Across the street from the Carrs grocery store at 13th and Gambell, Allen points out a pair of black males. One of them, wearing a tan jacket, has been contacted by Allen already this afternoon.
“I already warned him today, you guys are my targets,” Allen says. He’ll spend his shift intermittently following the two, parking his squad car right next to them or across the street from them, or rolling at just a few miles an hour behind one or the other while they walk the streets. “This just ruins their dope business—absolutely ruins it,” Allen says.
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One of the two Allen is following carries a fabric bag zipped shut, apparently with his stash in it. But without probable cause, Allen can’t just search his bag.
“I’m just SOL,” he says. “If somebody were to call in and say that guy in the tan jacket just took something out of the zipper bag and gave it to another guy, then I could make contact, but even doing that you’re on thin ice.”
The Community Action Policing team was established a couple of years ago after the Fairview Community Council approached the chief of police about the neighborhood’s problems with chronic inebriates (many of them homeless), prostitution, and street level dope dealers.
“What we first did was survey the situation,” Allen says. “We looked for a couple of weeks, to see what the problem was, where we saw it, what was going on. It’s just a survey—take notes, see what’s going on. Then we went in and started putting the kibosh on some of the problems we were seeing—the drugs, the prostitution, the alcohol. Then after we’ve done that for a while, we went back to talk to the neighbors again and see if they saw any differences.”
The Carrs grocery store told the cops business had actually picked up, Allen says. More women were coming in because they weren’t afraid to walk to the store. “I think we’ve made a big difference in that respect,” Allen says.
The biggest problem in Fairview now is the chronic drunks; a lot of the hardcore dopers have moved out. Critics say they’ve just moved somewhere else, which Allen admits may be true. “But they’ll kind of disperse; they won’t all just go to one area. Then they’ve got to set up their new headquarters and their new clientele, so it uproots them for a while.”
The CAP team now has six officers, and they feel they have Fairview down to a manageable level so the team has been adding similar operations in the Spenard area. Right now, the team in Spenard is doing the initial information collecting and selective enforcement to establish a CAP program there. It’s a different neighborhood than Fairview, though, where the drug and alcohol problems are concentrated in a four or five block area.
As the whole city knows, a still unknown assailant shot and critically injured Officer Jason Allen in Fairview on January 9 this year.
Tonight Sergeant Allen (no relation) doesn’t come across as any more cautious than he was before the shooting, but he does warn this reporter—who’s wearing a bulletproof vest—to get out of the car when he stops, so if shooting starts, the reporter can run.
The context of the assault on Officer Allen illustrates the neighborhood’s problem. “After the shooting we were going to places and talking to people, saying, ‘did you hear the shots?’ ‘Yeah, we heard the shots.’ ‘Why didn’t you call in?’ ‘Listen, we live in Fairview, it goes on all the time; we don’t call it in.’ That’s the absolute head-in-the-sand attitude to take. If people would call it in, we could get a lot more done. I’ve got people saying, ‘this is a drug place, we’re calling in all the time.’ I check the records, and it’s just been three calls. If people—different people—had called in ten or 15 times, we can use the excessive calls ordinance: We give you a 30-day notice that you need to fix the problem. One call after that and you get a bill for $500.”
As for the drug dealers on the street, the information Allen has available to him just isn’t sufficient to take action in a lot of cases, despite Allen’s informants in the neighborhood. “Them telling us and me proving it are two different things,” he says. “That’s where the problem is.”
There was a robbery at gunpoint earlier in the afternoon off of Ninth Avenue, by an associate of the guy in the tan jacket. Now he’s standing out in front of Spirits of Alaska on 12th and Gambell with three others. Allen thinks one of them might be the perp. “If it’s one of those guys, it’s the one in the black leather jacket, but I can’t see it. He could have it under his jacket, or under his shirt, and I wouldn’t know, but I’d sure like to see a gun or an indication of one. We’ll certainly talk to him if it is. Once we find out who that guy is, we’re gonna make contact with him and give him an opportunity to excel.”
That opportunity doesn’t come though, and the group separates. A bit later, sitting at a red light on 13th Avenue westbound at Gambell, Allen spots a guy walking with his friend and drinking a forty across the street, near Carrs. He curses at the red light, but once it’s green the car shoots through and hangs a right on Fairbanks Street, where the two are meandering. Allen jumps out of the car, appropriates the forty and pours it on the ground. He checks the IDs of the two guys, pats them down looking for more bottles, and tells them to throw the empty bottle in the dumpster. When he’s not creeping behind suspected dope dealers, street drinkers and drunks take up most of his time.
Allen has rules, and he’s been in Fairview long enough that most of the street people know them. If you get caught drinking, you pour it out on the ground. “We’ve found if we just have them dump out their booze, we’re probably going to get as much success as if we write them a ticket,” Allen says. “Writing a homeless person a $75 ticket isn’t going to do much good. First of all, they don’t have any money. If they panhandle, it just goes back to replace that bottle of booze you just dumped out. We had a lot of problems with panhandling when we first got here, but that’s really gone down a lot. We don’t see panhandlers, except occasionally. If we see someone not from around here panhandling, we tell them, you just don’t panhandle in Fairview.”
The guy in the tan jacket and his friends are now on the northwest corner of 13th and Gambell, across from Carrs, so Allen’s parked just a few feet away. While he’s sitting there, they go around the corner, but Allen spots an obviously drunk young man crossing against the light. Allen gets out of the car and talks to the kid, who looks around 20 years old. He’s lit, so Allen calls Community Service Patrol to come pick him up in the van. But CSP has a “man down” call at the Sears Mall, which takes priority, so he has the young man lean against his patrol car while he waits. In the meantime, a Native woman with a cane, who Allen warned earlier to go home, stumbles out of Carrs. Allen gets her over by the car as well, to wait for CSP, despite her pleas to “mosey on home.” After 20 minutes or so of standing outside, the manager and security guard from Carrs escort out another older Native woman and bring her over to Allen. She’s shoplifted about $24 of items from the store, but they don’t want to press charges. After a half-hour or so, the CSP van arrives and breathalyzes the three. All register around .250 percent blood alcohol content (the legal limit for driving is .08 percent).
As afternoon turns into night, Allen’s shift continues this routine. Follow the suspected dope dealers, who are obviously pissed off by it; punch suspicious vehicles’ license plates into his computer; look for people drinking in public and have them pour out the booze; round up drunks and either call CSP or take them to the sleep-off center himself. A couple times he meets up with the other CAP officers and do “knock and talks” at apartments where suspicious activity’s been reported. This particular shift, Allen doesn’t arrest anyone, and he only handcuffs one person, a guy so wasted he can barely stand.
No arrests, but between Allen and the two other CAP officers, every street denizen in the area knows they’ve been watching, and a good chunk of them have been subjects of a 1076, or field interview. This sort of intimacy with the neighborhood is what Community Action Policing is all about.
“If we had a CAP for each sector of town, it’s be nice to see what the results would be,” Allen says. “We think it’s made an impact because we’re seeing less drugs, less prostitution by far, and a fairly substantial amount of drinking going down. Have we cut down the violence? I doubt it; it’s just been driven inside. But at least it’s not as visible to the poor folks that live up here in Fairview and have to put up with it all the time.”
Meanwhile, Allen is counting the days until he retires, after 15 years with the force. His official retirement date is May 1. “It’s been a long 15 years,” he says. “You get tired of working with these guys after a while, when you don’t see the system working the way it should. When you see [the guy in the tan jacket] with that kind of criminal history, and he’s walking around doing it again still. It’s just ridiculous.”
bjk@anchoragepress.com
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