PROVIDENCE

The sun was setting behind the multifamily houses and housing projects on a bitter winter afternoon as police Lt. George Stamatakos drove through his boyhood neighborhood in Upper South Providence.

He was born in a mansard-roofed house on Point Street and lived in the neighborhood until he was 14. Even back then, in the 1960s, he said, children growing up in the Lockwood neighborhood had to be street smart.

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---Gallery: Browse images of this unique initiative, by Journal photographer Kris Craig

Your turn: Who deserves a second chance?

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Map: the Lockwood neighborhood

"Making Communities Safer: Youth Violence and Gang Interventions That Work" -- David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, testifies Feb. 15 before a House subcommittee

High Point West End Initiative: Project description, log, and preliminary impact analysis, July 2004

The Criminal Justice Institute's management quarterly article on High Point, N.C., program, fall 2006

As a rookie on his first tour and now as the lieutenant commanding the district, Stamatakos has seen drugs bring crime, gun violence and murder to this neighborhood, which hugs Route 95 in the South Side. After more than 26 years on the job, Stamatakos has become frustrated as he’s seen how police stings clear the streets of drug dealers for just a short reprieve.

Up in the Lockwood Plaza high-rise on Lockwood Street, Barbara Neal sits in the living room of her apartment as her granddaughter fixes her hair. Framed pictures of her 10 children, 27 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren cover the walls. She’s been here six years. All she wants is to feel safe.

She remembers drug dealers rushing her car as she left for work. She’d change her route, but the dealers were everywhere, at any time. “You’d slow down for the stop sign, and they’d run up to you — ‘Yo, Yo, you want something?’ ” Neal said.

William Fletcher has hustled these streets. He was 9 when he started hustling in the Chad Brown projects across the city. His father was gone, his mother died. No one gave a damn about him, he said, so he found ways to survive.

“At 9, what are you going to do when there’s no food in your house, and no one to feed you, and you’re not going to let your siblings starve?”

Now 30, Fletcher was still hustling. He didn’t think much about the future. He never thought he had one. “In your mind, you think you’re somebody important,” he said, “but the people in the street don’t look at you for who you are. They look at you for what you’ve got. The only thing you worry about is, are the police coming to get you?”

He ended up working Lockwood, where dealers have owned the street corners for a long time. They brazenly clustered in groups outside the Lockwood Market and N&H Grocery around the corner. They roamed up and down Pine Street — a tree-lined street with old houses that became known as “crack highway” for the drug dealers who trolled it and the customers who came off Route 95 looking for their fix.

There was a moment last July when a man pulled up to Fletcher in the Lockwood neighborhood looking for drugs. Something didn’t feel right. Fletcher shook off the feeling.

He didn’t know that the police had caught him on surveillance video — him and 103 other drug dealers across the city. The hammer of the law came down on all of them last fall, on convicted felons, on small-time dealers, on drug dealers carrying guns, on teenagers just getting into the business.

It was the biggest drug bust in Rhode Island’s history. But it was more than just a sting.

Tied into this citywide sweep was a unique initiative to clean up the open-air drug dealing in the Lockwood Plaza neighborhood. The initiative, which is being tried in several other cities in the country, hinges on an unusual partnership among the police, the residents in the neighborhood and a small, select group of drug dealers.

The streets of Lockwood have been quiet for four months now. But this is a neighborhood that’s seen decades of hard times. It’s too early to know how long the hard-won peace will last.

PROVIDENCE IS ONE of six cities in the nation that are trying this unusual initiative, at the recommendation of the National Urban League.

The program is called the High Point Initiative, named for the small North Carolina city that used the pilot program on a ghetto in its West End nearly three years ago. The police there tried it for the same reason that Providence is testing it now — because nothing else stopped the plague of drug dealing in the poorest neighborhoods.

The idea came from a college professor who helped produce Boston’s anti-gang project in the mid-1990s. But it took several years for David Kennedy, head of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, to convince any police department to give his anti-drug dealing initiative a try.

“Overt, chaotic public drug-dealing is one of the most destructive things a community can have,” Kennedy said, “whether there’s somebody standing on the street corners or in the apartments, it doesn’t matter.”

The drug markets bring crime and violence into communities that are already struggling, Kennedy said, and police efforts to curtail the dealing, such as drug sweeps, usually cause distrust in the community. At the same time, children in the neighborhood are lured by the fast money of drug dealing — and real jobs are seen as the path of suckers.

His solution incorporates what the police are already doing, with something they’ve never tried before.

The police start by going after the street-level drug dealers and their hierarchy in the worst drug-plagued area, or “beachhead.” The next step is unusual: The police select a few nonviolent offenders, the dealers who are young and have the potential to be rehabilitated. Instead of arresting them, the police give the dealers a second chance and turn them over to the community groups, such as the Urban League, which provide jobs, education and counseling.

The approach encourages the community to trust the police, Kennedy said, which leads residents to work with the police to prevent more drug dealers from returning. The dealers with a second chance serve as an example to the younger generation.

His initiative attracted the National Urban League, which invited Kennedy to its annual conference in the summer of 2005. He was on a community policing panel with Providence Police Chief Dean M. Esserman, whose department had been recognized as a model.

IT TOOK A YEAR before the Providence Police Department agreed to try the High Point Initiative, which is also being used in Winston-Salem, N.C., Kansas City, Mo., Tucson, Ariz., and Newburgh, N.Y. Kennedy, the Urban League, and High Point police officers visited Providence several times to explain the concept, and several high-ranking Providence officers went to High Point to observe.

“We were open to it because we were tired of being a narcotics-arresting machine,” said Esserman, who knew Kennedy from when the professor was at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “And there’s something compelling about a second chance.”

The Urban League of Rhode Island was eager to try it. “It seemed like an opportunity to transform the neighborhood,” said Luis Aponte, an administrator at the Urban League and a Providence city councilman. “The conditions were also ripe. We had the presence of a police chief who demonstrated the willingness to work with the community, and the Urban League was often called in to be a conduit between the Police Department and the community.”

However, in the beginning, none of the Providence police were buying the idea. When Kennedy explained it for the first time, “we were all skeptical. It didn’t make any sense,” Stamatakos said. “We said, ‘You’re not giving us anything concrete, anything we can grasp.’ ”

Sgt. William Dwyer and others questioned the logic of being lenient on drug dealers. “Originally, I never thought about giving somebody a second chance. I was always, ‘Lock them up. Put them in jail,’ ” he said.

During a visit to High Point, Lt. Thomas Verdi, head of the Providence police narcotics unit, was struck by how different High Point was from Providence. The North Carolina city, 20 miles southeast of Winston-Salem, is half the size of Providence, and the ghettos there have more green space. “They don’t have the housing developments, the high-rises. They don’t have the [housing] projects like us,” Verdi said. “They don’t have the gang problems we do. We have dozens of ‘beachheads.’ ”

But the High Point police said the problems were the same — drug dealers five deep on corners, gunfire, prostitutes, robberies and murders. After the initiative in May 2004, the decade-old drug markets closed and haven’t revived.

Finally, the Providence police signed on, for the same reason. “Doing something is better than being skeptical and doing nothing,” Stamatakos said.

The police decided to tie the initiative into an aggressive drug investigation that Verdi and the narcotics unit had been working on since early last year. The detectives were going after the drug-dealing networks across Providence — from the street dealers to those supplying the drugs. By the time the months-long investigation ended last fall, the detectives had caught 104 drug dealers, seized 4 kilos of cocaine and grabbed 4 handguns.

The dealers were arrested all across the city, but a third had been caught in one neighborhood — the Lockwood Plaza and surrounding streets in Upper South Providence. It was no surprise to the police or the residents.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD IN Upper South Providence has traditionally been home to working-class families and immigrants — a community that has produced governors, judges, lawyers and political leaders. Superior Court Presiding Judge Joseph F. Rodgers Jr. was born on Dudley Street, and spent the first 26 years of his life in the neighborhood. “I would not have wanted to have been brought up in another state or any other city than South Providence,” Rodgers said.

The years have been hard on the Upper South Side. Construction of Route 95, which opened in 1964, ripped through a chunk of the neighborhood, taking down homes and a school, and dividing the South Side from downtown. The defection of a Greek church and the 1960s race riots drove many residents to the suburbs. Rodgers also blames the repeal of the residency clause, which required police and firefighters to live in the city, for causing an exodus.

“I can remember people not feeling safe anymore in the 1960s,” said Stamatakos. When the Greek church moved, “my family and others wanted to be holdouts … but it was a dangerous area, you had to be street smart.”

Today, amid the colorful old homes and fenced pocket yards of the public housing complexes is the busiest open-air drug market in the city. A few city blocks attract the most attention from the police. But because the neighborhood is home to mostly Hispanic and black residents, white police officers have been seen as outsiders.

Route 95 has given drug customers easy access to the neighborhood. Crossroads Rhode Island is at one end of the neighborhood and Amos House at the other. The homeless and drug addicts are customers and a perfect cover for dealers trying to blend in, the police said. Smaller children in the neighborhood are used as lookouts and runners.

The youngest crack cocaine dealer ever arrested in Providence — 12 years old — was caught in the neighborhood. Teenage boys have been murdered here, often over drugs. Rodgers estimated that in the last 10 years, he’s presided over trials for at least 10 murders that occurred within one tenth of a mile from where he grew up.

The crime has driven residents indoors and some even send their children away in the summer to keep them safe.

“There are so many children stuck in these homes, so many elderly stuck in these homes, so many people going to work, and they’re all held down by just a few drug dealers,” said Robert McCutcheon, an administrator in the Department of Corrections who grew up in the neighborhood.

AS THE POLICE PLANNED their extensive drug sweep, the Urban League of Rhode Island started to build the safety net that would sustain the handful of dealers selected for a second chance.

President Dennis Langley and Aponte knew the Urban League had to address the reasons the dealers were involved in crime in the first place — supporting a family, lack of a job and education, feeding a drug habit. The Urban League pulled together local religious leaders, social service agencies, school officials, political leaders, businesses and medical providers. The agency asked for services from some and for job opportunities from others.

Meanwhile, the police kept their investigation confidential. Only they would decide which neighborhood would be selected and which drug dealers would be eligible for the second chance.

When the investigation ended, Maj. Stephen Campbell, Verdi and Assistant Attorney General Bethany Macktaz reviewed the criminal records of the dealers caught in the sting. Of the 104 arrested or wanted for drug dealing, 60 were convicted felons, 47 were violating probation, parole or bail, and 19 were habitual offenders.

They rejected anyone with a violent criminal record or caught with a gun. They looked at the youngest dealers, those with otherwise clean records, and those with a chance to be rehabilitated. The list was narrowed to seven boys and men, ages 14 to 30, who’d all been dealing in the Lockwood Plaza neighborhood.

They were dubbed “The Lucky Seven.”

CHIEF ESSERMAN WROTE letters to the Lucky Seven inviting them to a meeting at the police station, promising they wouldn’t be arrested if they attended.

The police and members of the Urban League personally delivered the letters. The police expected to find what they usually found on drug raids — houses strewn with trash and drug paraphernalia, and families who knew or condoned their children’s drug dealing. Instead, the officers found parents working, a father who was a minister, a mother working two jobs.

“One officer said to me, ‘My God, what are they doing different from us?’ ” Langley said.

One mother told the Urban League she’d given up on her son: Take him, I can’t do anything with him. Another parent said in disbelief, I call the police all the time on those drug dealers — and he’s one of them.

A hard-working mother in the neighborhood was stunned that her nearly 16-year-old son was selling drugs. Not my son! she insisted to the police in her well-kept apartment. I’m on him all the time. But the boy confessed. He wanted expensive sneakers and his family couldn’t afford them. He hid the sneakers at a friend’s house.

“I don’t think he had a sense of how wrong it was,” Campbell said. “Is it the kid’s fault, too, with all of the ways that kids are led to believe they need the clothes, the designer shoes, the jackets? Sometimes a kid gets swept up in all of this and doesn’t realize until he’s older that this isn’t as important as it was at 16.”

Fletcher heard from relatives and an ex-girlfriend that the police were looking for him. He met them in a parking lot. Expecting handcuffs, Fletcher walked away with the letter.

THE LUCKY SEVEN and their families were ushered into a room at the Providence Public Safety Complex. They were first met by clergy, community leaders and social services representatives, who told them their dealing was destroying the neighborhood. They also were offered help.

Then, the seven were ushered into the auditorium and seated in the front row. Behind them were poster-sized mug shots of the 26 other drug dealers from the Lockwood neighborhood who were under arrest or sought by the police. Those were the “ghetto celebrities.”

“Is this something I want to live up to?” Fletcher asked himself. “No.”

Law enforcement from Providence, the state, the federal government and corrections filled the room. The surveillance videos were played and the dealers were asked to acknowledge when they saw themselves on the screen — dealing drugs.

“It was shocking to me,” Langley said later. “These were young guys whose future was terminated for something stupid.”

When Fletcher saw himself on the screen, he started laughing. The cops gave him furious looks.

But he was laughing at himself. He was remembering that moment in the street, thinking he was “just chillin’ ” with the customers, but he was caught on tape by the police.

“You think you’re the slickest person in the world, and you see yourself and you have to rethink yourself fast,” said Fletcher, who apologized to the police chief for laughing. “How stupid was I to think I could do this?”

The dealers were told the police had the evidence and unsigned arrest warrants for each of them. Then they were told, “Tell us what you want.”

They could go back to the corner and sell drugs and go to jail. Or they could take the second chance.

All seven took the deal.

LANGLEY AND APONTE, who is running the initiative here in Providence, quickly realized that the seven needed help in areas that were basic to mainstream life. Some needed driver’s licenses. Some needed Social Security cards. Some needed help with housing and utilities. Some needed to be taught how to apply for a job.

The youngest, at 14, is now in school in Pawtucket. The Urban League is working to help his family with housing, food, social services and transportation. A 17-year-old boy is in school in Providence and being tested for special-education needs.

A 20-year-old man is working at the Welcome Arnold Shelter in Cranston and taking a class at CCRI. A 16-year-old boy is in school in Providence and was given a part-time maintenance job through the nonprofit developer SWAP — or Stop Wasting Abandoned Property Inc.

An 18-year-old man is working in maintenance at Amos House and working on his GED. Getting caught and threatened with arrest scared him, said Evelyna Pereira, whose daughter is dating the young man. Without the second chance, “oh, my God, he’d be lost,” Pereira said. “I’ve seen a lot of kids get lost in this system. It doesn’t seem to teach them anything except to go out and do crazy things.”

Fletcher has been given a $22,000-a-year job as a peer counselor with the Urban League. He works at a desk outside Aponte’s office and shadows Langley at his meetings. “I’m done with the streets,” said Fletcher, wearing a light orange shirt, slacks and a striped tie he kept playing with. “I’m having fun getting on the phone with someone and saying, ‘Man, I just got off work and I’m tired!’ ”

His smile is broad. He loves that he has a place to go every day, where people say “Good morning” to him. He says he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder anymore. He’s excited to be a leader for the younger kids.

“I’m getting leadership, respect for myself, pride,” Fletcher said. “I always kept my head up, but not like it is now. It’s been a learning experience, but it’s a good one. I have father figures I can look up to. I feel better walking through these doors [at the Urban League] than I do in my own home.”

But one of the seven is on the run. Carlton Barboza, 19, was a passenger in a car with stolen plates stopped by the police in December. The police said Barboza struggled with an officer, who used pepper spray to try to subdue him.

Barboza got away, but the police decided they wouldn’t charge him in the struggle if he returned to the program. Time has run out. There’s now a warrant to arrest him for assault and resisting arrest.

POLICE CRUISERS AND unmarked cars troll Lockwood as often as the drug customers used to. Pine Street is deserted. The doorways of the N&H Grocery and Lockwood Market are empty of the teenage boys and young men who used to throng there. No one is hanging out on street corners. No one is hanging out anywhere.

Dwyer, who’s overseeing the Lockwood Initiative, cruised through the streets one late winter afternoon. Usually, there’d be two to five dealers out, Dwyer said. Now, you can’t turn a corner without seeing a police cruiser, he said.

Housing Officer Maxwell Dorley stopped to chat. “It’s dead out here,” Dorley said. “All I’ve seen is a kid cleaning up trash on Broad Street.”

The Police Department has spent $33,335 in overtime on the Lockwood Initiative since Dec. 1. The police began to scale back its overtime and coverage in the neighborhood in January. Then there were two shootings in the neighborhood last month, connected to a decades-old Mount Hope-South Side feud. The police stepped up patrols again.

“We’ve had a huge degree of success here and nobody wants to lose it,” Stamatakos said. “It’s kind of a point of pride. We said it wouldn’t work, and we’re working hard so it will.”

Undercover detectives have tested the market by trying to buy drugs from the streets. They’ve made four arrests for drug possession since Dec. 1, but the police have found no dealers, so far.

There’s still skepticism. “Time will tell,” Verdi said. “It’s somewhat unrealistic to believe a year and a half from now there will be no drugs in Lockwood without police intervention. What’s to prevent some of the inmates at the ACI that get released and go back to Lockwood — what’s to prevent them from setting up shop?”

Isn’t it possible that crime is down because so many drug dealers have gone to jail? Not necessarily, the chief says.

“I don’t believe just the arrests would have eliminated the problem,” Esserman said. “I believe this strategy has a chance. We have enormous support from the community, because these are their children being given a second chance. The Police Department is not seen as an occupying enemy.”

COFFEE STEAMED in the back of the community room at the Lockwood Plaza high-rise one late January afternoon. Fletcher and another member of “The Lucky Seven” stood in an alcove as about 50 residents assembled in the brightly lit room to talk with the police. Esserman, Aponte and several high-ranking police officers told the residents they wanted to know whether the initiative was working.

Ken Cabral, a resident on Point Street, spoke first. “I take my hat off to the Providence Police Department.”

He’s lived in the neighborhood for years and saw how the dealers ruined it for other residents. But for the last few months, it’s been quiet, Cabral said, so quiet that he’s taken a walk in his own neighborhood at 2 in the morning and felt safe.

“The Providence Police Department has changed attitudes, changed race relations, and now we’re getting the fruits of what we sow,” Cabral said. “It could go either way, if we’re not vigilant. That’s on the part of the neighbors.”

One resident after another talked about the peace that had settled over their neighborhood. “It’s so quiet that I begin to wonder if we’re in the same neighborhood,” said Joseph Vileno Jr., a member of the 11th Ward Committee, who’s lived here for 26 years.

Barbara Neal said the drug dealers who used to rush her car were gone. But she was worried the dealing had merely moved indoors to her Lockwood Plaza building, because security wasn’t on all night and customers could be buzzed in.

This is the hard part, Stamatakos said, of maintaining the peace. The police were making every call from Lockwood a priority, but they needed the residents to call them if they saw any drug dealers trying to return.

“We’ve taken a lot of pride in this, too,” Stamatakos said. “We don’t want [the drug dealing] to come back.”

The residents applauded the police and a few gave them a standing ovation. The police looked stunned. They’d never gotten a reception like this here. “I’ve been doing community policing for longer than anybody, and I’ve never heard this before,” Cmdr. Paul Kennedy kept saying. “Never.”

At the back of the room, the two members of “The Lucky Seven” were quiet. “It was kind of sad,” Fletcher said after most of the people had left. “Some of those women who spoke, they were my mom’s age. You don’t realize you’re affecting people’s lives like that.”

He’d heard that some of the drug dealers in other neighborhoods were waiting to move into Lockwood. The warmer weather would bring more people out, he knew. This spring would be the test whether the peace in the neighborhood was a fluke or the real thing.

But on this night, Fletcher heard the sincerity in the residents’ voices and their determination not to lose their neighborhood.

amilkovi@projo.com