Twenty suspected dealers were brought in to face the evidence — plus a battery of top cops and prosecutors. Two New Haven officials, Police Chief Francisco Ortiz and Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts, were on hand to watch and see what lessons they can bring home from this innovative crime-fighting program in North Carolina. Ortiz and Smuts have been blogging their visit for the Independent; read on for their latest entry.
Wednesday 12:21 p.m.
After the High Point PD selects a neighborhood for their initiative, they put together a list of targets who have been engaging in drug activity and/or violence from Patrol and Narcotics investigation data.
They build cases – or eliminate names – on each target over three months of undercover buys and other surveillance. This process is very resource-intensive, with many detectives devoted to the investigations.
This fourth neighborhood in High Point will pretty much wrap up their main problem areas, and so the difference in scale when compared to New Haven will take some creativity to figure out. Our central city area that roughly corresponds to the four High Point neighborhoods is roughly six to eight times more populous.
After the investigations, the PD sweeps in and arrests a number of the targets – those with violent records or any mid and upper-level dealers they have cases on – and activates their community leader contacts to help them reach out to the remaining targets and their families. They are invited to the “Call In” and are informed that the PD has enough evidence to arrest them, but want to make an offer not to. The Call In we witnessed was on the large side – 27 invitees, of whom 20 showed up.
Of the rest, two were in jail on unrelated activities, one had stopped by earlier to explain that he’d just gotten a job and needed to go to work, and four will be receiving less friendly visits from the PD sometime today. The PD and County DA also met with the landlords to tell them to better monitor their properties, or else the county would act to seize them. This created a problem later, since some landlords threatened to evict the invitees.
The invitees sit in the middle of the Call In room, with families and community members behind them (and observers) and tables in a horseshoe in front of them. The meeting started without any police officers present, with community leaders telling them why they were here and what the community felt about what they have been doing and what their choices are going forward. The meeting started with smirks and defiant postures, but quickly turned more hushed when the older gentleman who said he “didn’t need the mike because his voice is plenty loud” told them in no uncertain terms what he thought about their attitudes and where those attitudes would lead them.
Then the Chief, the county DA, the US Attorney, the DEA, parole, etc filed in and gave their presentations. They talked about the cases they built on everyone and told them their choices were “prison, a coffin, or the community.”
There was an understood fourth choice, which was to disappear, and police from Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and two smaller neighbors were there to tell them not to “disappear” to their communities – it would be like us having West Haven, Hamden, Hartford and Bridgeport there telling our offenders not to just move their
activities to those cities.
They showed slides of people from the neighborhood they arrested, and the number of years they are facing in prison. That got everyone’s attention, because a week or two ago, they were engaged in drug dealing with those same faces that had “12 years” or “30 years” under them. A video followed with an interview with someone who had been called in but re-offended and is serving 15 years in federal prison, the family of a callee who was killed, and two who had turned their lives around. One of those talked about how hard it was – he had to go to 56 job interviews – but worth it.
Then law enforcement left again and the community leaders got back up to talk about helping them choose “the community.” Things got a little out of hand, though, with the issue of eviction, questions about why only the black sellers were here and not anyone from the white community, and other complaints. The big meeting broke up, and smaller one-on-one meetings seemed to make much more headway talking to the invitees about focusing on the choice in front of them.
Tonight we’ll finish up with some thoughts on what makes this initiative tick and our search for dinner that evening.
Click here and here to read previous entries in Ortiz’s and Smuts’ High Point Diary.