Guys on the corner

It is difficult to judge if the corner is getting better or worse since last year. I know it is better than the first year I moved here, but comparing it with 2005, hard. The problem, our friendly neighborhood drug dealers.
There was a crowd of surly teens that used to hang out in front of one house, where other surly teens lived. Sometimes there would be a little back and forth to the corner but they’d go back to their friend’s house. Recently I have noticed that some surly teens have taken to hanging out on the corner, where normally they had not been before. It seems to me that they are trying to make new hang out spots. One neighbor mentioned that they had set up in front of her house, with chairs. She called another resident for neighborhood reinforcements. I haven’t heard of the kids doing it again.
Recently I heard of an old timer confronting the guys on the corner about cleaning up. The corner boys asked the old timer why everyone called them drug dealers. Ha! Let’s see, you hang out on a corner, in a neighborhood where you don’t live, where there has been drug activity before. Gee, I don’t know. It’s one thing when you hang out in front of a friend’s house, it is a whole ‘nother when it is on the corner or in front of someone you don’t know.
And since I’m slightly touching the topic, out neighborhood crack ho has branched out into drug dealing. She doesn’t do the corner, she hangs out in the middle of the block and it has been mentioned by a neighbor that she was spotted distributing something in a tiny little baggy. Is this improvement, because to be a seller you must be able not to smoke up all your inventory. But she’s going to get caught one day, if the cops bother to stop her, because she isn’t as organized as the dealers. The dealers don’t keep the inventory on their person. They hide the drugs in garbage cans, in people’s yards, in other neighborhood nooks and crannies so when they are stopped by the police they don’t have drugs on them.
Is it getting better or worse? Still very hard to tell. I’d like to think as more folks who are less tolerant of drug dealing and anything that looks like drug dealing remain and like minded folks move in, yes, it will get better. More people calling the police, fewer people providing shelter and safe haven for the dealers, more people maintaining their properties so there are fewer places to stash the stashes, those things should make things better.