Holding the Line

In the war on drugs, AFSCME members battle to keep the streets safe.

BRIDGEPORT, CONNECTICUT

Officer Samuel McKelvie focuses his binoculars on the young man riding a bike through Marina Village, a public housing project here.

"He’s got product," he tells his partner, Det. Thomas Russell, who sits in the back seat. "Product" is the street term for narcotics. Russell raises his binoculars, focuses them across a field to the street corner where the young man, bike stopped, is probably trading drugs for cash — except there’s a branch in the way and neither officer can see the transaction.

McKelvie, 37, gets out of the car to take a closer look. As an officer, he must be in uniform, but he wears a button-down shirt over it.

"He can’t get too close," says Russell. "The dealers will recognize the pants and shoes."

Russell, a man in his 50s, wears street clothes. He stands against a tree to avoid detection and looks out across the field as the young man rides off on his bicycle.

Russell radios in a description to the unit’s other officers, who are in uniform, waiting nearby: "Young, black male on a bicycle. Black shirt. Hair in rows."

McKelvie and Russell are waiting to witness a buy before bringing in the rest of the unit — the takedown cars — to arrest the buyers and then the dealers, and to seize the drugs.

This surveillance car is the eyes of the city’s tactical narcotics team, called TNT. The team’s nine members, like the other 14 officers in the Narcotics and Vice Division, are members of AFSCME Local 1159 (Council 15). They are among 15,000 police officers throughout the country who belong to AFSCME.

Five days a week, McKelvie and Russell get into one of a half-dozen cars like this one — confiscated from drug dealers, invariably with tinted windows, air-conditioned if they’re lucky — and drive through Bridgeport’s worst neighborhoods. They know by now who the dealers are and where they work.

TNT has been in place for just over a decade. The job of this unit is not to win the war on drugs but to keep people from openly dealing in broad daylight.

Russell gets into the car and drives around the block. He parks in a spot he thinks will have a good view of the young man on the bike making his next deal.

They wait five minutes, 10, 15.

McKelvie decides the young man is somewhere else and begins backing out. As the car slides by an alley between two houses, they see the young man on the bike.

TAKEDOWN. Russell is on the radio. An untrained eye could miss all of this, but he is reporting in detail: The young man is selling to two Caucasian males in a white car, he hides the product by the parking meter, he’s putting it in his front right pocket, the buyers are headed south on Iranistan Avenue.

"We’re following the buyers out," Russell says. McKelvie throws the car into gear and pulls out and around the block, fast. "The passenger’s got his head down, like he wants to do it now," Russell tells the takedown cars as they pass the surveillance car, pulling in front of and behind the white car while it’s at a stop sign. The uniformed officers are out of their unmarked cars and at the windows of the white car, getting the two men out onto the street, patting them down, pulling out handcuffs.

McKelvie and Russell stop at the sign like anyone would, then continue on. The cuffs mean they found product, McKelvie explains. The officers make a U-turn within sight of the beach and Long Island Sound — only a few blocks from the housing project where this all began — and radio the other officers from there, far enough away that the buyers will never connect the surveillance car with the arrest.

The officers have let the white car get just far enough away that word won’t get back to the dealer. McKelvie and Russell head back to find the young man on the bike. They’ve witnessed a buy, they have an arrest and, at last check, the young man had product on him. They have a good case — and they get lucky.

When they pass the corner store, the young man is getting off his bike there. Russell radios the takedown cars and tells them to hurry up, the dealer’s going into the store. He is terse and urgent. "Get in here," he repeats. "Come on. Hurry up. He’s in the store."

McKelvie makes a U-turn and again parks the car far enough away that it seems to have no connection to the takedown cars pulling up down the block. Russell is on the radio to the officers at the store, telling them what the young man looks like, which pocket the drugs are in.

Getting the dealer when he goes to the store is ideal, McKelvie explains. He can’t run anywhere.

A minute later, the officers lead the young man out of the store, handcuffed.

Russell and McKelvie head out to their next site.

BANKRUPT. A port city 58 miles northeast of New York City, Bridgeport has a population of some 138,000 — down from a peak of 156,000 in 1960. Its empty factories recall the city’s years as an industrial center. Its public housing projects are named for former residents — including circus baron P.T. Barnum, who served as Bridgeport’s mayor for one term in 1875. Interstate 95 runs the length of the city, offering an easy way in and out of town for dealers from New York City and buyers from wealthy neighboring towns.

Driving past large houses on winding, shady streets, Russell shakes his head.

"These houses sell for half what they would if they were on the other side of the street," he says. The other side of the street is Monroe, a neighboring town. Bridgeport is part of Fairfield County, where nearly one in five households boasts an annual income of over $100,000.

In contrast, Bridgeport filed for bankruptcy in 1991, a low point for the city, the officers say. Things have improved since then — the city has had a balanced budget for the past four years and some of those empty factories have come down to make way for new development — but Bridgeport isn’t out of the woods yet.

Seventeen out of every 100 people in the city live in poverty — compared to a national rate of 13 out of 100. And, while the booming national economy has lowered the city’s unemployment rate to 6.2 percent, that number is still one-fourth larger than the national rate of 4.8 percent.

The narcotics officers have witnessed the effects of this poverty and unemployment. In 1996 alone, they arrested 1,966 people. They also seized 104 guns, $278,384 in drug money, and 52,840 grams of narcotics.

The officers say part of the reason drugs are popular is that jobs are scarce.

"You live in some of these places, you’d be drunk all day if you weren’t on coke," Russell says.

"Kids I arrest ask me: ‘You think I want to work at McDonald’s for $5 an hour?’" McKelvie says. He shrugs sympathetically.

It has been 10 years since a court decision lifted the requirement that police officers live within city limits and, though most of the Narcotics and Vice Unit grew up in Bridgeport and has strong ties to the community, only eight of the 23 officers actually live there.

"It’s one thing to work in it all day," Russell says, "[without] living in it all night."

Certainly the officers seem to have the support of the community. When they are chasing a buyer or a dealer, private citizens sometimes step in to help. And when they arrest dealers, people sometimes come out in the streets to applaud. Many of the unit’s tips come from calls to its anonymous hotline and to its main number.

The hotline — like the computers, video camera and other technology in the station — is funded by confiscated drug money. The division gets back from the state 70 percent of assets it has seized as a result of drug-related activity. In fiscal 1996, asset forfeiture added $123,070 to the division’s baseline budget of $421,457 — and provided eight or more of its surveillance cars.

PAPER CHASE. This job isn’t all car chases and drug busts, though. It’s also a steady stream of paperwork, and a lot of waiting and failure. The division is short staffed, the officers say, and the equipment is often faulty.

On days when TNT doesn’t have an undercover officer the officers can watch a possible dealer for a long time before a buyer comes along. Even when a buyer comes right away, there aren’t always enough takedown cars to cover every possible escape route — and the dealers sometimes run and get away. Moreover, though the officers’ radios have a secure channel, when one radio breaks, they have to communicate on another channel that can be overheard.

And when, despite these problems, the officers have a successful day, it means that they will be at the station until late — filling out reports, field-testing confiscated drugs, booking the people they’ve arrested, writing the vital statistics for each arrest on a white board on the station wall. They get overtime for this and at the end of the month — when the overtime budget is used up — they can’t arrest too many people.

This overtime is the reason many of them bid into the position. All of them agree that their union contract makes this a good job, with good benefits and steady pay.

"Everybody needs to be able to pay for their family. The contract provides peace of mind," says Capt. David Boston, who heads the unit and is also a former president of the local.

The contract also means no one has to work a second job, or let a hot tip sit until the next day, says Boston. "Crime happens 24 hours a day," he says.

When the officers are asked why they do this work, the words justice, service, glamour and excitement don’t come up.

Asked whether the police are making a difference in the drug war, Russell repeats the question and laughs. There was a time, he recalls, when dealers sold drugs casually on the street. "Now we’ve arrested so many, they won’t stand still," he says.

McKelvie admits that while they may not have stopped the drug trade, "sometimes we slow it down."

But Police Chief Thomas Sweeney says the officers don’t give themselves enough credit for the positive changes they’ve made. He points to the fact that the city experienced a 40 percent reduction in crime from 1990 to 1994 and a leveling off of crime levels since then, according to the FBI crime reports.

"Six years ago, police and crime were the issues for citizens," says Sweeney. "Now it’s potholes in the road and economic development. And it’s thanks to the officers that the city’s made this turnaround."

By Alison S. Lebwohl