On a South Baltimore corner near Thomas Johnson Elementary School on Wednesday, Al Evans watches the drug dealers.

Evans walks with friend Donnie Fair in a part of the city real estate agents bill as “Federal Hill” and attempt to sell row houses for $600,000.

He spots a dealer with a gray sweat shirt making a hand-to-hand transaction. There’s another, this one with a baseball cap pulled low. As school kids leave class, a young woman in a pickup truck pulls up. The man in the baseball cap approaches her window. They clasp hands. She drives away.

It’s 3 p.m. Broad daylight. There’s not a cop in sight.

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“It’s business as usual,” Fair says.

Evans has come out to the corner because he’s mad. He’s tired of drug dealers reigning over what he calls the Heath Street Corridor.

As Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld — a man Evans respects a great deal — implements a crime plan targeting the baddest of the bad in Baltimore’s worst neighborhoods, Evans, 55, says there’s an unintended consequence: The “riffraff” comes to Heath Street.

“The idiots come over here,” he says.

Evans and Fair, 31, a former City Council candidate, say they fear the neighborhood is worsening.

Tuesday night, bullets crashed through a neighbor’s living room window.

Evans says he suspects the bullets were intended for a drug dealer and fired in a drive-by shooting.

“It’s becoming a war zone,” he says.

So Evans is turning to the City Council and state delegates with a cry for help: Turn your attention to Heath Street. Help clean up our neighborhood. We’re sick and tired of the drug dealers.

“I want my politicians to step up to the plate,” he says.

So far, he says, help has been slow to come.

lbroadwater@baltimoreexaminer.com