathers and neighbors.
They may be the smallest supplier in the chain, but they are the ones
that destroy the quality of life for the neighborhood."

Those convicted in the Robles bust likely will join a prison
population of African American men growing at an alarming rate. In
Florida state prisons, 34,778 African American men are currently in
jail. Nationally at any time, one third of African American men
between the ages of 15 and 30 are under some form of criminal justice
control. In the total prison population, about one in four inmates has
been arrested for drug offenses. Of those drug offenders, 75.1
percent,are black and 59.2 percent are 34 years of age or younger.

"The tragedy is that prison life is a corrupting life," said
University of South Florida criminology professor Richard Dernbo.
There are far more effective and cost efficient and human ways to deal
with people who are offenders than locking them up in these
warehouses. We are running the risk in this country that we are
creating a sub-nation of enemies alienated from the, rest of society.
We have the highest incarceration rates in the world."

Dembo said society should try to understand the mindset of young
people who turn to drug sales as an economic opportunity without
thinking through the lifelong consequences of those choices. "When you
are young and impulsive, you don't see those things as cashing in on
your options at an early age," Dembo said. "There are things that need
to be done to give them a stake in conventional society. Arrest and
incarceration do not solve these problems."

For Burton's son Narada, arrest on charges of possession and sale of
14 grams of marijuana within 1,000 feet of a school meant he was fired
from his job at the Tampa Housing Authority and may face three years
in prison.

Burton received a notice Thursday that she has seven days to move out
of her Robles Park apartment. She is being evicted through. President
Clinton's "One Strike You're Out" policy.

"The rules are very clear on that," said Jerome Ryans, executive
director of the Tampa Housing Authority. If anyone on the lease is
charged with a drug offense, the family has seven days,to either
vacate the premises or appeal. During the appeal process, the family
may stay.

Burton, an outspoken social critic and mother of two, feels the busts
served a convenient excuse by the city of Tampa and the,Tampa Housing
Authority to deliver a message about what her activism will cost her
and her family.

"We are not singling her out," said Ryans, adding that five other
families also received eviction notices on the day Burton received
hers.

Burton said she will fight the eviction. And instead of silencing her,
the action has spurred Burton to vow to become more active, to more
directly challenge police policies in Tampa's black community. Instead
of locking up drug dealers, Burton wants to see the black community
come together to fight policing policies currently in force in Tampa's
black community. She wants to see the black community define its needs
and force the city to join in a partnership to help bring economic
opportunity back to the black community. She is the Tampa coordinator
of the National Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement, a political
organization grounded in philosophy of black self determination.

"I think this latest attempt by the establishment and whoever that
might include was the straw that broke the camel's back with me,"
Burton said. "I believe there are many more mothers in the community
that feel like I feel and are going through the situations that I am
going through. There are more people being oppressed. It is my mission
now to connect with those so that we can build an organization. I see
things in my community that I know is not right. They see things in
their community they know isn't right. We need to organize."
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