Jumping Ahead: Let’s Get this Party Started

My last story took you up to the Summer of 1999. I had been here three and a half years and already had a few confrontations with the drug dealers and a couple bad experiences with some patrol officers. The people who run FWPD had made it clear to me that they either had no idea what was going on here, or they just didn’t care. My attempt to join FWPD had exhausted me. There was a lot of time and energy involved. Often, their tests were scheduled during my regular work hours, so I had used up a lot of my vacation time already by half way through the year. It was an interesting experience, but I decided it would not be worth going through another time or two, so I gave up on the idea of becoming a cop.

As for the drug dealers, the next four years were roughly a repeat of the previous pattern. As I got to know more of my neighbors though, there was less of an edge to the relationship between myself and some of the regular dealers here. Many of our encounters could probably be better characterized as discussions, rather than confrontations. I still had to assert myself on a regular basis though. The worst times were when I lived alone, or when I was away from the house for long periods of time. The dealers always made it clear that they were ready to reclaim their turf if I did not remain alert and active.

As for the police, I don’t know if I called them once during this period of time. It really seemed pointless. I could take care of the immediate problems quicker and perhaps as effectively as the police would have. As for a long-term solution, the police had basically told me that they did not want to talk about that. So I got by as best as a guy could when living in what was beginning to appear to be a police-sanctioned drug neighborhood.

There was an important personal event in my life which occurred during this time as well. Although it was not in itself related to this neighborhood, the impact that it had upon me greatly affected how I dealt with the problems here. I began to write here about that event which occurred in December of 2000, but after three pages I realized I could not summarize that subject in a concise manner. Instead, it should suffice here to simply say that one of the most noticeable effects was that I became more assertive and more willing to confront dangerous situations. Although my actions here often seem reckless to others, I feel (even with the benefit of hindsight) that I usually acted judiciously. But before December of 2000, the saying “Courage is doing what you can’t do, because you have to do it,” was just something I heard. Now, those words had meaning to me.

Had this been a rented apartment, it’s likely I would have left a long time ago. And although I paid less than three thousand dollars to purchase the house, I had invested thousands of dollars and many hours of labor. This had become my home now, and I would fight to protect it.

It was probably due to the fact that the activities in 2003 started early and were more intense than usual that I realized that just “Letting the cops do their job” was not a viable option. I would need to develop a real strategy to effectively deal with this situation, and a key to that strategy would be to better understand the full scope of the activities here. I needed information, about the dealers and the police, and my journal is the result of that quest.

Up to this point, most of my posts have been colorful and descriptive, but often lacking in specific details. For example, when I say “During the summer of 1997, some guy was selling drugs on the side of my house,” or “During the spring of 1998, a couple cops checked my I.D.,” this means I can’t recall with clarity exactly when the events occurred or the names of the dealer or the police involved. Beginning in 2003 though, my journal often lists specific dates, times, names of officers and dealers, identifying numbers of police cars, and phone numbers that I called or where calls to my house originated from. I probably won’t include everything on my blog, but I suspect what I do include will be detailed enough to add credibility to my story.

There are many interesting stories I could tell about this skipped period of time, but they are not central to the main theme of detailing the activities of the drug dealers and the police. So, beginning with my next post, we’ll just move ahead a bit to 2003 and get the party started.