I went to a crack-house watching party last Saturday night on a street in Fairview. A group of neighbors invited me over to see the suspicious goings-on at a multi-plex a few houses down. They wanted me to find out why more than a year of calling police hadn’t made it stop.

I arrived just after 8 p.m. The neighbors milled in the kitchen, with its IKEA cabinets and espresso maker, drinking beer and eating egg rolls and artichokes.

Out the window, they pointed out a boxy brown building. Drug dealers come there to get product, they said. They suspected it was crack. Dealers sell it on street corners around the neighborhood they said.

They had photographed people exchanging money for something that seemed like drugs. They went to community council meetings. They called the police non-emergency number. Lately their efforts slowed down. They felt like the problem was obvious and no one was listening.

I saw a drug deal on the way into the house. One of the neighbors pointed it out as he walked me from my car. About a block away, a dark figure strolled behind a building. A car pulled up. A woman got out and slipped behind the building too. A minute passed. She reappeared, got back in her car and left. The guy walked away, hands in pockets, hoodie blocking his face.

Last month, a few blocks away, Anchorage Police officer Jason Allen was shot in his patrol car. Police are still investigating. They haven’t arrested anyone. Neighbors wondered if it was related to the suspected drug house. Usually, people come and go at all hours. After the shooting, everything stopped. The area was crawling with police. Snow piled up on the cars parked outside.

Now the corner cell-phone conversations, alley exchanges and late-night traffic were back.

GOING ON PATROL

A few days later, I parked my car at the Carrs on Gambell, slipped on a bullet-proof vest and got into a patrol car with Araceli “Sally” Jones, an APD officer who spends four days a week patrolling Fairview. She’s a member of a unit focused on street-level drug dealing, prostitution and chronic inebriates in the neighborhood.

Jones’ job is all about relationships. She knows which prostitutes hang around which pimps. She knows the names of the chronic alcoholics loitering at 13th and Gambell. She knows about the building the neighbors were worried about. A couple months ago, she tracked down the landlord who eventually evicted some of the problem tenants. It seemed trouble calmed down for a while, she said.

Getting to dealers isn’t easy. Pick your intersection — 12th and Hyder, 13th and Hyder — Jones can sit and watch people she knows are either looking to buy or sell. But people have rights. She needs real proof to make an arrest. That means seeing cash and drugs. That’s not so easy. She drives by. They go to another corner. It’s a game of cat and mouse.

Another route to get rid of drug houses is to get dealers evicted, she said. After eight police calls, the city can fine the landlord $500. That requires neighbors make a lot of calls. That’s not easy either.

So far, this year there had only been three police calls to the brown multi-plex, Jones told me.

Jones and I cruised over to the house. A couple officers were waiting in their patrol cars outside. We were going to do a “knock-and-talk,” a technique that lets people know they’re being watched.

I followed officers to the porch. They knocked on a couple units before a tall guy opened up, looking sleepy, a pick threaded through his hair. An older woman piled out in shorts and house shoes, followed by young woman who kept giving the officers different names. Officers asked about a motor scooter parked nearby with expired plates.

Sgt. Denny Allen, Jones’ boss, mentioned neighbors had complained about the traffic to the building. Everybody knew he was hinting at drug activity.
“I have a big family,” the woman said.

REVERSE BLOCKBUSTING

The neighbors at the house on Saturday night were young, professional types. They bought homes in the grid of streets between Cordova and Merrill Field because of low prices and proximity to downtown, becoming owners in an area where eight out of every 10 people were paying rent during the last census.

There are a lot of people like them in Fairview now, riding their commuter bikes and hanging their Tibetan prayer flags and planting their organic gardens in what has been one of the poorest, most crime-addled and least white zones in the city.

The neighbors’ attitude toward crime was a mix of fascination and annoyance. At the party, they traded stories about drunks using yards for bathrooms and drug deals on morning jogs.

The way the dealers did things, with most of the actual deals done away from the house, made it hard to generate police calls about the address, they said.
'“Dispatch will be like, 'Did you see them come out of the house?’ No, but we know the drugs came from there,” one of them said.

Neighbors knew police needed proof to search the house or make an arrest. They knew proof was hard to get. It seemed the system was stacked in favor of the dealers.

“Police have rules they have to abide by and everybody knows it,” one of them said.

For the most part, the people in the drug house left them alone, they said. But that didn’t mean they weren’t afraid. When I asked to use their names in this column, they all said no.

JADED CITIZENRY

Jones and I zig-zagged through the neighborhood for a couple of hours then pulled over a couple blocks from the brown multi-plex and turned off our lights. She told me that after Allen was shot, she was surprised how many neighbors didn’t call police when they heard the shots. People get jaded, she said. That makes her job harder.

After a while, a guy in a 49ers jacket rambled down the sidewalk. Jones knew him. He hangs out in the orbit of another neighborhood character with 20 years of drug-related arrests.

The guy in the jacket turned toward the gate to the multi-plex. He pulled out his wallet. We drove over to him and rolled down the window. Jones asked him what he was up to.

“Going to see my auntie,” he said.

Jones asked why his wallet was out. He said he was going to give his auntie a Walmart card. Jones asked him if he was going to see the tall guy with the hair pick we’d met earlier.

“Who?” he said.

“Right,” she said. “Go ahead. Go see your auntie.”