Although this blog remains closed, a few people continue to show interest in it. Realizing that many of my previous posts are a bit long and sometimes lacking in clarity I have decided to attach this general summary to help the reader better understand the situation.
My name is Phillip Marx, and I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. About fifteen years ago, I purchased a run down house in the inner-city from the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.) At the time, I had no idea that my home was located at the epicenter of the biggest open-air drug market in the city.
Although I paid very little for the house, I have put a lot of time and money into improving it (see photos at top of page.) I have also built strong relationships with my many good neighbors and I have become quite comfortable with living here in some respects. It should be understood by all that I will not let others harass me without retaliation or chase me away easily. Make no mistake, I am vested here.
After dealing with aggressive drug dealers and an ineptly managed police department for twelve years, including having fire-bombs thrown at my house one night, I finally decided that publicizing my situation could hardly make things worse. Initially, my only goal was to have a public record of what was going on in case I ended up getting killed by the drug dealers or arrested by the police for having illegal drugs and paraphernalia lying around in my front yard. At first, the plan was to simply chronicle the events of the past twelve years to let others know what had been going on. But then interesting stuff kept happening, so I began to interweave current events with past stories.
Eventually I began to realize that the police were paying attention to the blog, so my focus changed a bit. During the latter part of my blogging activity, I would also occasionally attend City Council meetings (where a high ranking member of our police department sets) and make use of the public comments time at the end of the night. Throughout my two year campaign, I tried using both carrots and sticks to convince FWPD that helping me with my problem would be in their best interest. At the same time, they (police) were using both methods to convince the drug dealers that calming their activities a bit would be in their (drug dealer's) best interest.
I decided to close this blog for several reasons. First, although I still hold a lot of animosity towards certain individual officers (mostly higher ranking ones), I came to realize how irritating my blog was for the good cops (many of whom I interact with in my neighborhood.) Also, after it came to my attention that the drug dealers themselves were aware of my blog, I had to decide exactly how big of a fight I was willing to take on and how long I could sustain it.
In the final analysis I concluded that since the drug dealers now conduct their business quietly and off of my property, and the police no longer harass me and do a better job now of monitoring the criminals in my neighborhood, it would be in my best interest to reciprocate by leaving both groups alone. They can continue to play their games with each other, and I’ll just try to get on with my life.
Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
Here’s the link to my first post, in case you want to start there and read forward.
And here’s the link to the last post, if you just want to cut to the chase.
Be forewarned though, there are 188 posts to this blog and some of them are quite long.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me at
e2010ac@yahoo.com
