I stood this morning a mile and a half from dense subsidized housing that is home to the hoodlums that hunt us mass transit users along this un-policed stretch of Old Eastern Avenue. By unpoliced I mean that patrol officers are no longer seen cruising by providing a deterrent. We do see the occasional speeding squad car with lights blaring, heading somewhere else. But the cops no longer linger where the street crime is, but are involved in more pressing concerns such as bringing in revenue via traffic tickets and also in fighting the drug war.

At 5:11 this morning a dark, unmarked car with blacked out windows cruised through the intersection with an SUV five feet behind it, its windows blocked out, rumbling along in the dark, headed across Old Easter on Stemmers Run where it turns into Turkey Neck Road, and merges with Highway 702 almost a mile down the road. These cops—federal, state, local, martian—are headed into a blooming ghetto, an opiate rose strangling the working people who are being hunted increasingly on the street, in their driveways and in their houses, with home invasions on the upswing, and being falsely reported as robberies and burglaries.

At 5:19 a caravan rumbles through the light at ten miles per an hour in the wake of the two porkmobiles. There are about ten vehicles, five feet apart, shaking the road surface: an unmarked SUV, a big rumbling pickup truck, two armored fighting vehicles that seem to hold six tactical cops each, an Emergency Medical Services van, an ambulance, the rest of the vehicles an assortment of unmarked cops cars.

Like the City, six miles south and west, when police activity is devoted to fight the drug war, the traditional deterrence role is reduced, with the police now limited to documenting the crime they are stretched too thin to deter. The belief that junkies are robbing and beating folks to pay for their habit when an area is ghettoized, is false, as is the claim that busting drug dealers will stop recreational mob attacks and hate-fueled beatings, when in fact addicts shoplift, beg, work and prostitute themselves for their drugs.

Who is attacking people at and near these bus stops at night?

According to the police blotter the attackers are identical, genderless, “unknown-suspects.”

At some point this summer I’ll find out.