Read S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. for Free Online Page A

sitting in a holding area, handcuffed.
    “Do you realize how close I came to killing you?” Lou said.
    “Who the hell are you? You’re too young to be a roller.”
    Lou brushed his coat aside and showed the badge and gun clipped to his belt.
    “Goddamn, you are a roller!” the man exclaimed.
     
    By the early eighties, Lou was working as a homicide detective, discovering that he liked jumping into investigations, gathering evidence, and figuring out ways to coax—or leverage—witnesses to talk. Lou took the sergeant’s exam when he was thirty. He aced it. Same with the exams for lieutenant and captain. In a span of three years, he rose from officer to captain.
    At thirty-three, he was young for a captain—and he figured he had maxed out. Tests determined promotions up to that rank; all promotions beyond it were political, approved by the mayor. Barry was known to favor certain high-ranking commanders, who in turn looked out for other white shirts in their clique. Lou never joined a faction and didn’t put any energy into departmental politics—he was all about being the po-lice , enforcing the law and keeping the peace. Being part of the clique meant telling his chief whatever he wanted to hear, and Lou wasn’t wired like that.
    Beyond that, Lou believed, the city’s political system for police appointments wasn’t helping matters on the street. People in dozens of neighborhoods overrun by drug dealing and violence pressured elected officials for relief. The pols leaned on the police brass. The white shirts responded with a series of highly publicized sweeps, arresting dozens of street dealers at a time. These operations got great play on the TV news shows, local residents felt grateful, and the Metropolitan Police Department bumped up its arrest statistics. MPD made some forty thousand arrests between 1986 and 1988, in Operation Clean Sweep, which focused on street dealers and buyers.
    But a day or two after police made arrests, the street dealers were either back out or replaced by other slingers. The buyers lined up again. The police department didn’t even bother to interview arrestees to try to compile intelligence on the serious players. The real dealers and enforcers weren’t on the street making retail sales, so the sweeps didn’t touch them. MPD was going after garden snakes and ignoring the cobras and pythons.
    Not only did the sweeps have no lasting impact, they were actually counterproductive, Lou thought. They made the police look like ineffectual amateurs.
    In the city’s most violent neighborhoods, detectives heard the same names over and over in the wake of a shooting. The fact that there were more than four hundred homicides in the city didn’t mean that there were four hundred killers. There were a relative handful of shooters—two, maybe three dozen—killing a lot of people, Lou believed. They tended to operate in specific neighborhoods, where everybody knew who they were. Most killings weren’t whodunits. The challenge was getting frightened witnesses to testify.
    Lou had given the problem a lot of thought. He’d developed a plan for how to go after the most violent players in the city.
    All he needed was a chance to put it into action.
     
    Six days after Barry flipped the bird, I began my first Saturday in town with some pickup hoops at the downtown YMCA. Then I settled down to watch a college football game. After a couple of beers, I upgraded to gin and tonics. Three drinks later, I was happily drunk.
    I was in no condition to drive. But in L.A. I’d gotten behind the wheel dozens of times while hammered and had never been pulled over. It was a warm, sunny September day. I wanted to explore my new neighborhood, my new city. What harm could come of that?
    My street was dominated by Victorian row houses. There was an old four-story apartment building at the far end of the block, directly across the street from a church. I drove a block past the apartment building and the church and