Each month, the Advocate visits with Sgt. Jim Little, Sr. Cpl. Pam Maines and Sr. Cpl. Rick Janich of the East Dallas Storefront police station, 1327 N. Peak Street (670-5514). The Storefront is best-known for its bicycle patrol officers, who pedal the streets of East Dallas weekdays. The City of Dallas funds the Storefront, but numerous volunteers and organizations provide both hours and funds to develop special programs aimed at building better relations among police officers and neigborhoods. Editor’s Note: Pam was vacationing during this month’s meeting but new “bike” officer T.X. “Tri” Ngo joined the lunch. Tri is one of only two Vietnamese officers on the 3,000-plus Dallas police force. He has been assigned to the Storefront since October, but he just recently was trained and equipped for bicycle patrol.
Advocate: What has been going on for the past few weeks?
Rick: The last 10 days, it seems like everything we’ve touched has resulted in an arrest. We had one girl who was in a vacant apartment, and as we were standing there, she bent over and spit out a whole mouthful of crack cocaine. She had wrapped it in paper and had been holding it in her mouth, hoping we wouldn’t find it, I guess.
You know, we told someone else who had crack in their mouth that you have to be careful – if you swallow that stuff, you can die. And the person said: ‘How much of it do I have to swallow before I die?’
I mean, crack is pretty serious stuff. You don’t have to swallow much.
East Side and Junius (streets in the Junius Heights area) have also had lots of activity. Prostitution…it’s funny, but it all gets back to the bike philosophy: We drive up on them (the criminals) before they know it.
Just the other day, we rode up on a prostitute who was just finishing the job, and the guy is zipping his pants. I mean, we caught them right there in the street.
Advocate: You mean, she was actually working right in the street? Out in full view, with cards driving by the whole time and everything?
Tri: This was right near the Zaragoza Elementary School (4550 Worth), right there on the street.
Jim: We had a call from a woman the other day, and she said: ‘I can see this guy sitting out in the car in front of my home, and he’s been there a long time.’ She didn’t want to leave her home until she knew what he was doing. So she went out there and, when she started looking at the car a little more closely, she realized he wasn’t alone. And this was right on a residential street, right out in front of her house.
You know, we’ve pretty much waged open war on that area to let people know that the criminals can’t take over the neighborhood, that we won’t let them take over the neighborhood.
Advocate: In the scheme of things, how serious of a crime is prostitution? I mean, if murders and sex offenses and all of that are decreasing, is prostitution something we really should be worried about?
Rick: Prostitution is not a Part One offense (serious crime categories such as murder and robbery; Part One offenses are those listed monthly in the Advocate’s Crime Report statistics), so those numbers don’t really show up in the typical crime numbers reported in the papers.
Jim: The biggest problem is that where there’s prostitution, there’s usually other crime. There’s not a prostitute who ever lived who wouldn’t steal if given an opportunity, and that becomes a Part One crime. Where there’s prostitution, there’s always other crime, and usually it becomes more serious crime.
Advocate: In East Dallas, who do you find to be the typical customers of prostitutes?
Rick: Married guys, businessmen out on their lunch break. Really, they’re not usually people from the East Dallas area. But the word was out that East Dallas was the place to come (for prostitutes).
Advocate: I suppose that once you’ve arrested them, prostitutes are pretty eager to give up their life of crime, right?
Jim: No, they usually come back – if not to that area, then another one – and continue to be a problem.
Rick: We try to make as many arrests as we can, because they communicate with each other. After three or four days (of enforcement), they disappear. And if they come back,w e do it all over again.
Advocate: In general, what kind of people are the prostitutes you’ve been arresting?
Rick: The women, a lot of them, are just the scum of the earth. I hate to say it, but they are. Most are dirty, without many teeth. Some of them have drug habits, whatever, and they don’t appear to have any place to live or go.
One we arrested the other day had a $200-per-day drug habit, and most of their tricks run about $5 or $10 apiece, so that’s a lot of work every day just to pay for the drugs. And she still has to have money to eat and everything else.
It’s pretty sad, really.
Advocate: Here’s another topic: Staffing. With Tri you now have, what, four officers operating out of the Storefront?
Jim: A Cambodian officer also was just added to our staff. He’ll be working with the Asian community, providing more police services to the community, including being able to communicate with them. None of the rest of us can speak that language, although we’re looking at getting some language training along those lines.
You know, altogether, the whole force only has seven Asian officers at present, with four more in the hiring process. And one of the biggest problems we have in dispatching (when a non-English-speaking Asian calls in an incident report) is that it’s difficult to know what language someone is speaking.
Advocate: Are five Storefront officers enough?
Jim: I still need another one, a Hispanic officer, but I haven’t received a decision on that one yet.
Advocate: Tri, how do you like the Storefront?
Jim: He’s already made a big impact here by arresting some robbery suspects.
Tri: That was a couple of weeks ago, and they were associated with Asian gang activity.
Jim: Very few of the Asian gang members are local boys. The two they arrested came here from New York just to conduct their activity.
Tri had taken some pictures of some guys whose activity he didn’t like, and they were then identified from those pictures after the robberies.
Tri: I was working the gang unit, and we stopped some of the guys. We try to identify all of the gang members (in a neighborhood), so we take their pictures and then let them go – the pictures are for future use.
Advocate: Is it legal to take their pictures without a warrant or probable cause or something like that?
Rick: Well, if they’re just walking down the street, we can take their pictures. Anyone can take a picture of anyone in that case. We’re going to start doing that with prostitutes, too. We’re going to be getting a Polaroid camera to carry around on the bikes just for that reason.
