Matthew Newton

Wilkinsburg saw a rash of shootings back in April; then North Braddock followed suit earlier this month. Now something’s going on in Clairton, with four people shot last night on Park Avenue (worlds away from this Park Avenue). It would be simplistic to say there is one unifying undercurrent here, but each of these places — Wilkinsburg, North Braddock, Clairton — are distressed communities that survive despite the existence of legitimate economies.

In the case of Clairton, however, cocaine has long been one of the town’s most stable and, of course, illegitimate economic engines (outside of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, that is). In December of 2010, a federal roundup of cocaine dealers that stretched from Texas and Georgia to the Mon Valley sent 11 from Clairton to jail, making a dent in the drug trafficking problem that has plagued the town for nearly two decades. According to the Post-Gazette’s Rich Lord:

Crack reached Clairton in the early 1990s, around the same time Chief Hoffman joined what was then a fledgling city police force that took over for the state troopers that had patrolled there for years. The chief remembers driving into one since-demolished housing complex, being surrounded by dealers asking him what he needed, and thinking, “Aren’t you guy supposed to be running from me?”

One theory for the current violence in Clairton is that new blood is battling over the vacancies left in the cocaine trade by those who were incarcerated in the federal roundup. The closing quote from Lord’s January 2012 story sums up the frustration surrounding Clairton’s current reality:

“There’s a drug war going on, definitely,” [Sgt. Giles] said. It’s a war in which cash-strapped Clairton is, once again, outgunned. “You’ve got these Colombian cartels making trillions of dollars moving cocaine into the country,” he said. “We’re at the bottom of that chain.”

[Photo: Bill Wade/Post-Gazette]