Movin' On Up

Police officers Paul Luster and Mike Eickman turn onto 55th street and see a flash of money. Two men on the sidewalk glance up at the white cop car and take off in separate directions. Luster hits the gas and wheels the car around. "Now we have to choose," he says. "I hope we get the dealer."

The chosen one heads for Highland Avenue, walking at an even pace. He peers over his shoulder, turns his back, reaches into his pocket and turns again to show he is lighting only a cigarette. In one swift motion, Luster parks the car at an angle to the curb, slams home the gearshift and opens his door. The suspect flinches as the officers approach him rapidly. "I thought you guys were going to shoot me," he says, shaking.

Eickman grabs an opened 22-ounce bottle of St. Des kiwi strawberry malt liquor from the man's hand and frisks him. The cop snaps cuffs around the man's wrists and lowers him to his knees on the sidewalk. It's late afternoon on a Friday. A block to the west, former mayor Emanuel Cleaver's church, St. James Paseo United Methodist, blocks the flagging sun, throwing a cold shadow on the scene. A tinny voice sounds from Eickman's portable radio. The suspect's name is Ronnie. This is his second bust of the month. Last time, it was for cocaine.

Eickman fishes a moistened wad of brown paper towel from Ronnie's shirt pocket. A pinch of marijuana hides in the paper's folds, more seeds and stems than leaves. Next comes a broken cigarette. Then a scrap of tightly wrapped cellophane containing a tiny clump of powder the size and color of a garbonzo bean.

"That's nothing," Ronnie protests. "It's no good. I found it on the ground outside Paul's."

Same thing with the weed, Ronnie says -- it had been a freebie just waiting there on the ground. Luster thinks this is unlikely. The owner of Paul's Liquor & Grocery, located across Paseo from St. James, has a low tolerance for crime. Hard to believe he would let his parking lot become a free-drug bin. "So you got busted for coke," Luster says. "They want you to go to [addiction recovery] classes. Why you going around picking up dope?"

"I don't know. It was stupid."

"Yeah, it's stupid. It's so stupid, in fact, that I'm not buying it."

Ronnie's eyes are wide. "The stuff's no good," he says meekly. "Are you going to let me go?"

"No," Eickman scoffs. "You're going to jail."

Eickman and Luster are never lenient with drug offenders. Not in this neighborhood. Four days a week the two prowl the streets of Blue Hills, a stretch of more than 3,000 households lining up from the shady Paseo on the west to the littered gutters of Prospect on the east, from the young grass of Brush Creek Parkway on the north to the bustle of 63rd Street on the south. In a bygone era, Eickman and Luster would have been called beat cops. Today they're Community Action Network -- CAN -- officers. Luster, who has worked this area the better part of a decade, says Blue Hills used to be a "war zone," one of the most drug-infested sectors of Kansas City. These days the drug trade is a meager open-air market shifting from corner to corner, bust to bust. Today 55th and Highland is a mini hot spot, just a sniff away from Cleaver's church.

"This is not good," Ronnie wails. "I can't go to jail."

Shackled, he kneels a dozen steps away from his own front door. One by one, his neighbors come home from work. The woman who lives across the street from Ronnie creeps by in a wide sedan, craning her neck to see who's been caught. She pauses in her driveway and then again on her porch for a longer look. A man about Ronnie's age, in his late twenties, pulls up and steps out of a van, half glancing at Ronnie while unloading his tools. An older man wearing a security guard's uniform parks in front of a police van that has arrived. He steps past Ronnie on the sidewalk, eyeing his neighbor peripherally, not saying a word.

These people are the new warlords of Blue Hills.

In 1969, the Atkinson family migrated south from a neighborhood near the old Municipal Stadium to a turn-of-the-century country estate in Blue Hills. Surrounded by the smaller yet robust brick-and-stone bungalows built in the halcyon 1920s, their new house rose high on a small hilltop -- two stories with a windowed attic and a two-column porch. In the eyes of their daughter B.J., who was not quite in her teens, it was a palace. "Being young, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world," she says. "It was just like 'The Jeffersons' -- movin' on up."

But B.J. also noticed "for sale" signs planted up and down her block, stabbed into the ground by the white families who had populated Blue Hills for decades. From her porch she could see the family that lived across the street, their children romping around on the front lawn. She longed to join them, but they'd never given her so much as a welcoming smile. "I knew better than to ask them to play," she says.