By Jane Prendergast
and Dan Horn
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Patrons of the Queen Ann Bar on Central Avenue in the West End gathered outside Thursday where earlier that night a man was arrested for shooting a gun in the air. Much of the violence in the neighborhood is blamed on a gang called the Tot Lot Posse. The Cincinnati Enquirer/JEFF SWINGER

WEST END - The police cruiser turns onto Livingston Street, and the officer aims his spotlight on the old loading dock where prostitutes bring their clients. Officers have found mattresses, used condoms and, last summer, a woman who'd been stabbed to death.

Around the corner, he points to a brick alley where, in December, a man was shot to death, then run over by a drunken driver as investigating police jumped out of the way.

This is the Cincinnati neighborhood where, for months, police have been anticipating federal help in emasculating the Tot Lot Posse, the gang that officers blame for much of the violence.

Such investigations usually are kept secret, but Mayor Charlie Luken spoke out last week about this one. He wrote a letter last month to the U.S. attorney's office asking for an explanation for the delay.

Because the investigation - finished by Cincinnati police and the FBI, but awaiting possible grand jury action by the U.S. attorney's office - dragged on for more than a year, the mayor said, the thugs in question have continued to devastate the neighborhood with their drug-dealing, shootings and killings.

"The way things are now, the violence can be about anything,'' says Officer Douglas Frazier, who has patrolled the West End on the night shift for seven years. "When I was growing up and you had a dispute, you duked it out and it was over.

"Now, they just shoot each other. And it can be over nothing.''

The gang, named for a children's playground on Linn Street, is less like a gang you might see on TV, officers say, and more like just a big group of young men with ties to the West End either because they grew up there or their friends did.

Still, Tot Lot members are blamed for a lot of crimes - many in the neighborhood, but elsewhere, too. Among them: the killing in January 2003 of the 17-year-old mother who was riding in a car with her baby on her lap, and the February shooting of a District 1 detective who locked up an alleged key gang member last year.

Nine of the city's 75 homicides in 2003, or 12 percent, happened in this one neighborhood. Sixty-one of the 1,508 guns confiscated in Cincinnati last year were found here. But residents say it goes beyond the crimes gang members commit - it's also about the way they intimidate. Police and prosecutors complain about that, too - they often can't get witnesses to testify against the Tot Lot.

The federal grand jury meets again Wednesday.

Capt. Vince Demasi, Cincinnati's acting commander of investigations who assigned several officers full time to work with the FBI on the investigation, said late last week he hadn't heard anything new about when the next step might happen.

"Nothing yet,'' he said, "but we're hopeful.''

The Tot Lot investigation (though federal authorities do not confirm the Tot Lot is the target) is an example of how cities and the federal government have joined forces to create teams geared to attacking regional problems, such as the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Project Safe Neighborhoods Task Force. They work together on cases that require more resources than just one agency can offer.

"The relationships have grown out of necessity," said Fred Alverson, spokesman for U.S. Attorney Greg Lockhart.

Reduced staffs and tight budgets are big reasons for the increase in cooperation, he said. Federal agencies, from the Drug Enforcement Agency to the FBI, typically concentrate their money and resources in big urban areas and in border states, leaving agents in places like Cincinnati, Columbus and Indianapolis in search of cheaper, more efficient ways to do the job.

"There is no question that the local police officers know the community and know the criminal players on the street better than anyone else," Alverson said. "The local agencies have the greatest knowledge of what goes on in a neighborhood."

Federal authorities, in turn, can offer local police and sheriffs all the resources of the national agencies, from staff power to technology. They also offer the promise of federal prosecutions that can bring longer prison terms, as they have in dozens of gun cases prosecuted under Project Safe Neighborhoods.

But Demasi said the cooperative programs don't work as well as they should, leaving the city without an effective alternative when local prosecutions don't bring "these career criminals'' long enough sentences behind bars.

"A lot of people want to say, Why aren't the cops doing their jobs?'' he said. "But we're trying to. We're locking people up and we're looking to the federal government for help.''

He said Tot Lot members know they're targets - agents and officers have searched their residences and confiscated their cars. But the city, he said, keeps being told the indictments will come next month.

Although Alverson said the relationship works smoothly "about 90 percent of the time," there are exceptions. Sometimes miscommunication or turf battles lead to conflict.

Alverson said he's not worried about any lasting fallout from the disagreement.

"No one notices if everything goes smoothly, but if there's a bump in the road, everybody notices," he said. "Our office does not view the mayor's letter as any type of impediment to our successful working relationship."

Thursday, Frazier's night in the West End started with a run to the Queen Ann Bar on Central Avenue, where undercover officers responding to a call about a fight saw a man outside the bar fire a gun into the air. The accused shooter swore someone else shoved the black 9 mm in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.

Later, Frazier, as he does most nights, parks outside the bar and starts checking license plates. When he pulls up, people run to their cars and move them from the no-parking zones that line the street.

He knows that writing parking tickets in the city's second-most murderous neighborhood might sound trivial. But the tickets, he said, help him know who's out and help him keep the doorway clear so he can see the bar.

"Otherwise, people will be drinking and shooting dice and gambling,'' he says. "And like I said, somebody will have a gun.''

E-mail jprendergast@enquirer.com and dhorn@enquirer.com