Prostitutes, pushers, johns, drug buyers, thugs come in from elsewhere
0:37 AM 4/21/04
Dean Mosiman and Andy Hall Wisconsin State Journal

Nobody has a better view of Dane County's worst neighborhood than Jillana Dyson. <

Her bedroom window, facing the intersection of Allied Drive and Jenewein Road, opens to the drug dealing, prostitution and rowdy crowds that push the neighborhood's rate of police actions to the highest in the county. <

"There was a lady out there last night, prostituting," said Dyson, 33, who shares the two-bedroom apartment with her three children and boyfriend. <

"I see where the trouble is." <

Nothing frustrates area residents - or the police - more than the outsiders who prey on the neighborhood. <

They jar Dyson and other tenants from their sleep with all-night parties and fights on the sidewalks and lawns. <

They sell crack and powder cocaine, marijuana and other drugs to residents - and to customers who sometimes drive from out of town to shop Allied Drive's open-air drug market. <

The police were called to handle large group disturbances on weekends in late March and early April. Officers followed up with a three-day crackdown - increased patrols using overtime paid for with federal money. <

The neighborhood is a magnet for criminals, according to a sample of Madison police records reviewed by the Wisconsin State Journal. <

Six of every 10 people arrested in Allied Drive last year lived outside the area. <

"If I was a drug dealer and I wanted a good business, I'd go on Allied," said Rita Adair, a social worker in the neighborhood's Joining Forces for Families anti-poverty office. She and many others trace the area's decline to largely successful efforts to drive drug dealers out of other troubled neighborhoods. <

Crime, Adair said, is merely an example of how Allied Drive is ravaged by the county's biggest problems - poverty, teen-age pregnancy, mental illness, addiction, inadequate jobs and unaffordable housing. <

"The problems, they're huge and multiple," Adair said after two incidents of gunfire frightened residents this spring. "We can't do Band-Aids anymore. We've got to do surgery." <

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The numbers <

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When confronting crime here, it'll be impossible to avoid race. <

Blacks account for a quarter of the Allied Drive area's population, and 50 percent at the heart of the neighborhood. <

But 80 percent of arrests in Allied Drive involve blacks, paralleling long-time local and national trends that blacks are involved in a disproportionate number of arrests in urban areas, a State Journal analysis shows. And young black males, ages 17 to 34, represent half of the 2,000 arrests by Madison police in Allied Drive since 1998. <

"That's the truth," Jeff McPike, a Madison neighborhood police officer who has made scores of those arrests, said after a 2-to-10 p.m. shift. <

"Me being African American, I want my people to be a contributor to the neighborhood and to society as a whole." <

On a drizzly evening last month, McPike's shift included defusing a racially charged dispute between African-American and Southeast Asian youths, lecturing several black boys after orange paintballs were smeared on a building and monitoring the sidewalk activities of half a dozen suspected drug dealers and prostitutes - all black. <

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Some are mugged <

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Most whites arrested here live elsewhere, driving as long as two hours in pursuit of drugs or prostitution, police said. Some become victims of muggers. <

Making Allied Drive safer will depend heavily on focused efforts to improve living conditions and behavior of young blacks, police and social-services officials said. <

Among the ideas proposed are mentoring, jobs and an insistence on personal responsibility. <

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Allied Drive isn't beyond saving. <

Compared to the bleak Chicago neighborhoods that many black residents of Allied Drive fled, extreme and random acts of violence here are rare. The last homicide was about a year ago. <

Still, four in 10 arrests involve violence or an altercation- typically battery or disorderly conduct - and a similar portion stem from violations of probation, parole or court orders. <

The drug trade - spurred by a large number of white customers - drives crime on Allied Drive, the police said. <

"Madison loves drugs," said former Allied patrol officer Curt Fields, now a neighborhood police officer in the nearby Hammersely Road area. "Maybe it goes back to our hippie roots." <

Signs of drug-selling activity are easy to see. Clumps of young black men appear every day, regardless of the weather, and someone is out on the street around the clock. They stand on sidewalks, where they can't be arrested because they're in public spaces. Some pretend to wait for the bus. <

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Street names <

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Police know most of these people and their criminal records. They yell out their street names, trying to make them feel uncomfortable, hoping they'll disappear. <

Police, though, have been unable to rid the area of drug dealers, even those working across the street from their neighborhood office. The police and many residents are frustrated that the city revoked an anti-loitering law used as a tool to disrupt street dealing. <

Former Mayor Sue Bauman vetoed a City Council bid to make the law permanent in 2002, saying it was ineffective and discriminated against blacks. The local chapter of the NAACP and Urban League of Greater Madison agreed. <

The law, which carried a $653 fine for adults and $68.75 for juveniles, was used 77 times citywide in 2001. Eighty percent of citations were against blacks, and 81 percent of those cited had a history of drugs, violence or both. Just seven people lived in neighborhoods where citations were issued. <

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Drug dealers affiliated with half a dozen Chicago-based gangs are active in Allied Drive, residents and police say. But because drug prices are double the rates in Chicago, gangs are flush with cash and aren't staking out turf. Gang members who would fight if they walked the same street in Chicago, co-exist in Allied Drive - so far. <

Informally they have areas where they sell in the neighborhood, said Madison Police Sgt. Carl Gloede, a specialist in drug and gang problems. "They intermingle. They hang out. They go to parks and shoot hoops." <

Jarrod Hinton and Aaron Crouch, cousins who moved to the area from Chicago, were surprised to see members of three gangs hanging together. Gang members here, they said, are weary of gunfire and seeing wounded friends in hospitals in Chicago. <

"The majority of the people want to live in peace," Hinton said. "There's very few people who really get shot...I've lived in Madison three years and I haven't had to run from one bullet." <

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Dealers' tactics <

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Gloede and Lt. Tony Peterson say violence could flare at any moment. Firearms were found in three-fourths of the narcotics search warrants executed in Allied Drive last year. <

It's become harder to arrest dealers because they're using countermeasures such as hiring children as lookouts, monitoring police scanners, using temporary cell phone numbers, negotiating in apartments and basements, and completing big deals in parking lots of businesses across the city. <

Dealers also persuade legitimate tenants to let them operate from their apartments. "Unfortunately, they focus on women who are low-functioning, very needy, with substance abuse issues," said Nancy DiBenedetto, who oversees state probation and parole agents in Allied Drive. <

Easier to find are signs of drug deals, which McPike showed during a recent shift. In basements and at sidewalks of three buildings, including Dyson's, he found baggies with cornerstorn out, where drugs had been sealed. One building's basement sinks were clogged by tobacco ripped from cigars and replaced with marijuana to make "blunts." <

A white, middle-aged man at a bus stop caught the attention of McPike, who told the man he wanted to know "why you're in my neighborhood." Cash fell from the man's wallet as he nervously produced a driver's license, telling McPike he resented being confronted. <

McPike said he didn't recognize the man, and that white men standing alone at bus stops frequently carry large amounts of cash to buy drugs and are sometimes mugged. <

The man hopped a bus as a police dispatcher told McPike he had an outstanding warrant for failing to appear in court. "I know where he lives. I'll pop him someday," McPike said. <

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'Little Beirut' <

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Steve Braunginn, executive director of the Urban League of Greater Madison, said some find the intensive police pressure in Allied comforting while others view it as "too much of an occupation, Little Beirut." The high arrest rate of blacks, he said, demonstrates a need to expand job training and fatherhood initiatives. <

Among the troubling patterns unearthed in a seven-month examination of Allied Drive by the State Journal: <

The rate of police actions, or calls for service, by Madison and Fitchburg officers in the Allied Drive area last year was 376 per 100 households - 13 percent higher than the West Badger Road-Penn Park area and 85 percent higher than the Broadway-Lake Point area, neighborhoods viewed as worse places to live in the 1990s. <

Despite a slight citywide decline in crime and calls for service, Madison police calls for service rose 5 percent in Allied Drive last year. <

About 180 people on probation and parole live in the area and four in 10 have a high need for education or stable employment, an analysis of state Department of Corrections data shows. "By lowering their needs, we can say they're less likely to commit crimes," DiBenedetto said. <

Offenders settle in Allied Drive because landlords often accept tenants with criminal backgrounds and tenuous jobs, and it's handy for them to keep appointments with probation and parole agents with offices in an apartment building. <

But Madison and Fitchburg police object. "I understand economics but that's too much in too small an area if we want to break this thing," Fitchburg Police Chief Tom Blatter said. <

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Culture exerts strong influences over crime patterns in Allied Drive, too. <

Asians and Hispanics are more likely than blacks and whites to not report some crimes, particularly thefts and domestic violence, because they have histories of dealing with them internally, police said. Officers are striving to break down barriers. Police assure Mexicans living here illegally that they won't be deported for reporting crimes. <

Ten percent of Allied Drive's residents are Asian, and Asians were arrested in 1 percent of cases. Hispanics, who may be of any race, represent 11 percent of the population and 1 percent of arrests <

Whites account for half of the Allied Drive area's population, many living in modest single-family homes on the eastern side of the neighborhood in Fitchburg. In the heart of Allied Drive, where low-income apartments are most densely packed, a third of residents are white. <

In the Allied Drive area, arrests of whites are 17 percent of the total. <

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'Butterfly Band-Aid' <

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Jerry Johnson, McPike's predecessor in 2001 and 2002, said misconduct is concentrated among young blacks because they lack strong role models at home or on the street, where the best-dressed people are drug dealers. <

What's needed, he said, is a massive communitywide campaign to find mentors for the Allied's children to break generational cycles of poverty, dropping out of school and teen-age pregnancy. <

"Us, as a police department, we're like a butterfly Band-Aid," said McPike, who spends much time trying to build leaders within the neighborhood. <

A 10-year police veteran, he's inherited a tough approach to taking on troublemakers from his father, retired East High School Principal Milt McPike. <

"I sweat 'em and I sweat 'em hard," Jeff McPike said. <

Black children are especially vulnerable here because they often grow up in single-parent households, where a job loss or illness can crush the family financially and push the parent into abuse or neglect. "It breaks my heart to see what these kids go through," McPike said. "It's not their fault." <

The toll on young blacks and others lacking support confronts Stephen Blue every day. <

Intense attention - such as rousting troubled youths out of bed at 8:30 a.m. to report to jobs - is needed in the community's approach, said Blue, delinquency services manager for the county Department of Human Services. <

"I haven't seen concentrated efforts by the city and county, year after year" that would send youths a message that "we're going to invest in you," Blue said. It costs about the same to give work experience and support 30 youths as it does to lock up three. <

"We've been very shortsighted in looking at our social initiatives for young black males in our community," said Blue, who is African-American. <

"This isn't just a Madison problem; this is a national problem. <

"We seem to be investing more in suppression and jails, more than programs that help young men." <

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