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It’s me again, lead plaintiff for the 14 South Berkeley citizens suing our South Berkeley drug house, responding to the latest distortions of our case in the editorial pages of the Daily Planet. In her Oct. 28 editorial, Executive Editor Becky O’Malley’s paints us ordinary neighborhood folks as vindictive harpies “with blood in their eyes” intent on unconstitutional punishment of Lenora Moore, owner of the drug house at 1610 Oregon Street. “If anyone . . . has broken a criminal law,” O’Malley asks, “shouldn’t they be charged and tried in accordance with the Constitution?” 

O’Malley is ignoring the difference between civil and criminal law. We are not charging Moore with a criminal infraction; we are making civil claims for the pain and suffering she has inflicted on our South Berkeley neighborhood by running an open drug house for many years. O’Malley claims that our “stated intent. . . is to force the defendant, a neighboring homeowner, to sell her property, whether she wants to or not.” This is false. Our intent is to collect cash damages from Moore. Before we filed our suit, we told her that if she would sell her house and leave the neighborhood, we would drop the action. She refused. Therefore we’re proceeding with our civil suit. Ms. Moore has allowed her house to be a public nuisance, and she owes her neighbors restitution for the open drug dealing, prostitution, casually discarded drug paraphernalia, and midnight fights her mismanagement of her property has inflicted on us. We all think it would be a fine thing if she would sell her property and move away, but that is not a penalty that small claims court can exact, nor that we can ask of it. 

O’Malley magnanimously allows that “No one should have to live in a neighborhood where criminal behavior is tolerated. But stopping criminal behavior should be the responsibility of the police, not of the small claims court, which can do nothing to stop real crimes.” In fact, we have been working closely with the police for many years. We keep our crime logs, call in drug deals we witness, identify violators of restraining orders, etc. But it hasn’t worked, largely because the Alameda County district attorney doesn’t take the matter seriously. Here’s a prime example: Recently, due to the hard work and good policing of the Berkeley Police Department, Lenora Moore’s daughter was arrested for possession of crack. Here was one of the worst actors in the neighborhood, finally in the hands of the criminal justice system. And what did the district attorney do? Gave her five years unsupervised probation. Now she’s back on the street, dealing as before. That’s why we’re pursuing a civil solution: It’s the only avenue left us. If Becky O’Malley is serious in her contention that we stick to purely criminal remedies, I look forward to her editorials in favor of stiff, mandatory sentences for those convicted of drug offenses. Until then, please allow us to deal with the situation as best we can. 

Finally, O’Malley calls us “dangerously naïve” for thinking that forcing Moore to move will stop drug dealing in our neighborhood. None of us is so deluded. However, it would stop a whole lot of drug dealing in our neighborhood, and I think we’d all be pretty darn happy with that. Surely O’Malley is not suggesting that since drug dealing is going to go on somewhere, it might as well be next door to us? That’s an easy argument to make for someone whose idea of a neighborhood nuisance is how high the sunflowers in her verge are allowed to grow.  

South Berkeley resident Paul Rauber is an editor at Sierra Magazine and a former columnist for East Bay Express.›