See
Two Protests By African American Leaders; One About The Drug Czar’s Lies.
The Other About Police Brutality – The Only Connection That You Will See Is On This Page.

BUSTING ROBLES PARK
April 6-14, 1999
From The Weekly Planet
letters@weeklyplanet.com
http://www.weeklyplanet.com
By Susan Eastman
susaneastman@weeklyplanet.com

It was played for maximum dramatic Impact. After 10 Months investigating drug deals inside Robles Park Village public housing project, police swept in and made mass arrests. On April 15, 23 young African American men were rounded up, handcuffed and charged with drug possession and sales. Police had a total of 321arrest warrants. By Thursday, April 29, they still had nine outstanding warrants.

After watching the arrests replayed on television and touted as a major dent in Tampa’s drug trade and reading about it in the daily newspapers, Robles Park resident Demonterio Wilson, 33, said the whole thing is mostly blowing smoke. Wilson sat on a kitchen chair perched on the front stoop of a Robles Park apartment on a hot day last week with four friends passing the time before work. The men traded quips and opinions on the meaning and motivation that drive such drug sweeps.

Most of those arrested in Robles Park were charged with selling minuscule amounts of marijuana, between two and four grams - enough for a couple of joints. Of the 23 arrested for drug charges, 13 had charges related solely to marijuana possession and sales, and 40 had charges that included either cocaine or counterfeit substance in addition to marijuana charges. Police made 56 indvidual drug buys, netting 150.8 grams rock cocaine and 386 grams of pot, which is about three quarters of a pound of pot.

"It’s false advertisement," Wilson said. "They show it on the news like it’s a big drug bust, but it’s not. That’s all it is, it’s just an illusion to the people in this state, to have people think they a doing something about drugs."

According to Tampa Police Department Lt. Louis Potenziano, the bust was financed with $50,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Undercover officers and informants bought drugs repeatedly from dealers during the sting to show most of those arrested had a business selling drugs on Robles Park streets. The police also sold drugs to users to make possession arrests. Armed with that history, they waited until they could bust everyone in one big shakedown.

"If you can show a continuing pattern of behavior, if we go in there over a 10 month period and make buy after buy, it really shows what these guys are," said Potenziano, who is commander of the city’s Quad Squad, a special unit that targets street level dealers. "These guys are not a one-time deal." Wilson said he wouldn’t mind police taking out street level dealers in Robles Park if he saw the same undercover scrutiny and police aggressiveness tackling pot smoked in apartments in Hyde Park or heroin snorted by young hipsters in Carollwood.

"If you are going to be undercover, do your job. If you want to clean up the drug dealers, make it citywide," he said. "Whenever they want to do something to stop violence or drugs, it’s always in the urban community. What about stings everywhere else?"

The arrests in Robles Park are just one more example of a public policy gone awry, critics say, a policy that targets poor communities by throwing more young African. American men in jail. Most of those arrested were 17 or 18 years old. When they get out of jail, they, won’t be able to vote and will have a harder time getting into schools or jobs where they can use their talents in legitimate enterprise. If such sweeps were happening to young people in the white community, activist Connie Burton said, the emphasis would be on rehabilitation not imprisonment. The mass busts are acceptable, she said, because young black men are being locked up and labeled incorrigible.

"I used to support the concept (of fighting drugs) because I thought we would start at the top and work our way down," said Burton, who lives in Robles Park. Her son, Narada, 19, was arrested in the drug sweep. "Now I see that this war on drugs is a war on the black community. There is no one willing to stop drugs at the top or stop drugs coming into our community. We can’t see it solved by hungry people going to jail."

All of the young men got felony charges upgraded because Robles Park is located across the street from the Sacred Heart Academy on Florida Avenue. It is a misdemeanor to possess less than 20 grams of marijuana, but if the pot is sold, it is an automatic felony. Because Robles Park is located within 1,000 feet of a school, sales carry mandatory prison sentences of three years.

While he didn’t deny that there was drug dealing going on inside Robles Park, Wilson said that most of the trade was just small time dealers making small amounts of money on a ready and willing economic opportunity.

"It’s targeting the underclass," he said of the, bust. "Ninety percent of those people don’t have a job. You got to do what you got to do."

Robles Park was quiet on an early weekday afternoon last week. A few people sat on stoops talking. A grandmother escorted her grandson along a sidewalk while he sucked on a grape flavored shaved ice. Police said that quiet showed the bust had been successful short term. But long term, they know arresting street level dealers isn’t going to solve the drug problem or help the young men selling drugs on Tampa’s street corners into well paid jobs in mainstream society.

"There has got to be a solution beyond just arresting them because we are still arresting them over and over again," said Potenziano "These kids have got to be able to find jobs."

Potenziano believes that there are jobs out there for the youths and education opportunities. The question, he said, is how you force someone to take advantage of the opportunities for legitimate and legal enterprise. "There is no magic pill," he said. "We just don’t have the answers."

Still, he said, removing street level dealers, even temporarily, eliminates the biggest impact that the drug trade has on neighborhoods - other crime, plummeting home values and fear.

"People that live in these neighborhoods are saying we want you to do this. They want to be able to invite friends over without them having to weed through guys selling drugs in front of their house. They want the quality of life to be improved. These guys are making it miserable for their own mothers, brothers, aunts, uncles, fathers and neighbors. They may be the smallest supplier in the chain, but they are the ones that destroy the quality of life for the neighborhood."

"The tragedy is that prison life is a corrupting life," said University of South Florida criminology professor Richard Dernbo. There are far more effective and cost efficient and human ways to deal with people who are offenders than locking them up in these warehouses. We are running the risk in this country that we are creating a sub-nation of enemies alienated from the, rest of society. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world."

Dembo said society should try to understand the mindset of young people who turn to drug sales as an economic opportunity without thinking through the lifelong consequences of those choices. "When you are young and impulsive, you don’t see those things as cashing in on your options at an early age," Dembo said. "There are things that need to be done to give them a stake in conventional society. Arrest and incarceration do not solve these problems."

"The rules are very clear on that," said Jerome Ryans, executive director of the Tampa Housing Authority. If anyone on the lease is charged with a drug offense, the family has seven days,to either vacate the premises or appeal. During the appeal process, the family may stay.

Burton, an outspoken social critic and mother of two, feels the busts served a convenient excuse by the city of Tampa and the Tampa Housing Authority to deliver a message about what her activism will cost her and her family.

"We are not singling her out," said Ryans, adding that five other families also received eviction notices on the day Burton received hers.

Burton said she will fight the eviction. And instead of silencing her, the action has spurred Burton to vow to become more active, to more directly challenge police policies in Tampa’s black community. Instead of locking up drug dealers, Burton wants to see the black community come together to fight policing policies currently in force in Tampa’s black community. She wants to see the black community define its needs and force the city to join in a partnership to help bring economic opportunity back to the black community. She is the Tampa coordinator of the National Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement, a political organization grounded in philosophy of black self-determination.

"I think this latest attempt by the establishment and whoever that might include was the straw that broke the camel’s back with me," Burton said. "I believe there are many more mothers in the community that feel like I feel and are going through the situations that I am going through. There are more people being oppressed. It is my mission now to connect with those so that we can build an organization. I see things in my community that I know is not right. They see things in their community they know isn’t right. We need to organize.