Between Rock and a Hard Place

The only construction project on Mary's block this summer was a tree fort made of plywood and bedspreads erected by homeless crackheads beneath the limbs of an overgrown elm on the south end of the street. "We couldn't figure it out for a long time," says Cortez. "We'd be watching someone who just made a buy down on that end of the street, and we'd turn our heads for a second and they'd be gone. Then we realized they were going into the tree. They had a little house in there. They had a little stereo and everything."

Last month, officers cut off most of the tree's limbs. Mary wishes they would similarly prune the crack dealers off her block. She estimates that she has called the police more than fifty times since early May, when the crackhouses across the street first opened for business.

"I used to have a limit where if there were more than five or six crack dealers on the block, then I'd call. If there were less, I wouldn't," she says. "Now I usually just call if there's a fight on the street or if I'm threatened.

"It's hard for me to call the cops. Over the course of my life, most of the time I didn't want the cops around. They were always on the wrong side from me. But now it's different."

At first, it was also hard for Mary to figure out exactly which cops she was supposed to call. "When all this drug shit started happening, I felt like I was trying to solve some sort of bizarre logic puzzle," Mary remembers. "I'd call District 2 and tell them there were a bunch of dope dealers across the street, and they'd tell me to call District 6, because the dealers were on the District 6 side of the street. So then I'd call District 6, and they'd ask me where I live, and then they'd say, 'Oh, well, you're in District 2; you need to call them.'"

"I was like, 'I don't care what number is on their badge. Just please send some cops to bust these guys, because they're doing this shit right out in the open.'"

Busts have been made.

DPD Sergeant Mark Fall, who oversees drug-house complaints for District 2's six-officer IMPACT team, reports that since June 1, his team has made more than twenty arrests for drug dealing and possession on the 2700 block of Downing.

District 6 undercover operations have netted sixteen arrests during the same time period.

"We're aware of the problem, and we're trying to address it as best we can," says Fall. "District 6 is running undercover, and what we've been doing with our [District 2] team is, basically, when we see a dope deal occur on that street, we'll try to contact the individuals involved for probable cause.

"We have been able to make arrests using that method, even though when you're dealing a few little rocks in these low-level sales, it's pretty hard to catch them. They're always looking out for the cops, and it's easy for them to just swallow the narcotics."

The get-high-crash-get-high-again cycle of crack cocaine is wickedly compressed. Many addicts smoke a rock every fifteen or thirty minutes. As a result, foot traffic to and from crackhouses is often a nonstop freak parade. One crackhouse on your street -- let alone three or more, as is the case on the 2700 block of Downing -- is a more flagrant nuisance than one clandestine methamphetamine lab, which tends to be obvious only when it blows up.

But meth labs and designer drugs have quickly outpaced crackhouses in the media's coverage of the never-ending War on Drugs, probably because methamphetamine and Ecstasy are both new millennial and sexy, while crack is so very Reagan-era.

On the meaner streets of Denver, though, crack's siren song has never quieted.

"We have a major, major problem with crack addiction right now," says Fall. "All along the East Colfax corridor is bad; the Holly Shopping Center is really bad; and if you go further up in the Cole neighborhood, from the 2700 block up to 34th, around Franklin, Marion, there's crack everywhere up there.

"And it's pretty bad over there on Downing, no doubt about it."

The 2700 block of Downing enjoyed one brief respite from badness following the late-June arrest of Morris Ayers, who runs the crackhouse in the abandoned beauty parlor -- owned by his 87-year-old grandmother, who lives next door.

Ayers, 42, was busted for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute after he physically barred a City of Denver zoning inspector from entering the property without a search warrant.

Unlike police officers, zoning inspectors do not need a search warrant to legally enter a property as long as there are documented complaints regarding its habitability. Since city law deems crackhouses "inherently uninhabitable," one way for the DPD to get a look inside a suspected drug house is to refer complaints about it to Neighborhood Inspection Services, which is what police did in this case.

When Ayers blocked her way, the zoning inspector retreated a safe distance and watched as Ayers blatantly conducted several apparent drug transactions. She then called the cops on the police radio in her car; within minutes, Ayers was in handcuffs.