CRIM FROM SCRAP METAL TO DOPE

Good news: last sum Gmer, the Dallas police won a small skirmish in the war on drugs in the Jeffries/Grand area of South Dallas by sweeping it with officers, arresting drug dealers, and running off drug users. Bad news: the drug users went somewhere else. “They moved over here,” says Thomas H. Smith, president of the Cedars Development Association. The Cedars, a mixture of old homes and light industry, is a hundred-year-old neighborhood across I-75 from the Fair Park area.

Since the drug busts. Smith says, the formerly docile street people of the Cedars have changed dramatically, becoming more violent. Crime has escalated, especially the theft of metal: air conditioners (for copper coils), aluminum siding, copper plumbing pipes, and even, ironically, iron burglar bars. The 450 landowners in the Cedars have lost more than $500,000 worth of metal since last summer. Smith blames not |just the drug users, but the scrap metal dealers in the area.

City Council member Craig Holcomb says the city is working on an ordinance to regulate scrap metal dealers, possibly much like pawn shops are regulated now-requiring the businesses to videotape transactions and to store the merchandise for two weeks, But Marion Claxton, owner of Claxton Copper & Brass on Lamar, says, “I’d have to have a three- or four-block-long warehouse if I had to store everything I bought.” As for videotaping, Claxton says that scrap metal is virtually impossible to identify, so videos would be useless as evidence in court. “They’re trying to put pawn shop rules on us,” Claxton says. “But the junk business is different.”