Capital-Gazette
February 19, 2007

Our Say:
Drive-in drug trade brings tragedy to public housing

By THE CAPITAL EDITORIAL BOARD

Terrance Powell's fatal shooting just outside a public housing project last week wasn't just his own tragedy. It was a continuation of a family tragedy.

As of this writing, there's no official determination of why he was killed on Feb. 11. But clearly it was not a random shooting. The 23-year-old victim - banned from public housing - had survived another shooting just a year ago. His younger brother was killed in nearly the same location five years earlier.

We reported on another such double tragedy recently. Terrence Tolbert is serving a life sentence for the 2002 carjacking murder of Annapolitan Straughan Lee Griffin. Meanwhile his brother, a 22-year-old drug user, has been convicted of attempting to steal a car.

You can argue endlessly about who's to blame for such patterns. But that doesn't get us a solution to these murders and other crimes.

Are public housing communities, like the one where the Powell brothers died, magnets for drug dealers who resolve their disputes with bullets?

Housing Authority officials - like board of commissioners chairman Trudy McFall, in a guest column yesterday - cite city police statistics to argue that the extent of violence in public housing communities is exaggerated.

Of the city's murders in 2006, two occurred in public housing and a third just outside public housing property. About 70 percent of violent crime occurs elsewhere in the city. And while public housing residents represent about 6 percent of the city's population, they account for just 5 percent of those arrested.

Yet drug dealing in public housing often ends in shootings and death - a pattern you don't see as clearly anywhere else in the city.

The Housing Authority has taken significant steps to address the crime problem. It has added police patrols and stepped up evictions of residents with criminal convictions. It is issuing identification cards to residents and banning visitors with criminal histories. But drug activity persists - and as long as it does, violence will continue.

Much of the crime in public housing is committed by people who don't live there - often people who drive in to buy and sell drugs. If there's no other way for the Housing Authority and police to stop it, perhaps the authority should do for its properties what wealthy communities do for themselves: install gates and guards to keep out the uninvited.

Furthermore, police need to get out of their cars and walk the streets more often. Fines for drug activity in public housing should be extra-high - just as they are for drug activity near schools. Judges need to get tougher, and residents, if they want safer streets, need to cooperate with police.

If the residents are not the problem, then the police and Housing Authority officials must do more to scare away the drug peddlers. Only when residents are more at ease on these streets than criminals, will these neighborhoods - and the city in general - be safe.