Suppose for a moment you live next door to a drug house. Cars queue up in your street. Drug abusers loiter in front of your house or apartment. Gunfire occasionally disturbs your sleep, and in the morning you might find derelicts sleeping it off in your front yard. Whether you’re a yuppie rehabber, downwardly mobile artist, aging home owner, white ethnic, Hispanic, Asian, or African American, you’re in danger the moment you step out your door and you know it.
Even if you get past these initial frustrations, you’re going to have a hard time closing down your neighborhood dope house. Let’s say you and a group of like-minded neighbors are able to get a meeting with your local police commander, and he promises to check out your complaint. In practice, this often means uniformed police will cruise down your street, stopping some of the likely offenders for a not-so-friendly chat. If they can’t scare the bad guys away, and you keep complaining, they might stage a bust. And that will usually slow up a well-organized drug dealer for a couple of days at most. In the event that one of the bad guys is sent to jail for a long time–keep in mind that this requires three busts involving certain well-known quantities of drugs–one of the drug dealer’s associates will usually take over the store. By then, your block will have deteriorated for quite a few years.
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Del Valle took a seemingly conventional approach: he formed a committee, Citizens United for Safety (CUFS), drawn from four block clubs, including the one on Superior Street. The committee decided to study the whole network of law enforcement: the local police station, the state’s attorney’s office, the central police department’s assets-forfeiture unit, the corporation counsel, and the city’s departments of housing and inspectional services (the latter two have roles in shuttering buildings that house unlawful activities or present a public nuisance). Del Valle interviewed representatives of each agency, emerging with a thorough knowledge of each agency’s relationship to the others. It was slow work.
After a few more meetings, the task-force plan was complete. CUFS would inform the police and their local alderman of the existence of a drug house. The alderman would write the owner (name provided by DIS) and ask for a meeting to discuss the problem. If the owner didn’t respond, the alderman would contact the police to see if the owner’s name appeared on its list of suspected narcotics dealers. If so, the police would call in the central police department’s assets-forfeiture unit, which seizes property suspected of being involved in illegal activity. If not, David King, supervisor of the state’s attorney’s narcotics unit, would call in the owner to pointedly explain Illinois laws on nuisance abatement and the unlawful use of buildings, including the unhappy implication for the owner of assets forfeiture, and the willingness of the grand jury, this being America and all, to hear the owner’s side of the story before considering an indictment. The hope was that the landlord would throw out the drug-dealing tenants–or, if the landlord was the dope dealer, cease operating out of the building–in order to preserve the property.
Meanwhile CUFS would like to expand its base of operations and is looking for other interested citizens, community groups, and block clubs.
