KILLING PUTS FOCUS ON TACTICS OF ANTI-DRUG EFFORT

Two months ago, to curb drug dealing and the violence it
spawns, New York City embarked on an ambitious $24 million narcotics
enforcement drive known as Operation Condor. Each day, 500 additional
police officers -- some in uniform, some in plainclothes -- have taken
to the streets in high-crime neighborhoods, working overtime to stage
drug stings and roust dealers from their street corner haunts.

Police officials say that Operation Condor has been an unqualified
success: drug trafficking has largely been driven indoors, overall
crime is down 8 percent and narcotics arrests have increased 36 percent.

But critics inside and outside the department say they are not
convinced. And the March 16 death of an unarmed man, Patrick
Dorismond, in a scuffle with members of an undercover narcotics squad
in Midtown has raised questions about the effectiveness, tactics and
training of officers involved in expanded narcotics efforts like
Operation Condor.

Though that undercover unit was not on overtime, and thus not being
paid with Condor money, its tactics and training were identical to
those used by most of the city's narcotics squads.

Mr. Dorismond's death has led the critics to question how those squads
are operating, much the way the death of Amadou Diallo led to intense
scrutiny, and ultimately an overhaul, of the Street Crime Unit.

Although the narcotics division has doubled in the last five years,
supervisors say that great care has been taken to ensure that officers
in the expanded ranks are properly trained and adequately supervised.

But some community leaders are charging that the use of aggressive
tactics to arrest people for often minor crimes has only increased
tensions in a city where many black and Hispanic residents already
view the police with suspicion and fear. Mr. Dorismond, an off-duty
security guard, was the fourth unarmed black man to be fatally shot by
the police in 13 months.

What is more, the critics note that the homicide rate has risen 22
percent this year, while all shootings have increased by 8 percent.
For another, the expanded effort has produced a tide of arrests that
is almost entirely made up of misdemeanors, like smoking marijuana or
trespassing. There has even been a 9 percent decline in felony
narcotics arrests.

Many in the department view Operation Condor as something of a
strategic successor to the Street Crime Unit, which was widely
credited with helping to reduce violent crime by seizing illegal guns
during multiple searches of people in high-crime areas. That unit's
effectiveness is widely viewed as diminished in the aftermath of the
Diallo shooting in the Bronx. Its gun seizures have declined.

In its place, several narcotics supervisors said, the city is using
the Operation Condor account to put the extra 500 officers on the
streets each day to keep the pressure on drug gangs whose interactions
so often end in violence.

Under Condor, narcotics officers in a variety of divisions, including
the Housing Bureau, the Patrol Services Bureau and the Narcotics
Division, are asked to volunteer to work a sixth day of the week for
overtime. Generally these officers are then assigned to work in teams
in one of the several dozen precincts that have been designated as
Condor precincts because of their crime rates.

By themselves, these squads have produced 21,445 arrests since the
program began two months ago, the police said.

"Since the program's inception," Police Commissioner Howard Safir told
the City Council earlier this month, "major crime has decreased
dramatically when compared to last year." In time, Mr. Safir said, "We
believe that this increased enforcement will have an impact on the
homicide rate."

But critics say they do not believe the program will significantly
affect violent crime, because they say the narcotics squads, under
pressure to make many arrests quickly to satisfy their bosses, have
spent most of their time pursuing people for minor offenses. Some 75
percent of the arrests under the program have been for misdemeanors or
even lesser offenses, known as violations.

"It raises a question of what is the impact," said David Kapner, the
arraignments supervisor for the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan.

Mr. Kapner said that in reviewing hundreds of cases each week he finds
that the Condor arrests are typically of people who have been caught
using marijuana or another drug -- not selling them. He estimated that
as many as a third of the arrests are for offenses like trespassing,
farebeating, peddling or drinking in public.

But police officials countered that misdemeanor arrests, far from
being trivial, are an integral part of the zero-tolerance strategy
that the Giuliani administration has devised to successfully fight
crime.

For example, said Assistant Chief Charles Kammerdener, just a few
weeks ago a narcotics team made a marijuana arrest at Lexington Avenue
and 28th Street and found that the suspect was wanted for a slaying in
the Bronx.

That arrest, like the Dorismond incident, occurred in Midtown. But
some critics complain that the undercover operations are usually
staged in predominantly minority neighborhoods even though the crimes
being pursued are often the sort of run-of-the-mill offenses that
occur anywhere.

"Any day, you can walk down Wall Street or another corporate area and
see individuals smoking joints," said Lt. Eric Adams, a critic of the
department and the head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care.
"But you don't see these type of operations there, or in Bensonhurst,
or in Rego Park."

Police officials said such criticism is unfair because the narcotics
squads are trying to suppress violent crime, although one narcotics
supervisor said he understood that recent events had bred a basic
mistrust of police motives in many neighborhoods. To address this
mistrust, he said, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and police officials
should alert communities before beginning high-profile enforcement
programs.

"Right now," the supervisor said, "the reservoir of good will is
arid."

Indeed, even in areas where drug arrests have helped to reduce crime,
like the Morrisania and Highbridge sections of the Bronx, the strategy
is not very popular. "In my opinion, they are doing more harm than
good," said Councilman Wendell Foster, who represents the area.

Mr. Dorismond was shot after a scuffle with undercover officers who
had approached him in an attempt to buy marijuana, which he did not
have. Detective Anthony Vasquez, who fired the shot, has said through
his lawyer that his gun went off accidentally when he rushed to help
an undercover officer who had signaled that he was in trouble.

At least some of the anger stirred by the death has come from the
perception that Mr. Dorismond was approached because he was black. But
police officials said race played no part. They said units are trained
to stage undercover operations where there have been specific
allegations about drug dealing. In this instance, they said, the
stretch of Eighth Avenue, just south of the Port Authority Bus
Terminal, had been the site of 919 narcotics arrests since January
1998, and the unit was, as a result, authorized to randomly approach
people standing on that street.

In recent years, the training, experience level and supervision of
narcotics officers has increased, according to police officials, even
as the number of Narcotics Division officers has doubled from 1,600 in
1995 to roughly 3,200 today.