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Danielle Robinson, 5, received a poster at an outreach program at B.W. Cooper housing development in New Orleans, one of the nation's most violent projects.Crime
Highly touted crime-fighting tool axed
Police presence, safety drop in public housing across nation
People killed at B.W. Cooper are memorialized in spray paint. The violence at Cooper, where five men were killed this year, is often driven by the ready availability of guns and drugs, housing officials say.
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NEW ORLEANS — Sylvia Hall knows firsthand just how dangerous housing projects can be.
In the space of five years, she lost a husband and son to gun violence in the B.W. Cooper housing development in New Orleans, one of the nation’s most violent projects.
The violence in Cooper and projects across the country, say housing officials, is often driven by the ready availability of guns and drugs.
But the only federal program that specifically targeted guns and drugs in public housing was eliminated in 2001, shortly after the Bush administration and Congress passed tax cuts totaling $41 billion that year alone. The administration ended the Public Housing Drug Elimination Program, a $310 million-a-year crime prevention effort hailed by Republicans and Democrats alike.
Created in 1988, the program gave local housing authorities money and wide latitude to fight drugs in the projects. It was later expanded to combat violent crime.
In 1999, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development again widened the program by allowing housing agencies the option of buying and destroying guns from residents of the projects. HUD credited the buybacks with taking more than 20,000 guns off the streets between 1999 and 2000.
The Bush administration ended the gun buybacks in June 2001. Administration officials said the buybacks were ineffective and that new emphasis would be placed on punishing gun crimes.
The end of the drug elimination program has meant a drop in police presence in housing projects around the country. It has also forced local housing agencies to abandon other elements of their public safety plans.
Houston housing officials used $850,000 in drug elimination funds to hire city police and Harris County sheriff’s deputies to patrol all the projects, according to David Zappasodi, deputy director of administration for the housing authority. After the program was cut, the cash-strapped authority initially did away with all the extra police protection.
But senior citizens, worried about crime, demanded that police again patrol their buildings.
The authority, said Zappasodi, was forced to reach into its already-strained operating budget to hire officers to guard projects where the elderly are concentrated. Other buildings have no such protection, and crime is creeping upward, said the Houston housing official.
The impact of the drug program’s elimination is also evident in New York City, which lost $35 million a year in grant money.
Traditionally, the housing authority spent $20 million of that money repaying the city’s police department. The remaining $15 million went to combating graffiti and operating youth programs.
City police have patrolled public housing projects since 1995 under a deal with the local housing authority. In 2003, the city spent $118 million policing the housing projects but only received $88 million for its services, according to city budget records.
New York budget officials expect that the 2004 shortfall will exceed $49 million.
Additionally, the New York Housing Authority, which faces a $300 million budget deficit, has scaled back or ended youth programs entirely. These programs were also seen as deterrents to crime.
Local police agencies around the country have tried to maintain their patrols in the projects, a task made more difficult because of their new homeland security responsibilities and the leaner budgets that followed the terrorist attacks.
When it ended the program, Congress said money for drug and crime elimination would be put in local housing authorities’ operating budgets in fiscal 2002. But the money budgeted for operating and capital expenses this year is less than it was in 2000.
The drug elimination program has had strong support over the years.
In July 1994, Rep. James Leach, R-Iowa, credited the drug elimination program with helping reduce crime in Clinton, Iowa.
“The success of this partnership has been phenomenal,” he said. “This type of program is necessary if we are to make public housing developments decent and safe communities.”
In May 1996, Rep. Bruce Vento, D-Minn., and Rep. Rick Lazio, R-N.Y., said the program was “very successful” and “worthwhile” in helping protect those who live in public housing.
In April 2000, Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif., was even more emphatic.
“If (housing authorities) are unable to continue the drug prevention efforts, the problems will return,” he said. “Would we only allow a doctor to give enough medicine to reduce illness, or would we give enough medicine to cure the disease?”
Carlos Jackson, executive director for the Housing Authority for the County of Los Angeles, credited the program with helping bring down crime in public housing 68 percent over a decade.
In fact, HUD reported in 2000 that crime fell more sharply in public housing complexes than in the nation as a whole in the late 1990s.
Between 1994 and 1997, crime dropped in 37 of the 55 public housing authorities studied that had received drug elimination funds, according to the HUD analysis. The drop in crime outpaced the drop in crime citywide in 28 of the housing authorities, the report found.
Crime fell 32 percent in public housing in Seattle, 39 percent in Oakland and 58 percent in Galveston, Texas. In Salt Lake City, calls for police service in public housing fell 30 percent in a year.
The report acknowledged that the drug elimination program was just one of several anti-crime measures in those years. In 1996, HUD also started the “one-strike” system that evicted those who committed crimes while residing in public housing.
While housing authorities struggle to find ways to fight crime, tenants like Sylvia Hall continue to deal with daily tragedies. But Hall, who takes home $274 a week from her job as a presser in a dry cleaning business, said she makes too little to afford an apartment in New Orleans outside the projects.
Hall’s husband, Benjamin Hall Sr., was killed in B.W. Cooper in 1999 while returning home from visiting a sick friend. In February, Sylvia Hall buried her only son, Benjamin Hall Jr., 21, after he was shot outside her apartment.
She remembers the evening her son died in vivid detail.
“It wasn’t even dark when it happened,” she recalls. “We heard the door open and Benjamin was standing there. He said, ‘Mom, call an ambulance. I am shot.’
“At first, I didn’t see no blood, but he fell down on the floor. They said the bullet hit a main artery and that he bled to death.”
Including Benjamin Hall, at least five men were killed at Cooper this year. Another man sitting on his steps was shot in the head and survived.
A 15-year-old Cooper resident said to be a drug dealer and suspected of a 2003 killing was shot to death in March away from the project. And in June, police finally nabbed Antoine Johnson, considered the most wanted man in New Orleans.
Police linked Johnson, known to stay at Cooper, with killing a man and wounding five others in three separate shootings within a year.
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The Detroit News.
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