To be clear, if every drug transaction were totally discrete - if the trade never escalated into random acts of violence that sent bullets flying into children and innocent passersby or caused people to feel uncomfortable or threatened in their own neighborhood - if there was none of the heavy negative social spin off that innevitably with the illegal drug trade, I would say it really hangs on people individually what they do. I don't care, whatever.

Unfortunately all of those other negative effects - the violence, the intimidation, the wasted lives - always do come with the drugs and so it falls on neighbors to put the pressure on when traffic gets too blatant and too "regular".

A drug corner or scene that festers and goes on and on withut disruption becomes a target for a rival to want to come in and take over the profits and next thing you know guns are blazing.

For Malcom X Park I think the thing to do is the traditional organization among neighbors and/or TownWatch kind of thing. Harass the cops enough to make them swing by regularly and discourage the scene from getting to "established" and you might nip it in the bud. You don't have to do the impossible make people stop buying and selling drugs - just make it uncomfortable for that spot to be a steady constant thing. You just want them to vary their routine out of your immediate area so the trade doesn't get out of control.

The scene in 407 S. 49th is far more disturbing - because it is way too "established" right off the bat. I have been repeatedly calling in complaints with fairly detailed descriptions to the police and I encourage others to do so as well. Police have a lot on their plate so realistically they often dispatch the personal to deal with the squeakiest wheel in terms of constant community complaints. From my phone calls they say that the information is passed directly to narcotics. Some other folks are investigating the real estate end of things. Everytime I see the scene going down I call it in.

If I don't see a change in a reasonable amount of time, I am contemplating getting more creative with my complaints. From my experience and from what I have heard from others, Philadelphia is often dysfunctional on the indivual level of any particular agency. People at XYZ agency (the police, L&I, City Council, etc.) are often either overwhelmed or all too willing to ignore a problem if they think it only comes from one complaintant. If you have multiple complaintants and you bring the problem to the attention of different agencies, suddenly XYZ agency wants to cover their @ss and they get motivated real fast.

Example - friends of mine had a dangerous structure on their block. Most of the 2nd floor had collapsed into the first, the roof leaked, their was tanding water in the tructure and no workin plumbing. The family who owned the house allowed an adult retarded man to live in the house because noone wanted to be the bad guy who put the man into social services. Our councilperson's office did not want to be the one's who took away someone's home and was actively hostile to my friends call's about the place 2 or 3 times a week. They would try to get the place sealed by L&I and when the process started it would suddenly be called to a halt. The guy staying in the house was dumping his feces in public trashcans and his urine into the gutter and as the summer got hotter the unsanitary conditions grew more and more untolerable. They started getting creative and calling the state environmental office or having all the neighbors on the block call the cops at once when the guy was dumping his fetid urine in the street, they started to raise the profile of the problem. Suddenly when the councilperson's office (who actually taunted my friends) and L&I were fielding calls from all sorts of odd ball other agencies and cops were filing incident reports after coming out and being gagged by the smell - well all of a sudden a problem that had festered for apparently ~15 years got fixed in a hurry.

Its easy for city empolyees to ignore individual citizens but they seem to get off their butts when they realize their innaction is coming to the attention of mutliple agencies or likely to get press attention soon.

Obviously you want to give each agency a chance to work at its own glacial pace and not escalate unnecessarily too soon - but if you come to feel that something is "stuck" in City Hall or in the Police Dep't for odd reasons or simple bureaucracy - sometimes the best thing to do get it unstuck is to get multiple agencies aware of the problem.

On 407 S. 49th, I am going to keep calling it into 911 religiously who routinely transfer my complaint to Narcotics. If nothing happens over time and we hit barriers at the real estate level, well I am going maybe complain about the rampant prostitution going on at that address and make sure Vice knows Narcotics is droping the ball on that address - even if the trade really is primarily drugs. If months go by and nothing happens a little bird may anonymously call various other agencies (sniff, sniff I smell gas and there were some workmen doing middle of the night repairs at this address), each time trying to make sure that reports of the obvious exchanges going on gets in someone elses report. From the bad old days of the 80s I have heard stories from neighborhood people about pushing abandonned cars that the city would not tow for eons out into the middle of the street in order to get the city to actually tow them, for example.

Its a little manipulative and obviously should be used only sparingly. In fact it really works most effectively when the problem is really, really obvious and egregious to the point that the shame factor for whoever is not doing their job is really high. However it is an idea for what to try if you have given something months and months and no progress has been made.

At least that's what I am thinking right now.

Again it might be simpler if everybody who reads this decides right now to call it in everytime they see the problem as a first step before resorting to more devious tactics.