POLICE MAY RAISE SPENDING 25% FOR ANTICRIME PROGRAM

The Police Department is planning to increase spending on Operation Condor
by at least 25 percent, according to figures released yesterday in a City
Council hearing at which officials said the department needed such programs
to keep the crime rate going down.

The first deputy commissioner, Joseph Dunne, defended the department's plan
to spend up to $105 million this fiscal year on Operation Condor, in which
officers focus on narcotics and quality-of-life offenses. He called the
program, which started this year, an essential tool that has helped reduce
crime by 5 percent.

Over all, crime is down 67 percent over the last seven years. "We think that
without Condor it would be very, very difficult to continue the decrease in
crime," Mr. Dunne said after a meeting of the Public Safety Committee.

The vote of confidence in the program comes just weeks after the department
re-evaluated its effectiveness. The program has been criticized for its
expense and because, some critics contend, the patrols it finances are too
often focused on low-level offenders.

Most Condor patrols were canceled for 10 days in October to see what would
happen. When crime increased by slightly more than 1 percent, Mayor Rudolph
W. Giuliani announced that the program would be continued and expanded.

The department now puts 1,000 officers a day on Condor patrols, Mr. Dunne
said, up from 500 a day several months ago.

During the last fiscal year, during which the program operated for the six
months ended in June, Condor cost $39 million, officials said. On an annual
basis, it would have cost $78 million, and the department has proposed
spending $100 million to $105 million this fiscal year.

If the department spends all the Condor money it plans, the program will
account for a third of the police overtime budget, which is now expected to
reach a record $260 million this year. Three years ago, the department spent
$146 million on overtime.

City Council members have consistently asked why the department spends so
much on overtime when its force of 41,000 is the largest in history and
crime is down. Much of the overtime, officials have said, has been incurred
because of special events, like the Subway Series and subsequent Yankees
victory parade. In addition, they have said that programs that produce
arrests create additional overtime because officers often have to stay late
while the arrest papers are processed.

>From January to June, officers on Condor patrols made 47,100 arrests,
officials said. In the new fiscal year, which is slightly more than four
months old, the number of arrests by officers being paid with Condor
overtime has increased to 69,743.

After the hearing, Councilman Sheldon Leffler, chairman of the committee,
said he had seen no evidence that drops in crime were necessarily a result
of Condor or that it was cost-effective.