WAR IN THE STREETS

In the increasingly violent world of many Dallas neighborhoods, people who have been poshed around too long are starting to push back.

IT’S ALMOST 10 P. M., AN HOUR BEFORE curfew, and outside the Prince Hall Village apartments in far southeast Oak Cliff comes the unmistakable pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons. Security guard David Keeton interrupts his story of Finding a 12-year-old rape victim slashed and stuffed in a nearby trash can, crying to him in delirium, “Don’t let me die, Daddy. “

Keeton figures the shooting to be from the Calvary Arms Apartments, a real free-fire zone a few blocks away, just across Ledbetter. He begins another tale, this time about discovering the rotting body of a young woman-“a white girl, ” he specifies, perhaps for my benefit-bound and gagged, stuffed into a closet, a junk needle pushed deep up into her nose.

The gunplay continues. It’s like that every night-punk drug dealers and gang-bangers shooting the air or each other ’cause it’s such a rush-and Keeton should be used to it. But the sound still wires him up. To supplement the not-quite $2, 000 a month he earns as the only guard on the premises of the HUD-subsidized complex, Keeton, 36, gets a ground-floor, corner flat. Any of the people he’s arrested, run off, fought with, or been shot at by could simply spray his bedroom with Uzis or Tech Nines. No wonder he works 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Who could sleep? “If I get shot tonight nobody worries about me but my children, ” he says, looking off toward the sounds of violence, past the high fence separating the apartment grounds from harm like a screen against a sandstorm. He mouths his own epitaph: “He was a good officer when he was alive. “

Staying alive is the big problem these days in more parts of Dallas than we’d like to admit, but especially in the ul-traviolent enclaves of the poor, the dispossessed, the non-white, the undocumented. At Prince Hall Village, even going to the laundry room, or across the street to the store, or to school in the middle of the day can mean risking your life. It’s the same in Little Asia, in South Dallas, in Fair Park, in the public-housing canyons of Hampton-the most dangerous parts of town, though for from the only ones. Throughout the mean streets of Dallas, as in most other major cities, daily life now involves unprecedented terror, which we euphemize as crime: warlike in its intensity, cancerous in its spread, lethal in its manifestation, and also quite expensive.

But something else is going on, too. Something so profound it has all but escaped notice. Something so revolutionary its ultimate impact is yet to be seen. Whether in grass-roots coalitions, armed citizen patrols, tough new neighborhood associations, or even in copycat outreach programs set up by the city, those who have borne the brunt of urban violence have come to realize that they must also mobilize the counteroffensive. The buzzword for this is “empowerment. ” It barely hints at the radical political change that is becoming the major byproduct of the long, tedious, draining war against crime.



FAHIM MINKAH, A 51-YEAR-OLD FOUNDER AND FORMER member of the Dallas chapter of the Black Panther Party-one of the most violently repressed organizations in American history-walks out from his office in the community center at the Prince Hall and talks to Keeton. Minkah, now a Muslim and organizer for the Chicago-based National Black United Front (NBUF), thinks aloud about taking one of his infamous shotgun patrols over to the Calvary Arms Apartments, where the bursts are coming from, to try to run off some of the gangs.

Minkah responded to the absence of adequate police protection in South Oak Cliff in May 1989 by helping set up AMAN (African Men Against Narcotics) Drug Fighters, which got noticed not for its community organizing but for controversial armed anti-drug patrols formed by its members. A-AMAN (African-American Men Against Narcotics), the Muslim parent group from which Minkah split, denounced the patrols as politically counterproductive. They weren’t the only critics.

The police hated the idea. As early as 1968, the DPD had eased into the idea of “community-oriented policing” by setting up storefront stations where the duty officers not only made arrests but also provided counseling and other secondary law enforcement services. The storefronts were dropped in 1981, supposedly under budget pressures, but were reinstated beginning in 1984. Now there are 10, positioned in high-crime and minority areas. The most publicized, the East Dallas Storefront in Little Asia, generated the formation of the city’s Crime Prevention Program, perhaps the most radical publicly financed operation in the city’s history. Run not by the cops but by Health and Human Services, and pushed through not by law-and-order conservatives but by city council members Diane Rags-dale and Al Lipscomb, the program became the city’s entiée into the fast-growing self-defense movement.



KEETON WOULD LIKE TO GO ON A PATROL WITH MINKAH, AND many residents in the Prince Hall unit would like to see the armed vigilantes back in operation. Since Minkah set up NBUF headquarters more than a year earlier in space donated by the complex, most of the worst violence has gone elsewhere. Which is one of the ironies of piecemeal pacification. Cleaning up one neighborhood just pushes the lizards to another.

A few nights later, Minkah sent a patrol back out, although without “visible arms, ” as he termed it. In truth, the patrols have relied less on carrying firearms than on their media image, part of which was Minkah’s own creation. When the Fox network broadcast a piece on neighborhood crime in November 1989, it included a segment featuring Minkah, who for the occasion assembled a dozen patrollers in red T-shirts and shotguns.

Minkah says, however, that none of his patrol members has ever fired a shot, which is a good thing considering the speed with which the police, who consider freelance armed patrols to be major and unwelcome usurpers, would slam an avenging citizen in jail, no matter how just the cause. The law says you can bear arms but rarely use them without a badge. Besides that, Minkah now wants to downplay the armed struggle in favor of community organizing, for which his group receives a modest federal contract. But he doesn’t eschew the right to patrol if he wants to, “not wanting government approval or asking for it. “

Translating self-defense into self-arming is a difficult issue in a community under siege. Ragsdale is opposed to armed patrols, but acknowledges that ad hoc vigilante groups have long operated in her South Dallas district. Lipscomb, whose district is eastern Oak Cliff, has decided the best solution to endemic drug-related crime is to call in the National Guard. County Commissioner John Wiley Price has endorsed armed self-defense as a possible response to poor police protection. Price also has encouraged the formation of a local Black Panther Militia chapter affiliated not with the now-disbanded party of Huey Newton but with a like-named group started in Milwaukee by Alderman Michael McGee, who has called for guerilla warfare against his city in 1995 unless it puts more money into reparations for minority neighborhoods.



“THE BIBLE SAID TO BE A BOLD SOLDIER, ” IS THE WAY KAREN Taylor sees it. And she is. While gunfire peppers the night, she and a dozen tenants gather inside the community center for the regular meeting of the Prince Hall Turnaround, the apartment association she co-chairs. Night after night, Karen lies awake in her apartment listening to the drunks and gamblers and drug dealers, wondering if they’ll break in on her and her children.

Taylor recently married, but like other residents, most of them single mothers, she can’t get into a macho revenge posturing to fight crime, but she’s got to do something. The Turnaround association is a way, but not without risks. After she ran a teenager off the apartment grounds, her daughter was cornered by two dozen guys who threatened to gang rape her. She’s had harassing phone calls and other threats. And there’s just the ordinary terror, like the time she watched a man get cut up and dragged to the vacant lot next door. “It’s a bad thing to see somebody stabbed to death, and you can’t do nothing because you’re scared to death, ” she tells the meeting.

Everyone else knows it. They just don’t know what to do about it. Calling the police, they feel, is a joke. Waits of hours-in one case, five hours-for a squad car to come are not uncommon, according to the tenants. “If we was up in North Dallas we wouldn’t be waiting like this, ” says one woman. Everyone nods. Sometimes it’s worse when the police do come. “I called 911 for the police and I said, ’Don’t come to my door, ’” recalls a slender woman of about 40, recounting the night she’d called for help because of loud gambling and drinking in an apartment downstairs. “But they come straight to my door anyway. When the police left they (the gamblers] come messing with my lock. There’s no telling what they wanted to do. ” She shakes her head. “No way I’ll call the police again. “

Which throws it back to David Keeton. For more than an hour, he has been sitting on a small platform in the meeting room listening to accusations that he isn’t doing enough, that he is too friendly with some of the bad guys, that drug dealing is creeping back onto the apartment grounds. The chairwoman of the meeting, Charles Cash, has seen her husband and brother killed by drug dealers. She rebukes Keeton, then finally says it: Maybe they’ll just have to ask the complex to hire a new guard.

“I’m gonna do my job to stay alive and keep drug dealers off the property, ” retorts Keeton, struggling to hold his temper. “But I’m not gonna die for this job. If y’all don’t understand that you can go straight to hell. “

As though witnessing in church, he rises to tell them how he arrests three or four people a night, how hard it is to hold them until the police finally show up. A security guard has very limited detention authority and often must rely on his own physical power and a good bluff. Keeton tells of the time a crew of bad guys beat him up and stole his weapon; of another fight in which he lost his beeper; of how all that is deducted from his pay; of being shot at by a 9-year-old. He tells of chasing another guy over to the Chief Auto Parts parking lot, catching him, and getting ready to draw down to keep him from driving away. Then he realized that in the excitement he’d forgotten to load his revolver.

Keeton is talking about stress. They all are. Not the kind you can leak out to a shrink or dissipate on a handball court. The kind that turns good people against each other, that makes life unrecognizable. The kind that makes you forget to load your gun when every night there’s a damn good chance you’ll use it. The kind for which, says Minkah, there should be “no tolerance. “

Minkah stands to speak. He looks tired-that day he and Charles Cash and some of the complex leaders had been over to HUD offices in Fort Worth to discuss community organiz-ing. And he still has a few hours to put in getting his new weekly tabloid, the Dallas Liberator, ready for its first issue.

The community must back up its security guard, he says. No man can make a 100-unit complex in the middle of hell a safe place 24 hours a day. No government has done so. Everyone has been living with the fear, the drug wars, the domestic violence for years. But they don’t have to let it win. Each tenant can be a force of one. Talk to friends, relatives. Get them to stop buying drugs, to stop selling them. “We don’t have to accept this, ” he tells them. “I’m a revolutionist. We can make a different system. “

A different system, however, may be the last thing Dallas wants, and therein lies the explosive import of the self-defense movement. Every successful social upheaval begins with the building of grassroots defense organizations-in colonial America they were called militias; in Russia they were called Soviets; in Haiti, site of the only successful slave revolution in the Americas, they were built around African religious societies, primarily Islam and vodun.

It is no accident that Muslim organizers are among the most prominent in the new organizing campaigns-three, in fact, work for the city. “The first thing we do is to try to make the community safe. This is a fundamental Muslim principle, ” says Khaleef Hasan, an “outreach specialist, ” or organizer, for the Crime Prevention Program. A former Panther, like his erstwhile colleague Minkah, he converted to Islam. But not to armed patrolling; he stayed with A-AMAN when Minkah split off. “You can’t build businesses or help build a community when it’s full with drugs and alcohol and crime, ” says Hasan. “That’s why we’re involved in this. “

Securing an area may be the first step to community resurgence, but it isn’t the last. People who learn to take charge have a tendency not to want to stop. Ultimately, the goals of neighborhood crime prevention will shift from immediate security of the streets to the larger issues that got the streets in such a mess in the first place. A new wave of activism could mean a number of things: higher voter turnout, more pressure on banks to stop red-lining and on corpora-tions to put jobs in the inner city, less tolerance for unequal allocation of city services, etc. It can also lead to boycotts-an explosive economic tool that some see as a very real possibility for Dallas.



THE FRAIL, ELDERLY CAMBODIAN woman in the two-room apartment at Carroll and San Jacinto answers the door cautiously. It’s a tough neighborhood, and tougher still for rural Third World refugees who resettled, for reasons that seem unfathomable, in the square-mile maw of citified horror affectionately known as Little Asia. But she opens the door for Youk Chhang. He’s wearing a coat and tie, he speaks three languages, and he works for the city. If it weren’t for him, the woman might not have known how to call 911 that cold midnight when drug dealers, having been chased out of the two-story frame house next door, set the place on fire as a goodbye gesture.

The woman unlatches the chain, presses her hands together in a traditional sign of greeting, and admits Chhang. Two small children sleep on blankets on the floor in front of a TV, which speaks an English the woman will never understand but the children do. It’s just a check-in visit, to see if she’s okay, a fleeting part of the 12-hour days Chhang, a longtime community activist, has been logging since signing on as a Crime Prevention Program organizer a year earlier.

Chhang tells the woman goodbye, then drives to the rear of another large apartment where two men, one of them blind, sit in the afternooon sun, surrounded by makeshift greenhouses and plots of Oriental herbs and flora. Since most of the immigrants to Little Asia come from rural backgrounds, the growing of foodstuffs is an important cultural link, but the garden, once a litter-filled vacant lot, has a larger purpose. The back side, which formerly opened directly onto Holly Avenue, a particularly lizard-infested stretch of criminality, is now sealed off by a homemade barricade.

Tree branches, plywood, chunks of asphalt, and mounds of dirt have been pushed up against a sagging chain fence to block access from the street, keeping dealers and their minions from using the lot as a hangout or a shortcut. The side of the garden facing the building has a barricade, too: a barbed wire fence topped with razor-edged concertina. The complex itself is in turn surrounded by high fencing. “We made it so there’s only one entrance and one exit, ” says Chhang, surveying what, for all purposes, is a defensive compound-one of several fenced-off complexes in the area-in the heart of a civil war. Officially, this semifortified neighborhood is part of a “safe zone. ” Prior to the Crime Prevention Program’s revised nomenclature, police called it a “war zone. “



CREATED IN 1989 AND NOW IN ITS SEC-ond year, the Crime Prevention Program, the city’s plan to build community self-defense structures through the grass-roots organizing techniques developed over the years by activists such as Saul Alinsky, Ernesto Cortez, Jesse Jackson-not to mention Diane Ragsdale and Al Lipscomb-is remarkable not least because of its close alliance with the police. There’s a fundamental clash of interests. The police are inherently conservative, with a mandate to protect the status quo. Community activists exist to make changes. Frequently, the former have taken the latter into custody. The Crime Prevention Program has the idea they can work together, with the people each seek to serve as the beneficiaries.

That understood, it becomes easier to see why Ragsdale’s choice for director of a $338, 000 program essentially dedicated to the political empowerment of African-American, Hispanic, and Asian Dallas was a white ex-cop.

Cpl. Ron Cowart, a 43-year-old Vietnam veteran and ex-SWAT team member, had gained considerable attention in the mid-Eighties through his dramatic community-oriented outreach programs in Little Asia. On the job, or on his own time, he taught Asian refugees how to protect their apartments, how to call the police, and how to confront their landlords. He found ways to distribute rice-nine tons in one year-as well as blankets, clothing, even fans.

In 1985 he “mooched” a Meadows Foundation grant to help set up a police storefront station in Little Asia. He recruited and trained three special Asian public service officers (Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese) to go into the community and talk directly to the people. He set up a hot-line referral system with instructions in five different languages and started two model Explorer posts for Asian and Hispanic teenagers interested in law enforcement careers.

The idea was to earn trust. Cultural and language barriers had all but isolated immigrants, especially the Khmer, who were terrified of people in uniforms. The food giveaways, the Saturdays spent fixing up old people’s apartments, the long family and marital counseling sessions led to a sense in the Asian community that it was okay to go to police to turn in drug dealers, burglars, gang members, murderers.

Not everyone in the police department liked the outreach strategy. Many officers contemptuously referred to it as “social work, ” and changes in the department brought in a division chief who, on visiting the storefront, described it as “a cluster f.” Reductions in services followed. When Cowart was given the chance to transfer his theories into civilian practice, he had little choice. He hung up his badge after 20 years and put on a gray suit.

From a single windowless room in the City Hall basement, Cowart drew together a 10-person field force composed of veteran organizers, each of whom lived in the five high-crime areas, from Little Asia to West Dallas, which accounted for 51 percent of all Part I crimes (theft of property) in the city. Two field workers were assigned to each area and told to find and train solid and dependable leaders, show people how to organize, how to lobby, and how to coordinate with the police. “We’re the left hand, and the police the right hand in fighting crime” became his standard refrain before citizens’ groups, the media, and the police themselves.

At the end of the first fiscal year (1989-90) Cowart reported, among other things, a decrease of 13 percent in Part I crimes in his areas, the establishment of 25 neighborhood organizations, and the designation of eight “safe zones” within each of the major areas. In the days of Chief Billy Prince, who first assigned Cowart as a special coordinator in the Asian community, Cowart’s work might have drawn admiration from his former DPD peers. Today a lot of cops think of Cowart as a showboat.

The Crime Prevention Program, to many officers, is “Cowart’s deal, ” and worse, the brainchild of arch-DPD foe Ragsdale. Cowart, meanwhile, has been unstinting in his criticism of the police for what he considers their backing away from community programs. “Certain police administrators are concerned now that the police department is providing too much social services, ” Cowart wrote last December in a letter published in The Dallas Morning News. “The attitude of the Dallas Police Department is that ’crime is a community problem, not a police problem. ’ Tell that to residents living in certain areas of town where the life expectancy is dramatically altered simply by walking out of one’s home. “

In early January the police responded. Lt. Stan Kay, head of DPD storefront operations, called a meeting in the Vietnamese Community Center in Little Asia to discuss the allegations. Several longtime volunteer workers in the Asian community asked the police to return to their more active stance of the mid-Eighties. Surprisingly, Lt. Kay, who had been in charge of storefronts less than a year, acknowledged that mistakes had been made. “We’re here to find out what you want. ” he said, seeming shaken by the criticisms. He pledged to make the changes the community wanted. A neighborhood once invisible and dangerous had become so sufficiently organized that the city was quarreling with itself over how best to protect it.



THE FAWN RIDGE EAST APARTMENTS IN South Oak Cliff, just a few blocks off the “Y” intersection of I-35 and Highway 67 at Kiest, are in an area of town so bad it’s been honored with the DPD’s eighth “Operation Clean, ” a concentrated-and soon to be discontinued-anti-crime offensive in which the police, augmented by enforcement teams from various city agencies, descend in force for several weeks of what amounts to hamlet pacification. Following the initial siege, the police leave beat patrol officers known as C-POPs (Community Police Officer Program) to keep the lizards from slipping back in. “We want to get this neighborhood in as good a shape as we can, ” Assistant Police Chief John Holt, head of Operation Clean, would tell a neighborhood group in the target area. “After that, what happens? You get involved. We cannot be an occupying army, “

The metaphor is not inapt. Already, a drug dealer has put a bounty on the heads of the two young volunteer C-POPs patrolmen, and they’ve been ordered to hang back until he’s busted. But it’s important to start recruiting community leaders as soon as possible. Cowart calls a meeting at a local McDonald’s. While members of the Raiders, a local gang, flaunt their colors at the counter, Cowart, his staff, and the two C-POPs meet at a back table, setting a plan to have “outreach specialists” Khaleef Hasan, Amon Rashidi, and Alfonso Herrera move into Fawn Ridge the following day.

It’s a dangerous place. In the average statistical reporting area, there might be 17 crimes a week-in Clean-8, the total is 90; over half of them violent. The three civilians divvy up the apartment buildings and move out, armed with nothing more than city ID badges on the lapels of their suit coats. You wouldn’t really know a major paramilitary operation is under way all around them except for the fact that more police patrol cars than usual are moving through the complex and surrounding streets. But something is up. Tough guys in cutoff sweatshirts sit on stairwell steps watching as the three city workers go door to door.

“I’m from the city of Dallas, ” Hasan says, handing a leaflet announcing a community anti-crime meeting to the woman who answers. He tells her he’ll be back later to help explain how the city can help her in keeping the apartment safe. “Thanks, ” she says, and closes the door, clicking the latch.

At other doors no one answers. Things could be worse. All of the field workers have had to face down threats-Herrera and Rashidi, who normally work the West Dallas projects, are confronted with armed gang-bangers all the time. They’re trained to deal with it, and if they were afraid of street-style challenges, they wouldn’t be inner-city organizers.

But what about the people themselves? If security officers like David Keeton can be routinely threatened, if city workers can be confronted with guns, if the police themselves can be pulled back from danger, what of the brave, yet mortal, ordinary citizens who join hands with the police? “Don’t never forget, ” one Fair Park resident said, “these people are drug dealers, and they will kill you. ” At a meeting in the Clean-8 area, an Oak Cliff minister admitted that he, too, was scared. After he turned in some dealers, they found out and began threatening him and his church.

There are many such stories. They are the Achilles’ heel of the anti-crime program. Both Cowart and the police, who put a hold on further Operation Clean programs after Clean-8, know it. Fear is contagious. But so is courage, which comes from fear. Edna Pemberton, a K mart store manager, decided to organize Oak Cliff Concerned Citizens Against Crime after receiving a call one night from a young woman who had been raped at the Fawn Ridge apartments and had nowhere to turn. Edna Pemberton thought that was unacceptable. She thought somebody should do something about it. If she didn’t, who would?



TO FOCUS JUST ON CRIME IS DEADLY, ” Diane Ragsdale beams, ” ’cause there are root causes of crime. ” A shy, grandmotherly woman nods in agreement. The woman has just explained to a meeting at the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center why she left a crime watch group to join one of the more comprehensive neighborhood associations operated by the Crime Prevention Program. Instead of just reporting law breaking, the group also works with senior citizens, runs car pools for people who need to get to grocery stores, lobbies for sanitation and other city services, fixes up deteriorating houses. The grass-roots programs in South Dallas, from closing down liquor stores, hot-sheet motels, and other lizard lairs to monitoring incoming businesses for environmental quality, are far from the stereotype of the area. The true picture is one of good people fed up with being pushed around.

“This is what a neighborhood can do, ” Ragsdale tells the group, a standing-room-only crowd of longtime organizers from her council district. “You identify the problems, and you resolve them. Each group must demonstrate that crime will not be tolerated. “

If only people agreed on the root causes.

According to the National Centers for Disease Control, those causes, as seen in a study of the excessive mortality rate of young black males (at about 1 per 1, 000 it is higher than for soldiers in Vietnam), are rooted in “immediate access to firearms, alcohol and substance abuse, drug trafficking, racial discrimination, and cultural acceptance of violent behavior. “

According to Jack McNulty, chairman of the now disbanded Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Crime, the causes lie in the words of Father Daniel Berrigan, the Vietnam-era anti-war activist: “He used to say. The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. ” Now in Dallas we’re paying the price for 25 years of doing nothing. The fact is, the system isn’t going to give these people a goddamn thing. They have to get it themselves. “

Ragsdale’s political career, power, and raison detre are based on doing just that, as are the communities she hopes to save. “Let’s not depend on the police department to do it themselves, ” she tells the meeting. “Let’s show in a visible, open way that we’re in charge. We want to show the people in this community that the solution is in them, not with the city of Dallas. ” She pauses. “It’s not as if the city is some separate entity from us. We are the city. We ought to act like it. “