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THE SAFE STREETS INTERVIEWS
by BERNARD VAUGHAN
September 2003
BEAT COPS ON OVERTIME, DRUGS, MONEY, MARRIAGE & THE MAYOR
HOW LIFE ON THE POLICE FORCE HAS CHANGED UNDER THE CONTROVERSIAL ANTI-CRIME PROGRAM
We've heard Mayor John Street, Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson, and Street's political rivals and neighborhood residents debate the merits of Operation Safe Streets almost every day in the media, but what about the patrol officers who actually police those streets? What do the police on the street think about the program that has put them on some of the city's most dangerous corners? I talked with two officers I'll call Eric and Chris about their experiences working Safe Streets. Both have been on the force between two to five years, and both have worked the operation on and off since its inception in May 2002. Both are based in precincts in the police force's North Central Division, home to some of the most volatile and dilapidated neighborhoods targeted by the costly, controversial program.
I asked them how Safe Streets changed their everyday life as police officers.
“Stress,” said Eric. Recently engaged, Eric picked up as many overtime Safe Streets shifts as possible to pay for his wedding.
“I'm constantly working,” said Eric. “Right now, you don't have to pick up the hours, but starting Monday [August 25] we're going to twelve hour days. You have to do it. It's not like you get an option now. Twelve hour days for a lot of people who have kids is tough.”
I asked Eric why he thinks the police are going to twelve-hour shifts.
“I'll tell you—this is my honest opinion—we're going to twelve hour days cause he's going to election,” said Eric, referring to Mayor Street. “He wants to look good. I guarantee it'll end in November, and we'll go back to the regular overtime as an offering.”
What kind of guidance are officers given as to how to go about ridding an area of drugs?
“We're more of a presence so they are not dealing in front of you,” said Chris. “Basically, if you see a bunch of dudes on the corner, and ah, you know, they don't have any legitimate business being there, you just sit there. You can ask them to roll or you can sit there, and then they'll roll on their own. They're hanging out in front of a grocery store that's closed, you just ask ‘who lives here?' Well, nobody. All right well, you can't hang here.”
“You're supposed to look for anything suspicious,” said Eric. “Like, in my district, there's known drug areas. Before the Safe Streets thing started, you'd have thirty guys on a given corner—thirty guys, not kidding you—everyone carrying somethin' different. You stop someone; chances are they have somethin' on ‘em. But what's your reason for stopping them? You have to be able to catch them, or see them or doin' somethin'. Articulate why you stop this person. You have to have reasonable suspicion, and then you have to have your probable cause.
“Like the other day I worked eight in the morning to eight at night on a Safe Streets corner. We told the guys (on the corner), we said ‘all right, look, we're gonna be out here for a while, and you guys gotta roll.' You know, they were on this one corner, sittin' in front of an abandoned house. I said, ‘any of you guys live there?' No, of course not, it's abandoned. ‘Roll.'”
What about routine work practices? What kind of monitoring or reporting are officers required to do in order to measure the program's success?
“You're supposed to write down in your patrol log if you see narcotics activity,” said Chris. “If you get tips from neighbors, if somebody older who actually cares about the neighborhood says, you know, ‘right around the corner on blank street, they're always dealing out of that abandoned lot,' you're supposed to put that down. If you get tips about any particular houses, you put that down, and then that's all submitted to a different unit that can do surveillance work.”
What constitutes “narcotics activity?”
“In the beginning,” said Chris, “when they first instituted Safe Streets, like, a lot of people from Jersey or the suburbs would drive around, you could tell by their registration tickets.”
Eric added that he used to stop a lot of Temple University students.
So you could get a decent gauge of activity by outside people coming in?
“Yeah, by traffic, yeah,” said Chris. “Now that it's been going on a while, they're not coming in as much, or if they are, they're going to another location. They're not buying on the corners anymore.”
So you might be aware that it's going on, but you don't necessarily act on it? You write a report about it?
“You're more of a deterrent,” Chris explained. Drug dealers “never do anything in front of the cops, because they all have lookouts. They'll have little kids on bikes; they have other guys that are on corners. So if they're dealing in the middle of the block, they have a guy on each corner, within yelling distance … so if you're rolling, they make a siren sound, or they yell ‘5-0', or they say ‘cops', you know, they just make a show of it that you're coming, so that everything for that minute ceases. So even if you park there, it's not a problem. They just walk away—that happens a lot.”
“I hate to say it,” said Eric, “but it's more of like a smokescreen, if anything, you know. Like, you're out there, and just with your presence, kids can go out in the street and play now—that's true, that's totally true. But it just moves the drug dealers to a different place. We're never gonna stop this completely. It's almost like saying we're gonna stop people in Palestine from bombing people in Israel. It's only a deterrent for the time being, you know. But I feel it does do its job, because there's nothing there now on those corners. Like, there used to be a ton of people, and the only people that are out there now are kids. There's no drug dealers walkin' around.”
Where have the drug dealers gone?
“A lot of it has moved indoors,” said Chris.
“Before Safe Streets,” said Eric, “there were dealers coming into the [Safe Streets] neighborhoods from all over the city. Now they just went back to their neighborhoods, different corners, different areas, in different houses. Drug dealers are like businessmen, you know, they find another life.”
You both worked Safe Streets when it started out. What was the community response like?
“That summer,” said Chris, “neighbors actually were happy to see us—some. Some people ah, you know, yelled out their window ‘good morning.' Some kids were happy to see us. A couple people actually stopped us and said it was good what we were doing—they could leave their house now.”
That must have been a good feeling.
“It was, but there was just as many people involved in the game that just hate cops in general.”
Eric's memories of the program's early days are not as rosy.
“A lot of people are upset when you lock up drug dealers,” Eric explained, “cause someone in their family is probably selling drugs, doing something or other. One time we locked a guy up for selling eighty bags of crack. A girl came up to me and said to me, ‘I can't believe you're lockin' him up. You know you're takin' food outta his family's mouth?' I looked at her and said, ‘Are you kiddin' me? You just had five shootings the other night, around the corner, and you're gonna say I'm lockin' this guy up for the wrong reason?' I just laughed at her and said ‘you're a piece a shit, keep walkin', you know. What am I supposed to say to that? So in other words, I feel like I'm hindering them from making money, because I'm doing my job.”
What were your goals in the beginning?
“It was always suppression through your presence,” said Chris. “You weren't out there to make numerous arrests, because if you go and make an arrest, you're off the street for a couple hours. Now nobody's watching that corner, or that area. And you're not supposed to ah, violate peoples' rights, and all that shit.”
One of the most controversial aspects of Operation Safe Streets is its cost. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in January 2003 that the cost for 2002 alone was expected to reach $35 million, much of it in overtime pay. Mayor Street has said the program will need $100 million over five years, the Inquirer reported last May. I asked the soon-to-be-wedded Eric if he and other officers made a lot of money in overtime.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “No joke. Your base salary for cops, if you're topped off, is like $50,000, all right. There's cops making $95, $100,000 last year, like, who worked every day. You see a big difference in your checks, and you make a killing, dude. But now they came up with a thing where you can't work both your days off. Last year, my base salary was like $42,000. I made $63,000 last year. This year I'm on pace to make like $70,000. I don't understand how the city's doing it. Honestly. I hope Street knows what he's doing. When you work narcotics, in the narcotics unit, they make a lot of money cause they go to court constantly. So you got those guys makin' 1,000 hours overtime, with their court time, and then Safe Streets overtime. Even supervisors who've been on the job for like twenty years say ‘we've never seen the city shell out this much money for this type of operation.' I look at it like this: we don't make as much as the guys in the suburbs. So if this is the compensation we're getting, then fine, so be it, because we're doin' so much more shit than anyone else, I think. I see cops in other areas and what they deal with, and it's a joke.”
Have either of you ever seen or heard of any Safe Streets cops engaging in illegal activities, like shaking down dealers or anything?
“Na, never,” said Chris. “And I'll tell you the reason for that: if you were gonna do it, and somebody would know about it, a lot of people would know about it. Say you go into a house, and there's like—in the movies there's three pounds of coke, a couple guns, $30,000 in cash—if one person's gonna be shady, everybody in the group has to be in, and the odds of getting five or ten people—cause you don't just hit a house with two people like in the movies—it's a whole group. You wouldn't be able to get the whole group, because that would be, you know, ten people who are gonna lose their jobs if one out of the ten snitches or gets picked for somethin' else. So no, I've never really seen anything.”
“That's why people hate cops,” said Eric. “We chase guys, and we'll be like ‘what are you running from?' And they'll be like, ‘I'm scared of cops.' You can't use that excuse all the time, but some people are genuinely scared of cops.”
“I have arrested guys I'm sure are drug dealers,” added Chris. “The most money I've ever found on anybody was $380, and, just morally I wouldn't do it, but also, even if I had that mindset, I wouldn't take his money and just let ‘em roll, just cause, if he rats, or somebody finds out, it's not worth losing your job over $380. It's not worth it.”
So, overall, do you think the program is a success?
“There's less open-air dealing,” said Chris. “I think there's less of like, gangs on certain corners, there's less turf wars, I think.”
“It's definitely a success,” said Eric. “Because it's saving us from things like stupid calls. Like in the summertime, everyone has a white T-shirt and blue jeans. You get a call about a black male, white T-shirt and blue jeans. Oh, OK. You pull up in a car: there's fifty guys on the corner with a white T-shirt and blue jeans. You can't just randomly go up and stop people on a radio call alone. It's not done that way. Now, with Safe Streets, it's like, all right, there's guys right around the corner, workin' that beat, I mean they can pull right up on ‘em, you know, as soon as they get the call. These calls aren't pending forever. You don't have to fly over to some disturbance and then have to leave there for something else. You're not like twenty jobs in the hole, or thirty jobs in the hole. If it wasn't for Safe Streets, I don't think they [Safe Streets-area precincts] could physically get through a day.”
Do the communities look better?
“Oh yeah,” said Eric. “You drive down a street, and some of ‘em are clear. You know what I mean? We used to drive down a street and there'd be like, you know, I'm telling you, thirty guys on the corner, dude. Thirty guys. And they'd all be carrying something. It's not like that anymore.”
But drugs are still being dealt Safe Streets neighborhoods, just behind closed doors?
“Ah, I'm sure they are,” said Chris. “You don't see as many people from other neighborhoods, but it never looks like there's a shortage of crack-heads. They're getting it from somewhere.”
Bernard Vaughan received his master's degree in journalism from Temple University. He is a frequent contributor to THE PHILADELPHIA INDEPENDENT. He can be reached via email at vaughanbernard@hotmail.com.
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