Zoned out

BACKSTORY • As drug-free zones expire, business owners, police say hands are tied

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Oct 9, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (23 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

Officers Jeff Myers (left) and Sgt. Matt Engen take a man to their patrol car last week in Old Town, after finding out he was wanted on a probation violation. Police can continue to make such arrests, but won’t be able to arrest repeat offenders anymore for violating the city’s three drug- and prosititution-free zones, including in Old Town. The ordinance authorizing the zones was allowed to expire last month.

The clouds have come and gone on a Monday afternoon in Old Town. Two Portland police officers, Vince Moreschi and Sgt. Charlie Fender, make a turn off Northwest Fifth Avenue, park their patrol car, and get out slowly.

Two men and a woman, maybe homeless, maybe not, are squatting in the corner of a parking lot, drinking beer. Moreschi approaches first, just making conversation. He asks for their names, writes them in his notepad, goes back to the car, and runs the names through a computer.

When he returns, Moreschi tells the group to get going, take their beer cans, and he watches them walk away. But if there is anybody frustrated by the encounter, it’s the two officers.

Moreschi’s check revealed that one of the men and the woman both had been placed on an exclusion list barring them from Old Town for previous drug-related offenses. Now all Moreschi can do is tell them to move along.

“Last week I could have lodged this as a ‘57,’ booked them for open containers in a drug-free zone,” Moreschi says. “That’s what the drug-free zone exclusion gave you in the first place. That was the hammer, and we’ve lost it.”

In this case, Fender says he can’t take somebody to jail just for drinking beer in public, which is a simple violation no worse than a traffic ticket.

Last week Moreschi and fellow officers were able to enforce the city’s drug- and prostitution-free zones. If they found someone in one of the three zones who previously had been told to stay away, they could arrest them for violating the ban.

Using the city’s Project 57 program — named for the number of jail beds that the city rents at the county-run jail for public nuisance crimes in the city — officers could be guaranteed jail space would be available.

But after an independent analysis requested by Mayor Tom Potter said that police in the no-drug and no-prostitution zones appeared to be using racial profiling in handing out the exclusion notices, Potter allowed the ordinances to expire at the end of September.

The arrests for drug-free zone violations never led to long jail time. The two beer drinkers probably would have spent no more than the rest of that afternoon in jail, according to Fender.

But the effect of the arrests, Fender says, would have been more significant.

“Just the ability to inconvenience them for half a day sends them a message,” Fender says. “That’s time out of their day that they don’t have the ability to commit crimes out on the street.”

Enough such inconveniences, Fender says, and at least some of the excluded didn’t bother coming back.

Judgelike authority given

But inconveniencing people shouldn’t be the job of police officers, says Andrea Meyer, legislative director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon — who applauds the ending of the exclusion zones.

Meyer says the zones gave police the authority that only judges should have — to order people restricted from homes and entire neighborhoods.

“The police essentially become police, the judge and the jury, and that’s not the appropriate source (for) issuing exclusion orders,” Meyer says. “We need checks and balances.”

The stronger criticism of the exclusion zones, however, was based on race. “Exclusion zones, whether on purpose or not, were being used to discriminate against African-Americans,” says Alejandro Queral, executive director of Portland’s Northwest Constitutional Rights Center.

Howard Weiner, however, has more immediate concerns than whether the exclusion zones were administered fairly. Weiner, owner of Cal Skate Skateboards in Old Town, is bracing for an expected increase in shoplifting at his store.

He’s seen it before, when the City Council temporarily abandoned and rewrote the drug-free zone ordinance a few years ago.

“Folks were emboldened,” Weiner says.

Weiner has managed the store at his current location on Northwest Sixth Avenue since 1984. He says that before the drug-free zone was established in 1992 the neighborhood was “inundated” with street-level heroin dealing.

Though it may be hard to tell, given the ubiquitous drug activity all along the bus mall today, Weiner says, there has been improvement.

“I have seen the changes over time,” Weiner says. “But if I was to look at it in the context of just today, I could understand why folks would say, ‘Why bother? We still have street-level drug dealing.’ ”

Dealers get the all-clear

Weiner says the decision to remove the drug-free zone already has made its way to the street: “The message that’s being sent to the drug dealers is you can come down and make a profit and do your business and really get a pass. The dealers know.”

Jay Mitchell says he’s seen it firsthand.

In a back room of the Shanghai Steakery Restaurant and Lounge on Broadway just north of Burnside Street, manager Mitchell reaches under a pile of papers and pulls out a brown envelope, last month’s list of people who are supposed to be excluded from his neighborhood.

There are 488 names on the list, all the way from Abraham, who’s male and black, to Zinger, who’s male and white. Every month the police bureau has sent Mitchell an updated list, and he hardly takes a glance at it, even though he acknowledges an ongoing battle with cocaine dealers who use his bar’s bathroom to do business.

“It’s like I told an officer last night,” Mitchell says. “This is nice, but worthless. I don’t have time to flip through pages and look for people when there’s a line outside. A book with photos would have helped.”

It won’t anymore. Mitchell says that he’s seen a change already in the week since the no-drug zone restriction was lifted.

“You see people on a regular basis, and now all of a sudden you’re seeing a lot of new faces,” he says. And it’s not just numbers, it’s attitude as well, Mitchell says: “They’re more brazen. They know nothing’s going to be done now.”

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