POLICE SUSPEND EXTRA PATROLS FOR 10 DAYS

The Police Department quietly suspended Operation Condor for the first 10
days of the month in an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of the
expensive and often criticized overtime program, which officials say has
cut crime with extra drug sweeps and quality-of-life patrols.

The $55 million program, which assigns officers on overtime to the extra
drug operations and patrols, was suspended as part of Police Commissioner
Bernard B. Kerik's continuing evaluation of the effectiveness of the
department's overall antinarcotics efforts, officials said. They planned to
use the break as an experiment, and analysts have begun to review how the
nine-month-old initiative affects the crime rate and the productivity of
narcotics investigators.

Reported crime throughout the city rose slightly last week, but it was
unclear yesterday whether crime went up in areas where the Condor
operations had been suspended.

Officials stressed that no final decision had been made about the long-term
prospects for Operation Condor, which came under scrutiny at a City Council
committee hearing yesterday.

Officials in the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani say the
program helped turn around the murder rate after it began climbing last
year despite continued declines in overall reported crime. But in resuming
the overtime patrols yesterday, the department scaled back the narcotics
elements of the program, restoring only quality-of-life and warrant sweeps,
a move that, along with the experiment itself, suggests that some police
officials believe the program needs to be modified or scrapped.

Despite its successes, Operation Condor has been the focus of controversy.
Critics have called its emphasis on low-level offenders too aggressive.
They also contend that the stepped-up buy-and-bust operations, performed by
undercover officers, have added to the often hostile relationships between
police and residents of black and Latino neighborhoods.

Indeed, at the hearing yesterday before the City Council's Public Safety
Committee, Council members questioned the department's top narcotics
official about the program's cost-effectiveness and impact on community
relations. The official, Assistant Chief Charles Kammerdener, defended
Operation Condor in his testimony and said it was constantly being
re-evaluated. He also said the program had been significantly cut back, but
he did not tell the Council members about the 10-day suspension, an
omission that later angered Sheldon Leffler, the committee chairman.

"I think that what it says is, `We don't want to be questioned in depth
about what we're doing,' " Mr. Leffler said of the Police Department's
attitude to the Council's oversight. He referred to Chief Kammerdener's
testimony as "Mickey Mouse" and said the chief's statements were an example
of why administration officials and others who appear before the Council
should testify under oath.

Thomas Antenen, a spokesman for Commissioner Kerik, said there had been no
effort to mislead the Council, and he later clarified details of the
department's plans.

Operation Condor began in January as an overtime initiative under which
teams of undercover narcotics detectives are paid to work a sixth day,
performing their regular tasks for additional shifts each week. After
several months focusing largely on undercover narcotics enforcement, the
program was broadened to include uniformed officers conducting additional
quality-of-life enforcement and patrols to help protect livery-cab drivers,
prompted by a spate of robberies and slayings this year.

Mr. Kerik, who served in the department as a narcotics detective for four
years, began an intensive examination of the department's overall antidrug
efforts last month, several weeks after he was appointed the city's 40th
police commissioner. Officials said he was analyzing how overtime money was
being spent and reviewing the high percentage of petty drug arrests being
made by narcotics detectives. Officials said the review was prompted in
part by Mr. Kerik's concerns that overall in the Police Department,
misdemeanor narcotics arrests outnumbered felonies by three to one, an
indication that a large number of people charged with drug crimes served
little or no jail time.

Yesterday, Assistant Chief Kammerdener disclosed for the first time the
breakdown of Operation Condor arrests by felony and misdemeanor, figures
the department had consistently failed to provide. Of the operation's more
than 60,000 arrests since January, 9,179 were drug felonies, 40,137 were
drug misdemeanors and 6,968 were violations, offenses that do not rise to
the level of a crime. An additional 7,027 arrests were for crimes that were
not drug-related.

Many people have speculated that Mr. Kerik, who earned accolades with a
crackdown on overtime costs at the City Department of Correction, where he
served as commissioner for nearly three years, would not be a fan of any
program that sent police overtime to record levels. Operation Condor
represented more than 17 percent of overtime costs in the last fiscal year.

Even so, police officials have called the program a success, and it was
hoped the overtime pay would also serve to raise the morale of police
officers and detectives, who have long been embittered over what they see
as miserly pay. Indeed, Mr. Giuliani recently credited the program for its
success in fighting crime at a ceremony in August honoring Howard Safir,
the departing commissioner, who put the program into place.

Condor grew out of a surge in crime that occurred as police officials
decentralized the Street Crime Unit, which had been involved in the 1999
shooting of Amadou Diallo, and the unit's gun seizures dropped. Officials
were looking for a way to address a crime rate that they believed was
beginning to tick up because, they thought, more guns were appearing on the
street.

The idea behind Condor was that the constant enforcement pressure of
additional teams of undercover detectives in neighborhoods would make
criminals reluctant to carry guns on the streets.

But Condor's success in bringing down the murder rate was often
overshadowed by a sense that the enforcement had become overzealous. A
series of incidents, including one in which a narcotics detective with his
gun drawn chased a drug suspect through a crowded schoolyard, angered
community leaders in neighborhoods throughout the city, and prompted
complaints that aggressive enforcement in the pursuit of low-level arrests
was misguided.

Councilman Leffler said he had been seeking to question department
officials about narcotics initiatives since the death of Patrick M.
Dorismond, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed March 16 in a
scuffle with undercover narcotics detectives who mistook him for a drug
dealer. While the detectives were not part of Operation Condor, Mr.
Dorismond's death became associated with what critics called the
department's overly aggressive tactics.