Police sweep nets 527 arrests in 10 days

 

Geneva Lewis sits outside her corner hair salon at 15th and Elm streets, perched in a wheelchair, and shoos away the "dope boys."

"When I say get off my corner, I mean it: Get off my corner," the 74-year-old said Thursday, before digging into a Styrofoam container of pancakes in her lap.

Lately, she's had help.

For the past 10 days, police on bicycles and horseback or in their cruisers have fanned out and saturated some of Cincinnati's toughest streets, rounding up people and making good on long-standing warrants.

As of Wednesday evening, 527 people had been arrested and 508 warrants had been served.

The stepped-up police effort comes after two people from the suburbs were shot and killed during the first week of April as they tried to buy drugs.

The added police presence and the zero-tolerance policy for even the most minor offenses, such as jaywalking and spitting, aren't the only things officials had in mind April 10 when they announced the monthlong cleanup effort.

In addition to Thursday's sweep through the area to help people such as Lewis chase away the drug dealers and make more arrests, the sound of hammers, shovels and rakes echoed through the neighborhood of 19th-century buildings.

The area is riddled with trash and vacant properties - about 500 in all. The blighted buildings provide refuge for rats, addicts, the homeless and women who sell sex to support their drug habits, police say.

At one point Thursday morning, three people were rousted from sleep when contractor Ron Taylor and his crew pulled up to a former apartment building on Moore Street - what police and neighbors call an "abandominium" - to put plywood over its empty windows. The three wound up in a police cruiser because they had outstanding warrants.

Inside, where the two men and woman had been sleeping, police found crack pipes and syringes.

"What it takes for people to live like this is beyond me," Taylor's grandson, Erik Taylor, 24, said.

Police think they know: drugs.

"That man's drugged 24/7," Lewis said of one man. Reginald Ballew, 45, was carted off to jail along with Leonard Thomas, 57, after police said they found them down the street from Lewis' salon with several hundred dollars' worth of heroin and pills.

Ballew's record reveals a variety of charges, including trafficking in drugs, disorderly conduct, rape and domestic violence against children. Some were dismissed, but he has been convicted of felonious and aggravated assaults.

"With all the guns and the shooting and the throwing of wine bottles going on, I appreciate it any time anybody wants to help this neighborhood," Lewis said. "I really try and keep my own corner clean because I got my babies and my grandbabies down here. So I watch them boys, and I keep them off my corner."

JUST ONE SHOOTING

Since the sweep started, there has only been one shooting in the notoriously violent neighborhood, Capt. Kenneth Jones said Thursday. There are no records kept for the average number of shootings in a 10-day period in the area, but police say one is well below the usual.

Sgt. Jim Perkins, an Over-the-Rhine beat cop, can also see the difference in just 10 days.

"It's dead out here; it's like being in Hyde Park," he said. "Everyone is minding their P's and Q's; it's great."

Ron Taylor, 66, grew up here and said it almost broke his heart in the 1960s when his family outgrew its Over-the-Rhine apartment.

Now, the Price Hill man is back at least once a week boarding up buildings the city has declared vacant.

Taylor said that what he sees on the job is more heartbreaking than when he said his goodbyes four decades ago. "You got rats, and rodents and even the two-legged vermin that we are trying to keep out," he said.

Many of the boards Taylor and his crew nail up become fresh billboards for graffiti and rest-in-peace signs for the dead.

"Yep, they got that one," police Officer Mark Williams said of a new "R.I.P." sign.

Down on Green Street, the 100 or so drug peddlers who usually hang out scattered as police, Taylor's crew and a building inspector moved down the street, searching for vacant buildings.

"This is unacceptable. This is just unacceptable," Sgt. Steve Saunders said as he stood outside what has been dubbed the "beer cemetery" - a patch of land, roughly 50 by 150 feet, covered with beer bottles, empty cans and a decomposing cat. "Whose gonna want to buy property next to this?"

OWNERSHIP LACKING

Adjacent to the beer cemetery is a shanty in a breezeway - complete with a mattress and walls on three sides, courtesy of a former effort to clean up the neighborhood and board up the glassless sockets of empty buildings.

Police and community leaders have long said Over-the-Rhine problems stem from lack of ownership.

Only about 4 percent of the roughly 7,000 people who call this place home own where they live, city statistics show.

Throw in the fact that most of the people causing the problems come here to sell drugs on the streets all day - and then return to the comfort of their own homes - and the mixture can be toxic.

"Without ownership, if something falls apart, or breaks, or if it's dirty, are you really going to care?" Williams asked. "And if you come down here and stand on the streets all day long, what do you care where you throw your beer bottle?

"Over-the-Rhine is getting a bad rap all because of the people who don't even live here. The majority of people in Over-the-Rhine want the same thing that people in all the other neighborhoods want: They want a good, safe neighborhood."

Lewis couldn't agree more.

"Thank you. Thank you," she said within easy earshot of the nearby police. "I'm happy to see the police. I sure am. I sure am."

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Cincinnati OH Abandoned Properties