Ignorance is Bliss

One of the most frustrating things about living in this neighborhood is the mixed signals I often receive from FWPD. They publicly proclaim that they want and need citizen involvement in order to do their job effectively. Yet my experience has shown that often they either resent or simply don’t know how to make use of such help when it is offered to them. I don’t really think the main problem with FWPD stems from a coordinated effort to keep citizens such as myself from being involved in the process. Rather, I think it is a sign of a lack of coordination within the department.

One day I got in a shouting argument with a guy here after I told him to stay off my property. A few minutes later, he drove by my house with a friend and did a mock drive by shooting on me. I did not call FWPD to report this because it seemed useless to do so. Most likely they wouldn’t even question him, and even if they did he’d simply deny it and that would be the end of the story. When I relayed this story to an officer some time later, he chastised me for not reporting it. According to him, I was part of the problem because they (FWPD) can’t do anything about the criminal activities if their not reported.

Then, there was the time that I called FWPD to ask them to remove two guys from my front lawn. As the officers arrived I went out and picked up a CD case that one of the guys had set in my yard. When one of them claimed it I said to him “Look, I have asked you a dozen times this year not to be on my property. Now I’m telling you, with this officer as a witness, stay off my property or I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.” After finishing talking with this guy, this officer walked down the street to join another officer who was speaking with the other guy. As the man with the CD case was walking away from my house he turned back to me and said “You did the wrong thing - called the police. We’re going to get you.” I immediately went over to the officers and repeated what he had said. I instructed the officer that I wanted to file a complaint stating that this man was threatening me. The officer ran back to the corner, but the guy had already slipped away. I told the officer where this guy lived (only two blocks away) and he just rolled his eyes at me. I said fine, forget it, but now you know why I don’t report frivolous things around here.

I have tried for years to keep the dealers off of and away from my property. I have also tried for years to elicit the cooperation of FWPD in this matter. For the most part their response has been to tell me to just ignore the problem when it is occurring on the sidewalks or in the street. At the same time, I have had several officers seem to accuse me of being the source of the problems here, making comments such as “Don’t you see what these guys are doing around here?” or “Did you ever try to do anything about this?”

In a sense, I feel like a colonized subject living here. If the colonized makes noise and rails against the unfair system, he is labeled as a trouble-maker. If he complies with the rules, which constantly change to ensure that he can never fully comply, he is labeled as stupid or lazy. So the colonized is either so aggressive that he must be controlled, or he is so compliant that he shows a need to be taken care of. Either way, the occupation is justified and the colonizer remains in control. Eventually the farce becomes apparent as enough of the colonized realize that the only true goal of the colonizer is to be in control, and the colonized themselves are mere commodities in this game.

Whether FWPD admits it or even realizes it is irrelevant to the fact that this in the game that they are playing here. They don’t initially respond to my pleas for help because I am insignificant to them. But when I make a little noise and other people become involved, then my situation becomes a public relations case. They act here not because they want to help me, but because they want to appear as though they care to the other people who might be watching. I don’t think that this situation is unique to FWPD, but rather is something that is suffered by most bureaucracies, especially governmental ones.

I have come to accept this situation, not because I want to but because I have little choice in the matter. For quite a while after failing to establish any meaningful communication with FWPD, I fell back on my own resources. I monitored my property and spoke directly with the dealers as best I could, and for the most part I found better results this way than by going through the FWPD. But then a couple years ago things began to get very active here again. Not only were the dealers constantly encroaching upon my property, but I had a few encounters with the police in which they actually seemed to think I was a drug dealer.

During the summer of 2006, I called FWPD to my house several times for what some people might consider to be frivolous events. I did this not because I expected any results from FWPD, but simply as a matter of establishing a public record of what is going on here. FWPD still refuses to release to me a police report which details the time a sixteen year old drug dealer hid his gun in my front yard. As far as I know, there may actually be no official record of this. I have a report of another incident that occurred here which I believe was falsified by the officer in order to protect one of their confidential informants. I have no idea what FWPD’s official summary of this neighborhood is, but I am absolutely certain it is very far from reality.

This concerns me because it would be quite easy for a person to drive past my house and take a few photos that would make pretty convincing evidence that mine is a drug house. On any given day, you could probably search my property or the immediate area surrounding it and find something illegal. I could not count on whatever FWPD might have in their hidden records. I needed to clearly establish that Mine was not a drug house and that I was actually trying hard to work against the problems here. The culmination of my actions in this regard was the certified letter I sent to Chief York in October of 2006. My main goals in all this were so that if I ever got in a full blown fight with one of the dealers it would not appear as though I was the troublemaker, and If FWPD ever found evidence of drugs on my property they could not accuse me of being the perpetrator.

As I said, my acceptance of this situation is not by choice, and I periodically re-test FWPD to see if they are actually interested in doing their job, instead of just pretending to be interested. There is one patrol officer here who I have a lot of confidence in. Officer Rice occasionally stops to talk while I am outside, and has given me his work number so that I can leave a message if necessary. In addition, one member of FWPD Command Staff has recently begun taking a very direct interest in this area. I have seen Officer Jefferson in my neighborhood over half a dozen times in the past month or two, and he tries to interact directly with some of the most obnoxious dealers here. Officer Jefferson has also given me his work and cell phone numbers and I have spoken with him several times over the telephone. The last time I left a message on his voicemail, I saw a positive reaction from both the police and the dealers within a few hours.

But there is still much to be desired in this relationship. Officer Rice is sometimes sporadic in his patrolling of this neighborhood, and my telephone contact only allows me to leave a message, rather than to actually converse. Although he stops while passing through, I feel it is best if we keep such public conversations at a minimum. As for Officer Jefferson, I can’t help but wonder about certain things like what occurred during our last conversation. Several dealers had been standing outside my house one afternoon when Officer Jefferson pulled up to the corner and parked for about ten minutes. The corner (in fact, the entire block) quickly cleared. I think a lot of these guys know who Jefferson is and if someone of his rank is going to come here himself they understand the message that they need to settle down a bit.

I called Officer Jefferson on his cell-phone immediately after he left the area. I didn’t know the guys who were on the corner by name, so I used that opportunity to I.D. them and to give him some information about them. Officer Jefferson then suggested that I call Vice & Narcotics to give this information and ask for their help. I began to explain to Officer Jefferson that I have done that before, even going so far as to offer to let them place cameras on my property, but received no response from them. At this point, Officer Jefferson had to suddenly break away from the conversation because he had arrived at his destination. Things like this just seem very strange to me.

Here I am talking to one of FWPD’s top officers, and he’s telling me I need to call someone else myself to convey this information. Then, when I try explaining that those officers have already shown that they are not interested in hearing my information, Officer Jefferson abruptly ends the conversation. I really appreciate the apparently sincere efforts that I have witnessed Officer Jefferson engaging in here, and I really don’t want to believe that he is simply pretending to care about the problem. But if he really does care, then he is obviously ignorant of the machinations going on inside his own department.

I can not speak with certainty about the motives of any one particular officer, but the empirical evidence does not lie. The FWPD, as an organization, has shown that it is far more interested in appearing to be concerned about the problems here than in actually confronting those problems. There may be many individual officers who are not the cause of this problem, and some may not even be aware of it. But when an officer tells me to take certain steps and I respond that those steps have already been taken, to no avail, then that officer has to make a simple choice. Either he will begin to educate himself and to confront the problems within his own department, or he has chosen to become a part of the problem himself.

One night I called FWPD to report activities going on here. I told them the EXACT location of where the dealers had stashed their drugs. The guys fled as soon as the police came in sight, and there were four officers now searching the empty corner in vain for the drugs. Either these cops don’t know their directions, or it got lost in translation, but I actually had to call back to FWPD, give the name of one of the Officers who was outside, and reiterate my instructions. I was literally saying to the telephone operator “No, they’re at the wrong tree. Tell them to go south about twenty feet, then west about ten feet, and to check the east side of that tree.” It was like watching grown men search for Easter eggs while blind-folded. They were shining their lights and walking in all directions until they finally stumbled upon the stash. At that time I was still trying to act somewhat incognito, but I was very tempted to just walk out there and point it out for them.

The dealers here have a very strong communications network, and it is connected to the FWPD dispatch channel. Most of the time when the police are called to the area because of a complaint, the dealers have already fled. And when the dealers are sometimes caught in the area, they have usually had time to toss the drugs. It is very difficult to fingerprint a piece of crack cocaine or a plastic baggie. If FWPD was sincere in addressing the problems here, they would take a few simple steps. First, they would provide me with a contact officer who patrols this area for each shift. They would then give me the cell phone number for each of these officers so that we could communicate directly and off-line. And finally, they would install cameras here so that all that crack that they keep finding laying around in the grass could be reunited with the proper owners. The fact that they are not doing this leads me to wonder if their current actions are not a mere facade.