Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels addresses supporters after early returns showed him in third place in Tuesday’s primary election. (Grant M. Haller/PostGlobe)

Update: Mayor Greg Nickels is holding a news conference at 10 a.m.

His campaign spokesman, Sandeep Kaushik, declined to say what it’s about. But it comes on the heels of Thursday’s election count, which saw the mayor, currently in third place, actually lose some ground on being one of the two candidates who will advance to the primary.

If he does call it quits, Nickels will be the second incumbent Seattle mayor to be ousted in a primary. His predecessor,

 

Paul Schell, was the first to have that distinction in 45 years when he finished third to Nickels and Mark Sidran in 2001.

The King County Elections Office just released Thursday’s vote count. With 107,167 ballots counted, Joe Mallahan remains in first with 27.22 percent, followed closely by Mike McGinn at 26.69 percent and Nickels at 25.56 percent. Nickels trails Mallahan by 1,710 votes and McGinn by 1,170 votes.

With about 15,000 to 20,000 more ballots expected to be counted, things are looking very tough for the two-term mayor’s making it through the primary.

After seeeing Mallahan’s percentage total grow slightly from 26.48 percent Tuesday, and his lead over Nickels grow slighty, Mallahan campaign spokeswoman Charla Neuman said: “We’re ecstatic. It’s another sign voters wanted a change.”

But she stopped short of saying she was confident Mallahan will finish in the top two. “We’re not taking anything for granted, but we’re certainly enthusiastic,” she said.

The latest count did not change matters greatly. But Nickels, struggling to survive the primary, fell a little further behind McGinn in the race to finish in the top two and advance to the general election. He had trailed McGinn for second place by 1,016 votes Wednesday. He now trails by 1,170 votes.

Still, there was little sign that indications voters making up their minds in the last days of the election were going against him.

In July, the KING/5-Survey USA poll showed Nickels with 26 percent of the vote, while McGinn and Mallahan were mired at 8 percent each. In the past 10 days, the poll showed McGinn in particular gaining momentum.

That was reinforced Wednesday when Nickels, who was in third place on election night Tuesday, remained in third and lost a little ground while Mallahan passed McGinn into first place.

McGinn said the numbers are “still looking good, aren’t they? We extended our lead over third place, so it’s still good news.”

On Thursday, Mallahan extended his lead over McGinn slightly from 221 votes Wednesday to 540. He also extended his lead over Nickels from 1,236 on Wednesday to 1,710.

Joe Mallahan at his campaign event Tuesday night (Jim Gupta-Carlson)

See latest election results.

Read Tuesday night’s PostGlobe election coverage here and here .

 

Moments ago on Wednesday, the King County Elections Office released results from an additional 15,783 ballots cast in Tuesday’s primary election. They show T-Mobile executive Joe Mallahan now in the lead with 26.76 percent of votes counted, while attorney Mike McGinn has slipped to second place with 26.48 percent of the vote. The two are separated by 221 votes.

“Looks awesome” is all Mallahan campaign spokeswomen Charla Neuman could initially muster. Mallahan campaign workers high-fived one another at his Eastlake headquarters.

“It’s still nearly a three-way tie, but I’m delighted,” Mallahan said. He explained his late surge in both pre-election polls and in Wednesday’s numbers

“My insurance policy was the 20,000 calls our volunteers made in the last five days,” he said. “Real people talking to real people.”

Of a possible matchup with McGinn, Mallahan said, “The mayor is a very street savvy campaigner, and I’d be thrilled not to have too duke it out with him.”

 

Seattle Mayor Gregg Nickels addresses supporters after early returns showed him in third place in the primary election. (Grant M. Haller/PostGlobe)

“It’s an awfully close election,” McGinn said in an understatement. “It feels pretty good. We’ve actually stretched the lead on Nickels by a little bit.”

The news continues to be bad for incumbent Mayor Greg Nickels with 25.19 percent. He trails Mallahan by about 1,200 votes. Last night, Nickels was at 25.05 percent. A KING/5-Survey USA poll released Monday showed a late surge of support for Mallahan and McGinn.

“I don’t really know” why that is, McGinn said. “I think people paid more attention as time went on.”

The top two vote-getters go to the November general election. Another vote total release is slated for 4:30 p.m. Thursday. About 45,000 ballots from Seattleites remain to be counted.

It is a sign of just how concerned Nickels’ campaign is that it has observers in place at the King County Elections Office in Renton, according to Sandeep Kaushik, a campaign spokesman.

As for Nickels himself?

“He’s in a wait-and-see mode,” Kaushik said before Wednesday’s numbers came out. “There’s not a lot we can do at this point except let the county count the votes.”

Nickels’ spokesman acknowledged McGinn’s vote advantage actually went up a bit. But he had this spin: Nickels’ percentage of the vote went up slightly while McGinn’ss went up.

“If that trend continues there’s still a lot of votes left to be counted,” Kaushik said.

Joe Mallahan at his campaign event Tuesday night (Jim Gupta-Carlson)

Incumbent City Councilman Nick Licata may be on his way to wrapping up his re-election in the primary for Council Position 6. The 8:15 p.m. numbers released by King County Elections show him with 52.79 percent of the vote, challenger Jesse Israel with 29.99 percent and Marty Kaplan with 16.73 percent.

In Position 8, Mike O’Brien leads with 35.56 percent of the vote, followed by Robert Rosencrantz with 19.39 percent, Jordan Royer with 14.93 percent, David Miller with 12.22 percent and Bobby Forch with 12.02 percent.

In the race for Position 4, Sally Bagshaw is far out in front of challengers at 50.06 percent, followed by David Bloom at 18.17 percent, Dorsal Plants at 12.21 percent and Thomas Tobin at 10.17 percent.

Referendum 1, the so-called bag tax, looks to be headed to defeat. With 65,693 votes counted from Seattle voters, the no votes are 58.17 percent; the yes votes, 41.83 percent. With more than a 10,000-vote lead for

“No,” it’s hard to imagine that voters will approve the proposed fee as other ballots are counted over the next few days.

King County Elections just posted the first set of results in several races.

For Seattle mayor, with 65,693 votes counted, attorney Mike McGinn leads the field with 26.56 percent of the vote, followed closely by T-Mobile exec Joe Mallahan at 25.81 percent and two-term mayor Greg Nickels at 25.05 percent. The margin is tight enough that Nickels is only about 1,000 votes behind McGinn. James Donaldson has 9.24 percent, and City Councilwoman Jan Drago has 7.78 percent.

In the race for King County executive, with 181,683 votes counted, former KIRO/7 anchor Susan Hutchison leads with 37.40 percent of the vote, followed by Dow Constantine at 22.38 percent, Fred Jarrett with 12.04 percent, Larry Phillips with 11.72 percent and Ross Hunter at 10.9 percent.

More results forthcoming.

An aggressive round of anti-Joe Mallahan robo-calls have been hitting tens of thousands of Seattleites’ phones in recent days and they mark an unusual alliance between labor unions and business interests which together are shelling out $50,000 on the calls late in the August 18 primary campaign for Seattle mayor. The calls came as a result of recent polling which showed Mallahan, a T-Mobile executive with no political experience, to be running a strong second place to Greg Nickels, Seattle’s two-term incumbent mayor. The usually well-funded Nickels campaign machine is out of money, as the PostGlobe reported last week.

The calls highlight Mallahan’s less-than-100-percent participation in local elections and cast aspersions on T-Mobile’s troubles with unions.

Two new so-called independent expenditure groups formed to fund the robo-calls, Qualified Leadership for Seattle and Working Families Coalition. The first is a strange bedfellows collection of SEIU and UFCW locals and other unions in addition to Paul Allen’s Vulcan, Samis Land Company, the Downtown Seattle Association and GLY Construction. The Working Families Coalition is made up of several unions including SEIU and UFCW.

While the union contributions make sense as a way to support Nickels, a known quantity and long-time union supporter who’s become quite unpopular with the public over the last few years, the business contributions for what are basically attack phone calls on Mallahan are unusual.

“Joe Mallahan from the start has made us the centerpiece of his efforts to unseat the mayor,” says Vulcan spokesman David Postman, himself the Seattle Times’ former chief political reporter. Postman says Mallahan is critical of Nickels for supporting development in South Lake Union–much of it controlled by Vulcan–and of a proposed fix to the Mercer Street mess in South Lake Union. So that makes Mallahan an unacceptable candidate for Vulcan, which has also contributed money to the mayoral campaign of Seattle City Council member Jan Drago.

“We’ve got an endorsed candidate and we’ve got to make sure” he gets through the primary, says David Freiboth, executive secretary of the King County Labor Council. Nickels has won endorsements from almost a dozen local labor unions. He describes Mallahan as an “unknown quantity” and that  “some of the T-Mobile baggage is concerning to our affiliates.”

Among other things, T-Mobile is known to have fought against higher unemployment insurance benefits.

“I don’t know that he’s directly related with some of that stuff,” says Freiboth. “But that’s the environment he’s coming from and that’s where we end up defaulting.”

Freiboth had no comment on the irony of Mallahan’s 18-year-old daughter, who works at a local QFC, being a dues-paying UFCW member.

“In some ways it’s flattering they view us as such a threat,” says Charla Neuman, a spokeswoman for Mallahan’s campaign. “Otherwise, it’s disturbing that someone can dump so much money in the last few days of a campaign to spread lies and not let us correct the record. They’re absolutely wrong about Joe’s support for unions. He’s always been a supporter of workers’ right to organize.”

The calls themselves are pushy and benign.

“Has Joe Mallahan proved he deserves to be Mayor?” asks one of the two calls. “He’s missed 6 of the last 18 elections and his only community involvement has been with the Wurst Festival.”

“We’re concerned about Joe Mallahan’s campaign for Mayor,” goes the other robo-call. “The Seattle Times said Mallahan has yet to demonstrate why he should hold the city’s top job. He has little record of involvement in our community and didn’t even vote in 6 of the last 18 elections. About the only thing we know about his is that he was an executive at T-Mobile, a company that has had problems with unions and consumers.”

The call fails to point out that the Seattle Times’ editorial board endorsed both Nickels and Mallahan in an unusual joint endorsement.

Michael McGinn, an attorney and Sierra Club activist, is himself neck-and-neck with Mallahan for second place in recent polls. The August 18 primary also includes Dargo, former Seattle Supersonic James Donaldson, Norman Sigler, Elizabeth Campbell and Kwame Wyking Garrett. The top two vote getters advance to the November general election.

At a party for candidates endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters Thursday night, Mayor Greg Nickels shook hands with his political friends. But the veteran pol said it’s his first August primary and the first time he’s been in an all-mail.

“I don’t have a feel for where things are,” he acknowledged.

Amid what seems to be a free for all in the final days of voting before next Tuesday’s primary, the campaigns of Nickels and T-Mobile executive Joe Mallahan, a leading contender in the primary according to recent polls, traded shots earlier Thursday, the kind of negative hits that aren’t common to Seattle political campaigns.

The dueling press releases and emails come a day after Nickels’ campaign released an online advertisement slamming the mayor’s opponents over empty promises — a clear swipe at Mallahan — and touting Nickels’ record. Nickels on Wednesday went after a third leading contender in the race, Mike McGinn. Only two of the three will survive the primary.

The barbs thrown the past two days also reflected, as the PostGlobe was the first to report, that both the Nickels and Mallahan campaigns are out of money, Mallahan’s latest ad, like Nickels’, appeared only online. With the candidates running financially on fumes like heavyweights in the later rounds, a last-minute attack by labor against Mallahan was all the more important.

Early Thursday afternoon, Seattle PostGlobe contributor Larry Lange received an anti-Mallahan robo-call at his home at the behest of the Working Families Coalition. In an email, Lange recounted the call:

“It said: ‘How much do we really know about Joe Mallahan. He was an executive for T-Mobile, which outsourced jobs overseas, opposed unions and fought against increasing unemployment benefits. That’s why labor unions oppose Joe Mallahan.  Before you vote, take another look at Joe Mallahan.’

“The caller said the coalition paid for the ad but listed a number of labor contributors, including UFCW Local 21, the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, the Washington Machinists’ Council and SEIU Health Care.”

“As popular as George Bush and Richard Nixon,” went the subject line of a Mallahan email to his email list on Thursday afternoon, and in it Mallahan reminded recipients that Nickels’ popularity ratings hover in the 30 percent range.

“When you are the political outsider running to change a culture of mismanagement, cronyism and divisiveness,” wrote Mallahan, “you expect your opponents will inevitably resort to negative campaigning.  We knew this day was coming.  And true to form, yesterday, Greg Nickels released an online ad that distorts our campaign statements and hides his own poor record of management over the last eight years.”

The Nickels ad is on YouTube here .

Within 30 minutes of Mallahan’s email, the Nickels campaign had fired back with a press release claiming that Mallahan had not voted in about half of all elections since 2000.

“Joe Mallahan has paid so little attention to important civic issues that he could not be bothered to vote in half of our recent elections?” said Sandeep Kaushik, a Nickels campaign spokesman, in a statement. “Perhaps he should try familiarizing himself with the issues — and participating in our Democratic process more regularly — before deciding he is qualified to be mayor.”

Thursday afternoon, Mallahan’s also released an online ad that asks, “How desperate is Greg Nickels? Thirty-two years in politics and now career politician Greg Nickels and his special interest cronies are attacking Joe Mallahan with lies, distortions and gross exaggeration. Why would Greg Nickels stoop so low?”

The ad let’s Nickels answer the question himself from his first ad.  “I’ve made some mistakes,” says Nickels.

The narrator in the ad lists some of those mistakes while news reports flash across the screen, “Mismanagement, dysfunction, bungled projects, cost over runs, cronyism.”

 The ad finishes with, “Enough is enough.  Seattle needs new leadership.  Joe Mallahan.  A progressive business executive who understands Seattle ’s values and knows how to get things done.  Joe Mallahan.  New leadership and effective management for a better Seattle .”

In a press release, Charla Neuman, a spokesperson for the Mallahan campaign. said his special interest friends are trying to bail him out by dumping $50,000 into efforts to falsely attack Mallahan.

“It appears that Greg Nickels’ financers can’t think of anything good to say about the mayor so they’re resorting to negative and false attacks against Joe Mallahan,” Neuman said partially about labor’s automated calls.

 

All of this comes three days after Nickels’ campaign went negative on attorney Michael McGinn, another leading contender in the mayoral primary, and began placing thousands of its own robo-calls to allegedly “clear up the distortions and half truths about candidate Mike McGinn’s position on the Alaskan Way Viaduct,” according to the Nickels campaign.

On Wednesday, the Seattle P-I reported the results of a Strategies 360 and Don McDonough Associates poll that showed Nickels leading the pack with 24 percent support. McGinn and Mallahan were nearly tied for the second spot with McGinn at 16 percent, Mallahan at 15 percent.

The latest KING5/Survey USA poll last week showed McGinn and T-Mobile executive Joe Mallahan gaining momentum; with McGinn drawing close enough to raise the possibility of knocking Nickels into third place in next week’s primary and out of the November general election.

According to that poll, Nickels’ support dropped to 22 percent in the poll, down 4 points from the previous poll three weeks ago. Mallahan had 19 percent of the support in the latest poll. McGinn had 15 percent.

As the primary campaign draws to a close, it’s obvious that silly season has erupted. Other candidates in the mayoral primary are Seattle City Council member Jan Drago, former Seattle Supersonic James Donaldson, Norman Sigler, Elizabeth Campbell and Kwame Wyking Garrett.

Skimming through the most recent campaign disclosure reports on the main contenders in the Seattle primary contest for mayor today, the most startling fact jumped out at me: Mayor Greg Nickels’ campaign reported negative cash on hand of $1,607.87 as of Aug. 10. While the Aug. 18 mail-in primary is close to being over, it’s clear that this has been a bruising and expensive campaign for the two-term mayor and a huge contrast to 2005. Just before the September primary that year, his campaign reported $153,694.47 in cash on hand. Nickels, a classically aggressive fundraiser, faced nominal opposition that year and waltzed to an easy re-election in November of that year.

The campaign of T-Mobile executive Joe Mallahan is in even tougher financial shape than the mayor’s: Mallahan’s campaign was in the red to the tune of $54,612.71.

Mallahan and Nickels have both advertised heavily on local television in recent weeks and Nickels’ campaign made a $50,000 media buy late in the game that’s set to run all the way through Aug. 18, when mail-in ballots are due.

Former Seattle Supersonic James Donaldson is also in the hole to the tune of $12,782.24 as of Aug. 10.

The campaigns of both attorney Michael McGinn and Seattle City Council member Jan Drago are both in positive territory. McGinn’s campaign reported  $13,495.95 on hand as of Aug. 10 while Drago’s campaign had $7,102.95 in the bank.

It’s not surprising that in such a competitive primary that several candidates have shot their wads, as it were, but it’s also a clear sign that whichever two candidates advance to the November general election will have to do a ton of fundraising.

King County Executive candidates Susan Hutchison, a former KIRO-TV anchor, and Larry Phillips, a Metropolitan County Council member, were on KUOW-FM’s “Weekday” program this morning. The appearance was important for both candidates in the crowded exec’s race, and an opportunity for Phillips to try and take Hutchinson, who’s leading in most public opinion polls, down a notch or two. Phillips, who’s been advertising heavily on local television, is one of several candidates trailing Dow Constantine, another Metropolitan County Council member, in polls for the August 18 primary. It was also a chance for Hutchison to combat perceptions that she’s a bit loose on details of county government and little more than a sound bite candidate. (You can hear the entire program here .)

The program host, Steve Scher, spent 20 minutes pressing the two on how they would handle the ongoing conflict over gravel mining on Maury Island and how they’d deal with the Duwamish River cleanup. There wasn’t much difference on the mining (it’s in the state lands commissioner’s hands now; use the bully pulpit to lobby against more pollution) or the river (both agree it could be cleaned up by 2020, 10 years faster than current plans).

After that matters did get more heated. Scher asked Hutchison how she got started running for County Exec, given her inexperience in politics.

Hutchison explained that former County Exec Ron Sims had appointed her to a commission to look into the King County Elections Department after the very messy 2004 recount adventure.

 

“I began to see that a non partisan politician could do a lot to fix county government,” Hutchison said. “So many people are so fed up with the county. They are tired of the arrogance of imperial government.” She suggested that too many county officials were in the grip of special interests.

Pressed by Scher on what special interests she meant, Hutchison didn’t respond, except to note that the county had a “growing budget deficit,” that county government has “grown so big in its employee base” and that “We  have an issue with our unions and benefits package.”

Whatever that means.

“I would dispute that it’s an imperial government,” said Phillips. “I’m not trying to hide who I am….She may not want to admit she’s Republican, but she’s a Republican’s best friend.”

Scher pressed Hutchison on whether she is in fact a Republican, which is apparently a shared obsession with some in the Seattle media. Hutchison declined to take the bait, saying voters had made it clear they wanted the exec’s office to be non-partisan.

“They are tired of divisive politics,” she said. “I am not going to divide people that way. I bring people together.”

“I think it’s important to tell people who you are and not hide things from them,” countered Phillips, who’d said he’s been a Democrat his entire life.

Offering one example of how she’d address the county’s projected $50 million-plus budget deficit for 2010, Hutchison said, “We need to cut waste and duplication. Any number of [county] agencies are duplicative.”

Hutchison pointed to “six” agencies she said provided services for “homelessness and substance abuse.” She said they each had a director and staff, but did not name the agencies. While several county agencies have a piece of providing such services, her claim of six agencies sounded high.

After the interview, I queried Hutchison’s campaign to detail which six agencies were involved in homeless and substance abuse services. Her campaign did not respond.

Within two hours, however, Phillips’ campaign had issued a press release saying Hutchison had stuck to sound bites and had little idea how county government works and cited some alleged Hutchison gaffs such as “saying she would balance King County’s budget by eliminating six King County homelessness agencies as an example of ending duplication. No such ‘homelessness agencies’ exist in King County government.”

To be fair, Hutchison did not say she’d eliminate any departments, but suggested merely that she’d try to reduce duplication between agencies and create some cost savings. While there isn’t a single county department devoted to homeless services per se, several county departments do provide funding to non-profit agencies which do provide homeless services and housing for the homeless.

Last week, local law enforcement officials took a radical step to eliminate street drug dealing in Seattle’s Central District. Instead of arresting more than one dozen small time dealers who plied their trade along 23rd Avenue, officials invited them to a meeting where they presented the dealers with evidence of their crimes and then offered them a choice: stop dealing drugs and embrace various support services or you will be prosecuted.

It was an unusual offer and an unusual approach to dealing with a decades-old problem in the CD and elsewhere in Seattle. Sixteen dealers showed at the event and to say the least they were blown away.

“They were kind of in a state of shock,” says Kay Godefroy, executive director of the Seattle Neighborhood Group. SNG aims to create crime-free neighborhoods throughout the city.

“Everyone wanted to try this including SPD,” says City Attorney Tom Carr. “They’re the ones who have the frustration of re-arresting the same people over and over again they want to see it stopped.”

But the big question is whether this new approach, which could be tried to combat other open air drug markets in Seattle, will work at all because the city is plunging into the unknown.

What is known is that changing the character of small parts of town works to abate, if not eliminate, open air dealing.

Back when the Twilight Exit bar used to be located near 23rd Avenue and Madison Street, I used to groan if friends suggested meeting at that wonderful dive. The trouble was with all the street drug dealers slinging crack cocaine and whatever else it is they dealt. I’d have to run a gauntlet of them each time I went to the Twilight and, while they never messed with me, you’d hear stories of others who were not quite as lucky. Let’s just say that street dealers and their hangers-on can be nasty, especially towards women. Sometimes, I’d come out of the bar and there would be four police cars and Seattle police would have two or three suspects cuffed and up against a wall.

Twenty-third and Madison was your classic open air drug market, one of several in Seattle that Mayor Greg Nickels and SPD have pledged to shut down for years. As it happened, urban development in the form of a huge Safeway and many new condominiums nearby with all their new residents (and a helpful shove from SPD) effectively chased off the dealers (the Twilight moved to 25th Avenue and Cherry Street). They regrouped a bit to the south at 23rd and Union Street, a corner that soon became synonymous with trouble. It was simply a new outpost for a drug dealing problem that has existed along 23rd for decades.

“We’ve been playing whack-a-mole,” says Carr. “Someone gets arrested, someone else fills his spot.”

Often, the busted dealers would end up back on the streets selling drugs after serving a year or less in jail. The dynamic also ended up creating mistrust between SPD and Central District residents. The police were simply using busting small time dealers as a way to put African-Americans into jail and get them locked into a cycle of hopelessness, or so the thinking went with some community members, says Carr.

It was a never-ending cycle, one that local law enforcement officials took radical steps to end by enacting a so-called drug market initiative, an experimental approaching to shutting down small-time drug dealers that’s met with much reported success in High Point, North Carolina. The basic idea is that small time dealers–as opposed to people moving kilos of crack–are told that the community is sick of their activity and old-fasioned peer pressure does its work. It’s, of course, a far cry from traditional methods of law enforcement and has its critics.

“I was exhausted,” City Council member Tim Burgess, a former Seattle police officer, wrote on his blog after witnessing the meeting where the 16 dealers were confronted. “I was impressed. I was proud of our city. Here was a grand experiment that just might work. Instead of the very common arrest-prosecute-jail-release-start-over-again cycle, I got to watch a very innovative alternative approach. Some, I’m sure, will write this off as ‘hug-a-thug,’ bleeding-heart, crap. But when this strategy has been tried elsewhere in the country it has worked.”

Will this approach work in Seattle? No one can say because this approach has only been tried in North Carolina, where it has reportedly worked for four years. The US Department of Justice is enthusiastic enough to have trained law enforcement officials and community members in cities like Milwaukee, Chicago and Nashville. But the unique piece of North Carolina’s success is that most of the dealers in High Point lived in the city and had ties in the community, so the community-based approach had real impact. Carr says that the dynamic along the 23rd Avenue corridor is similar enough to High Point–long time dealers with deep community ties–to expect success.

But it’s not just about being nice to dealers and helping them turn their lives around.

“The whole idea is to shut down the drug market,” says Godefroy. “If we can help a few people along the way fine, but the primary goal is to stop the dealing.”

If the approach works in the CD, even Carr won’t say if it could simply be applied to other open air drug markets in the city such as the ones in Pioneer Square and Belltown. In those two areas, dealers don’t commonly live in the neighborhood and are sometimes dealers sent into that turf from far away. Earlier this year, for example, SPD arrested dozens of drug dealers in Belltown who were mostly from Honduras and had been sent to Seattle to deal drugs at the behest of a highly-organized crack cocaine ring.

It’s difficult to imagine how community peer pressure and social services would play out with dealers who aren’t part of a specific community.

Carr says officials will give the CD experiment about three months before trying to determine its level of success. And success, he says, won’t be measured simply by whether the dealers stopped dealing, but also by other the absence or presence of other offenses in the community that often crop up around drug markets such as assaults and robberies.

“The question is ‘Can you make it last’?” says Carr. “High Point has lasted for four years. The trick is for community to take ownership. When you change the norm because the community says it’s not OK to deal drugs, that’s when things can change.”

Godefroy says that after the meeting, a few of the 16 dealers–or candidates, as they are known–were talking with treatment providers.

“There wasn’t any bolt of lightning that said, ‘Oh, I’ll change my ways.’ The reaction was more like, ‘Well shoot, somebody does care.’”

Godefroy says that on the day following the meeting she drove by the corner of 23rd Avenue and Union Street and that it was “deader than a door nail.”

How long that lasts is anyone’s guess.