You know what they're doing when the guy on the street is sizing up everybody who walks by and enough eye contact will get you a question asking what you're looking for. Figure you've got a dealer, a lookout, and a few crack heads going in together on a score.

"Then you see a whole group of people walking around the corner behind the Jack in the Box," says Sergeant Jim Dyment of the Seattle Police Department's North Precinct, referring to an area allegedly popular with drug dealers along Aurora Avenue North.

Dyment says he's spent so much time busting street crimes in his 14 years on the force that it's tough for him to do undercover work because the drug dealers can see him coming. But with his thick neck below a lantern jaw and big shaved head, antique dealers could probably identify him as a cop in most lineups.

Dyment and Lieutenant Dick Reed were at the Greenwood Library last week Tuesday to giving neighbors a glimpse behind the scenes battling the illegal drug trade in North Seattle. The meeting, billed as a narcotics workshop, was sponsored by Greenwood Aurora Involved Neighbors, a neighborhood crime watch group.

According to Dyment, many street-level drug dealers in the north end are selling crack cocaine in small quantities, perhaps five to ten rocks at a time. They tend to loiter on the street, or hold up near phone booths or other inconspicuous areas. Upstream distributors dole out drugs to street dealers, often during trips around the block in a vehicle. Some dealers manage to deal from the houses of elderly or incapacitated family members. Visitors in such cases are frequent, but stays are brief.

Pot growing operations, on the other hand, tend to be empty apartments with lights coming on and off on regular schedules and sporadic visitors carrying hefty bags.

For the Greenwood Aurora Involved Neighbors, known locally as GAIN, the objective of the evening was becoming more intelligent about crime.

"People are hungry for information, for a way to positively affect their neighborhood," Monica Oxford, a founder said. "We need to understand what we're dealing with."

Greenwood Aurora Involved Neighbors has become a success story dealing with bringing visibility to the issue of crime in the city's North Side. The group hosted a forum on last year attended by more than 400 people, organizes block watches, community cleanups and social events, is spawning similar groups like "GAIN The Highland" and as a credit to its influence, even warranted the Seattle Police Department recognizing its "strong alliance" with the community group as a success story in its 2005 annual report.

For police, having Greenwood Aurora members striving to become better informed about what they're seeing makes for more effective 911 callers, a key component in the way the police department tracks crime.

Reed described a software tool the department uses that collects 911 caller data. He said that for July, the N4 police beat, which covers an area from Northwest 85th Street to Holman Road south to north, and 14th Avenue Northwest and I-5 from west to east, had the 3rd highest incidence of 911 calls regarding narcotics out of 64 city police beats. While he didn't correlate those statistics with arrests, they at least suggest there are very strong suspicions about drug problems in north Ballard. Reed didn't discount those suspicions:

"The Aurora corridor and University District are problem areas in one way or another," he said.

And to a number of residents, those problems were coming closer to home.

"A lot of (drug trafficking) has moved off of Aurora and onto the side streets, Dyment said. He said that was a sign of progress - that dealers were scurrying out of the police glare. But some neighbors saw it as less than a positive development.

"It sounds like we're moving it [(dealing drugs) into our neighborhoods," Oxford said, echoing the sentiments of several other audience members who said drug dealing was becoming a regular feature in their neighborhoods. Linden Avenue, a block west of Aurora Avenue, was mentioned several times as becoming a focal point for such activities.

The differing perspectives illustrated the intransigence of crime in a community. Reed said that while police can collect data and respond to trends in crime, such trends are not visible in real time. Whether crime tracking systems will someday become so sophisticated as to allow police to be at the scene of criminal activity as it happens likely will remain in the distant future. Until then, enforcement might continue to consist of a kind of slow motion whack-a-mole where criminal activity starts to coalesce in a given area, street crime units like Sergeant Dyment's move in and make busts, and the criminal element resurfaces elsewhere.

Keeping trends in crime from increasing in certain neighborhoods, possibly at the expense of others, could depend in part on the effectiveness of groups like Greenwood Aurora Involved Neighbors in applying political leverage at city hall.

But both officers pointed out that becoming empowered in the face of crime isn't confined just to calling on elected leaders. They said that when neighbors observe suspicious activity, they can use the phone to send a message to criminals as well.

"If you're a drug dealer, you thrive on anonymity," Dyment said. He said people should not be afraid to let criminals know they object to illegal behavior in their own neighborhood when they see it. One way to do that, by placing a call to 911 in plain view.

"Standing outside [on the porch] with a phone works great," he said, though he and Reed both stressed the importance of staying near the house to make 911 calls, and not, for example, precipitating a confrontation by walking up to a window of a suspiciously idling car with a cordless phone.

Several residents worried that criminals might seek to harm neighbors who even dared to appear on their own porches to call the police, but Dyment said neighbors should resist being intimidated on their own property.

"In the 14 years I've been doing this, I've never seen reprisals on somebody reporting crimes, Dyment said.

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