A car pulls away from the stopped traffic at the intersection, into the left lane and stops next to one of the women. The driver of the car calls to her and gets the woman’s attention. She steps off the curb and leans into the driver’s window to talk. A few moments later she straightens up, looks across the street and gives an innocuous signal as she walks around to the passenger side of the car.

As the woman reaches the passenger door, a police scout car pulls out of its hiding place and screeches to a halt in front of the suspect’s car as another cruiser careens around the corner and boxes the car in from behind. Officers pull the man from his car, inform him of his rights, handcuff him, drive his car to a lot to be impounded and escort the man to a waiting paddy wagon to be taken to Third District Police Headquarters for processing. The "prostitute," actually an undercover policewoman, goes back to the police staging area, a parking lot hidden from view, to help fill out paperwork.

The bust takes less than a minute and the street is clear again as the officers wait for another john to try to make a pick-up.

In another part of the city, a black Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows prowls the

side streets and alleys of Anacostia looking for drugs. The driver knows where the open-air drug markets are and what they’re selling, so it’s only a matter of minutes before he finds what he wants.

A teen-age boy standing with a group of friends in front of a ramshackle apartment building spots the Town Car as it pulls up. He turns away and then makes his mistake: He runs. Police officers in another car snap to attention.

"He’s running!"

"Watch his hands!"

"Did you see it?"

"I saw it, I saw it."

Three Seventh District vice officers jump out of the first car and stop the boy as two others jump out of the second and begin searching the ground. As three officers interrogate the suspect, one of the other officers pokes through the rocks and rubbish in front of the apartment building. He finds "it": a dime bag of marijuana.

The suspect is read his rights and a patrol car is called to transport the boy to police headquarters for booking. The paperwork is finished and the cops pile back in the cars ready to do more "jump-outs."

***

When Charles H. Ramsey assumed command of the Metropolitan Police Department five months ago, he made drugs and prostitution his two major crime initiatives. At numerous community meetings, Ramsey stressed the importance of ridding the District of these "customer-driven" crimes. He vowed to target the customers and force them to go elsewhere to satisfy their vices. Those customers, however, still have to be busted one at a time, and in the Third and Seventh police districts, two men lead units that have quietly gone about doing what Ramsey has been publicly advocating.

Sgt. Frank Morgan is well known in the community as the man who heads the District’s prostitution task force. A trim, graying middle-aged man, he has an unassuming and friendly manner.

Morgan knows most of the regular prostitutes in the city because he has seen them travel through the station house many times. He knows most of the hookers police bust by name and those he doesn’t, he gets to know. He jokes with them about how many times they have been arrested and listens patiently as they complain about the unfairness of their arrests.

Lt. Thomas Rodman of the Seventh District vice squad, whose nickname in the ‘hood is "Lou," has a similar relationship with the drug dealers in his neighborhoods. Joking with a crew of marijuana dealers on Forrester Street, Rodman apologized for scaring them the previous week when the cops ran an operation targeting their customers. "Hey man, it’s just police work," one of the crew responded good-naturedly.

A resident of a nearby apartment building joked that it is a good thing Rodman is not an undercover agent because, being white, he could never blend in with this Southeast neighborhood. He enjoys joking with the neighbors and his targets and he especially likes pointing out that one of the cars the vice squad uses formerly belonged to Mayor Marion Barry.

Both men have a rapport with their subjects that comes from years of working the same problem areas in the District.

Both Rodman and Morgan, as well as other officers in their squads, said arresting the johns and drug buyers is often the easiest part of the job. At times it even seems too easy to make arrests, they said.

One night this summer, Morgan and his undercover unit made three simultaneous arrests. As johns in two different cars were trying to solicit sex from undercover policewomen standing half a block apart, a third man on foot was literally walked back to the police staging area by the other policewoman and arrested. The men in the other two cars also were arrested.

Rodman said the trick to making drug possession arrests is simple: the person who runs from the scene as the police cars approach is the guilty one. Then all they have to do is find the drugs the perpetrator dropped as he tried to flee.

With the paperwork and time involved in processing a single arrest, a lack of personnel is usually the main impediment to making more arrests.

Morgan said his unit can usually process only about 20 arrests a night. Rodman said his squad can handle only five or six arrests a day. And if they happen to arrest a minor, the arresting officer has to travel to the youth division on New York Avenue NW to process the arrest, effectively ending that officer’s day on the streets.

Morgan’s prostitution task force was recently assigned more people, but Rodman said the size of his vice squad hasn’t changed in years. He is assigned nine officers and two sergeants, but with officers on medical leave and one on limited duty, he said he is rarely able to put more than five or six on the streets at a time.

Despite the personnel and time constraints they work under, both have had successes in their operations.

Prostitution arrests have been up this summer in the area south of Logan Circle and some residents say they’ve noticed a decrease in prostitution-related traffic in the neighborhood.

Rodman said his main target area, a one-block stretch of Forrester Street in the southernmost corner of Ward 8, had at one time reported nearly two dozen homicides in an 18-month period. He said since he made that street his squad’s main initiative area there have been only two homicides in the past year.

Both units have also expressed frustration toward the U.S. Attorney’s Office for its reluctance to prosecute misdemeanor offenses like solicitation and marijuana possession. But they also said that not making these arrests sends the wrong message to the community.

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator