ON THE FRONT LINES

The glass doors of Hometown Market seem to be in constant motion. People
flow in and out as cars try to maneuver in the crowded lot of this corner
store in Lorain. They wait in line to pay for their $4.25 packs of
Marlboros, 2-percent milk and lottery tickets.

The red Cherokee is parked in one of the spaces facing West 22nd Street,
under the sign that says "American and Spanish Food, Cold Wine and Beer to
GO!" A man sits in the driver's seat with the engine running.

To anybody else, the utility vehicle would blend in with the other cars on
this Friday night, but to Officer Miguel Baez, it may as well have a
bright, neon arrow pointed right at it.

After eight years on the Lorain police force, and most of this year spent
patrolling the underbelly of the city for the Street Crimes Unit, Baez, a
Lorain native, knows how to spot potential drug busts.

"Turn around," Baez says.

Officer Corey Middlebrooks, like Baez, an eight-year veteran of the force
from Lorain, slows the unmarked police vehicle with tinted windows and
pulls into a driveway about 500 feet past the store. Baez looks over his
shoulder, keeping an eye on the Cherokee. Middlebrooks backs out and pulls
to the curb.

"Just chill," says Baez.

Up ahead, the parking lot remains busy, but Baez isn't looking for a customer.

"Should we go?" asks Middlebrooks.

"No. Somebody is walking from back there."

Baez doesn't have to explain. Middlebooks knows that "back there" means a
suspected drug house in the area behind Hometown Market.

A few seconds later, a man appears from the side of the store and heads for
the Cherokee. He hops in the passenger side and the driver pulls out.

"These people make it so obvious," says Baez. "Follow them."

With that, another night of trying to keep drugs off the streets officially
begins for Lorain's Street Crimes Unit.

Middlebrooks quickly catches up to the Cherokee. Baez punches the license
plate number into a laptop computer attached to the car's console.

They need a reason to stop the Cherokee. Figuring that the passenger came
from a suspected drug house isn't enough. Lucky for Baez and Middlebrooks,
drug users usually aren't sticklers for traffic laws. They get their reason
at the first stop sign.

No turn signal.

Middlebrooks flips a switch and a blue light begins flashing on the dash.
The Cherokee pulls over on West 21st Street. Baez is out of the car before
it stops. Middlebrooks whips it into park and heads for the Cherokee's
driver's side. As Middlebrooks gets information from the driver, Baez asks
the passenger to step out of the vehicle.

The passenger is a large man. Baez, who is about 6-foot, cuffs him and
begins patting him down. The man is wearing gray sweatpants. When Baez gets
to his waist he feels something strange, almost like a small stick poking
through. He continues on to the legs and ankles before feeling the man's
waist again.

"Hey," Baez yells to Middlebrooks, "come on over here."

The two officers lead the man off the grass near the curb and onto the
sidewalk.

"Do you have anything on you?" Baez asks.

"No."

Baez asks a couple more times. He gets the same response. But Baez can feel
something in the man's waistband. The man is hiding something, and he knows
that Baez has caught on.

So he begins to shake his right leg, trying to knock loose whatever is in
his pants, hoping it will fall to the ground unseen by the officers.
Middlebrooks, a solid 6-foot-5, tries to hold him still as Baez feels
around the man's ankles.

"Stop moving," says Middlebrooks in a tone coated with warning.

But he won't stop. The three men on the sidewalk have an audience now.
Residents are watching from porches, front doors and windows. The driver
sits quietly in the Cherokee. Suddenly, the man abandons his jig and,
despite being handcuffed, lurches forward in an attempt to break free from
the officers.

"Oh," says Middlebrooks, "this is how it's going to be?"

The man is on the grass almost instantly. He hits face-first with a thud.
Middlebrooks plants a knee in his back.

All three catch their breath for a moment.

"OK," the man says. "It's in my leg."

"Now you tell us?" asks Middlebrooks, exasperated. "After we take you to
the ground?"

Baez pulls a bag of marijuana from the man's pants. It's barely enough to
fill a coffee mug.

"This is it?" asks Baez. "All that for this? I got six pounds off someone
last week and he didn't fight me."

"I was scared," the man says.

"You were scared," says Middlebrooks. "So we have to do the River Dance out
here."

v v v v

Getting drugs off the streets of Lorain has been the sole mission of
Middlebrooks and Baez since May, when they were put on street crimes.

The duo spends their time patrolling the streets of Lorain in an unmarked
car. Too many people recognize the headlights and shape of a Crown Victoria
cruiser in the dark. In the unmarked car, dubbed the "grant car" by
officers due to the way it was purchased, they can sneak up on drug users
and dealers.

Or, as the screen saver on the car's computer points out: "Beware, here
come the Jump Out Boys!"

But even in the grant car, under the cover of night, Middlebrooks and Baez
sometimes lose their element of surprise. Two girls, lookouts for whoever
is dealing drugs out of a house near General Johnnie Wilson Middle School,
have spotted the car.

A large Buick pulls up to the two girls. They lean in and talk for a
moment, then the car takes off. A man in an oversized sweatshirt comes by
next. The girls tip him off as well.

"I owe you," he yells back to them as he walks past the grant car.

It's a game. While the police study what drug users and dealers are driving
and where they live, they do the same with the officers.

"I had a guy who literally called the station and asked if I was working
that day," says Baez. "OOh, Middlebrooks and Baez are working 2-10 and I
have a felony warrant. These other (officers) don't know who I am so I'll
just hide out from 2-10.' That's how they do it."

Lookouts are common, especially during the summer. The grant car can pull
onto East 30th Street off Fulton Road in South Lorain, and by the time it
reaches Globe or Pearl avenues, the secret is out.

"In South Lorain the blocks are longer, so they have time to call or
whistle or whatever," says Baez.

Still, the Street Crimes Unit made more than 600 arrests this year. Many
came in South Lorain, which, according to Middlebrooks and Baez, is a
difficult area to deal with.

Unlike other areas of Lorain, where there is more space to cruise and more
spots to check, the south side is more compact. It's harder to stake out
one spot repeatedly. Harder, but not impossible.

When a shortage of officers forced Middlebrooks into regular afternoon
patrol earlier this year, he would park in a steel mill lot and watch the
bars along East 28th Street.

"Common sense tells you that if you see somebody walk into a bar at 3 in
the afternoon and stay for two minutes, they're up to no good," says
Middlebooks. "I probably made 10 cocaine arrests out of City Bar in one
week that way. It was almost too easy."

Often, people looking to buy drugs will park in a nearby store parking lot
instead of pulling up to a drug house. One person will make the deal. The
other will stay in the car, engine running. It's an easy tip-off.

Traffic violations are the officers' best friends. Failure to signal.
Failure to stop at a stop sign. Those two alone give Middlebrooks and Baez
a reason to stop suspects 90 percent of the time.

One Friday night, the grant car is headed down Pearl Avenue from East 28th
Street. The bars in the area are crowded. A car up ahead stops so a
passenger can get out and run into City Bar. The car continues down Pearl.
Middlebrooks follows.

The car turns right on East 29th Street, then right again on Globe Avenue.

"He's going right back," says Middlebrooks.

He's right. The car turns right again onto East 28th and eventually parks
on the street across from City Bar.

"What ordinary person would do that?" says Middlebrooks as Baez runs the
car's plates. "I mean, what's gas nowadays?"

About 10 minutes later they stop the car. It leads to a citation for
driving under suspension.

Not the arrest they were hoping for.

"We don't necessarily like doing this kind of stuff," says Middlebrooks.
"But it might lead to bigger stuff. We like doing felony arrests. Take them
off the street. That's when you get satisfaction."

v v v v

It was the middle of the day and Middlebrooks was on patrol when he came
across a man he knew had a warrant. When Middlebrooks approached him,
someone came out of a nearby house yelling, "Check his mouth! He's got a
bag of crack in his mouth!"

Middlebrooks asked the man to open his mouth. As he reached for the man's
throat, he swallowed the drugs.

Then the man started yelling.

"You see him? You see him," screamed the man to anybody who would listen.
"He's choking me! I don't have no dope! I don't sell drugs!"

Instead of just serving the man with his warrant and watching the drug
arrest slip away, Middlebrooks got creative.

He got a search warrant. Not to search the man's home.

To pump his stomach.

"We got the baggie of crack," says Middlebrooks. "That kind of killed his
lawsuit."

One thing about crack, once users have it, they don't care about anything
else. Earlier this year, Middlebrooks and Baez pulled their car next to a
woman who was walking in the middle of a South Lorain street.

She couldn't wait to get home to smoke the crack she had bought. She was
smoking it right there in the street.

"You need to get help," Middlebrooks told her.

"Mind your business," she snapped back. "Mind your business."

Another time, Baez came across a young man with a warrant who was dealing
drugs near Hometown Market. Baez, in a car in the store's parking lot,
watched as the guy, wearing a latex glove, reached down the back of his
pants, pulled out a bag of crack and sold it to someone.

"I jump out and he's like, OWhat?"' says Baez. "He's got a latex glove on
with doo-doo all over it and he's acting surprised. And people go home and
smoke that stuff."

One man hid his crack pipe behind the license plate on the back of his car
and claimed a drug user must have stuck it there.

"Yeah," Middlebrooks told him, "You."

But the drug stop that had both officers shaking their heads for a long
time came at East 31st Street and Globe.

As they pulled over the vehicle, something was thrown from the back
passenger seat. It turned out to be a bag of crack.

In the back seat, a mother was flanked by her two sons. Middlebrooks and
Baez weren't sure who had thrown the bag from the car, but they suspected
it was the teenage boy closest to the window it flew out of.

Both his brother and mother admitted it belonged to the boy, but he had his
own story.

"That's my mom's," he said.

"What?!" said his mother.

"That ain't mine," the boy said. "I'm not going to jail for you, Mom."

They pulled the boy aside.

"You know we're going to take your mom to jail if this is hers," they told him.

"Well," he said. "She shouldn't be doing drugs."

Looking back now, Middlebrooks and Baez still can't believe it.

"It took a while, but he finally admitted it was his," says Middlebrooks.
"But that's just a lack of respect."

v v v v

Roman's Groceries sits at the corner of Pearl and East 29th in South
Lorain. The grant car is using the cramped parking lot to make a U-turn,
but when Baez sees a carload of young girls yelling and swearing in front
of the store, the officers pull back into the lot.

There are four girls in the car and another outside of it. They stop
yelling when Middlebrooks and Baez approach.

"Are you driving?" Middlebrooks asks the girl in the driver's seat.

"I ain't driving," she snaps. "I'm 15!"

"Well you're in the driver's seat and the car's running," says Middlebrooks.

The girl gets out and stomps to the other side of the car. She stands next
to the passenger door with her arms crossed.

"Why are you standing so close to me," she says to Baez. She begins tapping
her hand on the hood of the car to display how annoyed she is. The girls
are told to leave.

"When I was 15 years old I was way bigger than my mom," Middlebrooks says
later in the grant car. "There is no way I would ever disrespect her. I had
to address my elders as OSir,' and OMa'am.' Period. No exceptions."

The young people they deal with daily, though, laugh at that. For them,
respect isn't gained through age or authority.

Aside from the city not having a jail, the biggest problem officers in
Lorain deal with, says Middlebrooks, is a lack of respect.

"(Young people) will tell you in a minute, OI'm a soldier! You can't do
nothing to me!,"' says Middlebrooks. "They don't care. They got some kind
of code I don't understand. OWe're street warriors!"'

The ultimate lack of respect came a little over a year ago for
Middlebrooks. He was in his home, watching television with his wife, when
he saw an orange glow through a front window.

A car was burning in his driveway.

It wasn't his car. It belonged to a crack dealer who decided to use it to
send a message.

Up to that point, Middlebrooks only had the occasional swear word directed
at him from delinquents near his home.

"But this was bad," he says. "That was arson. They could have caught my
house on fire."

Middlebrooks, who is black, has been called a snitch and a sellout by young
black people in the city. He counters by telling them that the poison
they're pushing is killing their community. But they scoff at that.

"It's like we're the enemy," says Middlebrooks. "It's as if they like
what's going on in the streets. But they don't have to deal with the kid
who hasn't seen his parents for weeks because they're on drugs, and the kid
is starving and you have to take him to McDonald's just to give him
something to eat.

"They don't deal with that stuff. They just spend the money. They separate
themselves from that."

v v v v

Middlebrooks and Baez are products of Lorain's low-income housing.
Middlebrooks graduated from Southview, Baez from Lorain High.

For them, the job is more than just getting drugs off the streets. It's
about helping their home.

"Just because you smoke crack doesn't mean you're a terrible person," says
Baez. "Some of these people are just sick. Drugs just take everything out
of them. So sometimes you have to sit back and understand that.

"You have to let them know that you understand how they feel and why they
keep doing this, but they need to find a better way."

A chubby, middle-aged man leaves a suspected drug house near Washington
Avenue and makes it half a block before the Jump Out Boys introduce themselves.

If he had anything on him, he swallowed it. Middlebrooks notices the man
can barely lift his tongue during a mouth check. It's a sign he's had crack
in there.

The man is wearing a stained T-shirt that used to be white. On his head is
a cap that reads, "No. 1 Dad." He has a warrant for driving without a
license. As the officers wait for a cruiser to transport him to the county
jail, the man admits he has a crack problem.

"You need to get help," Middlebrooks says.

"I know," says the man, looking at the sidewalk.

The man doesn't have a penny on him. Middlebrooks suspects he spends every
cent he gets on crack.

"Somebody like him, we'll remember," Middlebrooks says later. "He said he's
from Avon, but he will be back. He has a drug problem."

"And we can't do everything," says Baez. "It comes down to education and
people just helping people instead of sitting back and saying, OOK, who
cares? I'm not doing it. I'm not going to worry about it.'

"Well, you have to worry about it because it's going to come into your back
yard."

Both officers talk about the need for the community to help. The police
can't do it alone, they say.

"(The Street Crimes Unit would) have to hit the streets 24/7," says
Middlebrooks. "They always adapt. But then, there are guys we've been
dealing with for eight years. We'll catch them, lock them up and they'll
come back out here and do the same thing."

The grant car turns down another street. Two men and a woman are walking
down the sidewalk. Middlebrooks and Baez know the woman. They call her
Fantasia.

The woman is short and very thin. She's wearing dirty slippers. Not only is
Fantasia a drug addict, she's been known to prostitute herself.

The grant car slows next to the trio. Baez asks Fantasia where she's going.

"I'm going to get sex," she says, seemingly proud of her answer.

Later, they pull over a car carrying Fantasia and her two friends. The
driver doesn't have a license. Wherever they are headed, they'll have to walk.

"We remember Fantasia when she was a lot healthier," says Middlebrooks.
"She had a lot of weight on her, and that wasn't too long ago. She'd come
up and say Ohi' to us.

"Now, two years later, she's as thin as a rail and strung out on crack
cocaine. It's sad."

v v v v

Rain taps the windshield as the grant car sits in the darkness of East
29th, about 300 feet from Globe. Many residents of this section of South
Lorain complain about the lack of bright, or even working, street lamps. It
contributes to the waning sense of safety in the area.

But Middlebrooks and Baez use the darkness to their advantage as they watch
the activity around a Lorain Metropolitan Housing Authority complex on the
other side of Globe.

They peer through binoculars and watch as people make their way through the
parking lot on foot. After a few minutes, a man in a hooded sweatshirt and
baggy jeans exits an apartment and gets into a green Explorer. He pulls out
of the parking lot and heads toward the intersection of East 29th and
Globe. The Explorer rolls right through the stop sign and turns left on
East 29th.

"He didn't stop," says Middlebrooks as he hits the headlights and takes off.

The Explorer pulls into another LMHA complex. The grant car comes roaring
in right behind it.

"Stay in the car!," yell Middlebrooks and Baez, their hands on their
holstered guns as they move closer to the Explorer. After making sure
there's just one person in the vehicle, they tell the driver to step out.

The smell of marijuana hits Middlebrooks as soon as the door opens. The
man's eyes are bloodshot. Middlebrooks recognizes him.

"Norman," says Middlebrooks. "How have you been?"

Middlebrooks and Baez come across the same faces over and over, week after
week. Some of that has to do with Lorain's lack of a jail. Instead of
facing a night or two behind bars, drug dealers or users know they will
only be given a citation.

The process offers little interruption, if any, in their lives. Some don't
even pay the fines or show up in court.

"Some people just don't care," says Baez. "They go right back to what they
were doing. We have a lot of repeat offenders."

A man caught buying marijuana near Hometown Market was dealt with by Baez
in the past during a domestic disturbance.

A driver stopped for driving under suspension was caught by Baez a year
earlier with drugs and a crack pipe.

Middlebrooks served a man urinating behind a bar on East 28th with a
warrant for domestic abuse.

And then there's Norman. The officers are familiar with his whole family.
His mother often shows up at the scene when she hears his name on her scanner.

They know Norman's girlfriend lets people deal out of her apartment. They
could try to get her evicted, but the dealers would find a new place to deal.

Usually, Norman is loud and brash when he's stopped, cussing out the
officers. But this time, he stands in the rain quietly as his vehicle is
searched by Baez, and then a K-9 unit.

"Where are you working?" Middlebrooks ask him.

"What do you mean where am I working. I don't work," says Norman, who has a
pager on his hip, along with a cell phone, and about $200 in his pocket.

The Explorer turns out to be clean, but Norman won't be driving it anywhere
else tonight. His license is suspended.

"I was just moving it for my pregnant girlfriend," says Norman.

"So who was smoking the marijuana?" Middlebrooks asks.

Norman is silent.

"Don't have nothing to say now, huh?" says Middlebrooks.

A few minutes later, Norman has his citation and begins the short walk back
to his girlfriend's apartment.

He pulls his hood tight over his head to block the rain. Then, he fades
into the shadows along East 29th and is out of the grasp of the Street
Crimes Unit.

Until the next time they stop him.