POLICE DEPT. PULLS TOGETHER ALL IT KNOWS

Moving to replace a system that it acknowledges is disjointed and
archaic, the Police Department is transforming the way it handles its
most valuable crime-fighting tool - information, from tips about
street-corner thugs to reports on international drug syndicates.

Police officials say they hope the new system will spur fundamental
changes in the department, not only in the way police gather and
distribute information internally, but also in the way detectives and
police officers use the information to solve crimes and track
criminals.

They also say that the new program, which includes more than a
half-dozen federal law enforcement agencies and has consolidated
several units in the Police Department, will give police commanders
around the city additional tools to further reduce the city's
declining crime rates.

The new system was created through a reorganization of the
department's Criminal Intelligence Section. The section oversees the
gathering of information, from the nicknames of local criminals and
their favored haunts, to details about international drug smuggling
routes and tips about gun trafficking organizations.

The intelligence section will analyze the information and funnel it
through a high-tech clearinghouse to get it to the people in the
department who need it most.

Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik directed his staff to begin
formulating a reorganization plan last September, and the program
began quietly operating in May. In its first 100 days, officials
said, it has produced information that directly led to the seizure of
113 guns and the execution of 199 search warrants, which probably
would not have happened without the new system. Information funneled
through the intelligence section also helped the police find
witnesses or suspects in 45 homicides and 47 shootings.

"I think it's going to substantially contribute to our crime
reduction efforts," Mr. Kerik said.

Perhaps most significantly, he said, the reorganization is meant to
change a culture that sometimes bordered on paranoia.

In a recent interview, Mr. Kerik acknowledged that department units
intent on making their own cases - and, sometimes, their own
headlines - have withheld information from fellow officers, a
longstanding problem that, he said, has frustrated and angered him.
At the same time, he said, some officials so obsessively feared that
information might fall into the wrong hands outside the department
that they fostered a culture of secrecy.

"People weren't looking out for the best interest of the department,"
Mr. Kerik said of the jealousies that sometimes got in the way of
good police work. With the new system, he said, the department has
started to change that.

Assistant Chief Joanne Jaffe, who helped shape the plan, said one of
the department's most overlooked resources has been the information
it already has.

"I think the most critical part of this is that there are thousands
of cops out there, on patrol, beat officers, youth officers,
community affairs officers - they have so much in their heads," she
said. "Every day, they're retiring and leaving, and we were losing
that information." Under the new system, she said, it will begin to
be stored, cataloged and put to good use.

Under the old system, there were several different units responsible
for keeping track of information about crimes and criminals,
including one unit for narcotics crimes, one for street gangs and one
for organized crime. There were at least as many separate computer
databases used to track information and patterns of crimes, but there
were no links between the systems.

The reorganized Criminal Intelligence Section is part of the
Intelligence Division, which traces its history back to the beginning
of the 20th century and has had its share of darker moments. The
division's infiltration of black militant groups and other political
organizations in the 1960's and 1970's led to a 1985 federal court
decision that barred the department from conducting any kind of
political surveillance, except under exceptional circumstances. The
court case and the ruling, some police officials say, had a chilling
effect on efforts to collect information on crimes and criminals,
leaving the division in disarray and fostering its troubled culture.

The new section, which police officials say is focused squarely and
exclusively on criminals and criminal groups, has so far given civil
libertarians little pause. "The Police Department is entitled to make
its investigative and analytical operations more efficient," said
Donna Lieberman, the acting executive director of the New York Civil
Liberties Union. "We would be concerned if they were expanding their
political surveillance operations in ways that infringed on
individuals' rights."

Mr. Kerik said the new program is intended to provide as
comprehensive a picture as possible about crime in the city, block by
block, precinct by precinct, and borough by borough, so that
officials can make better-informed decisions about where to use
scarce resources. Working in a computer center that serves as the
program's clearinghouse are agents and analysts from the F.B.I., the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms, the United States Customs Service and other
agencies. They focus not only on street crime, but on money
laundering, gun trafficking and sophisticated drug operations.

"The goal is to make law enforcement more efficient and effective, to
have this integrated picture of crime and have that information drive
enforcement decisions," said Chauncey Parker, the director of the New
York-New Jersey High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or Hidta, a
federal program that has provided more than $4 million to support the
new initiative.

The foundation of the new system for collecting information is a
network of 98 police sergeants, one assigned to each of the city's 76
police precincts and the 22 other police commands for the city's
subways and housing developments, said Deputy Inspector John Cutter,
who heads the section. The sergeants' sole responsibility is
collecting information in their areas about criminals and crime
patterns, including drug and gun trafficking, robberies,
prostitution, burglaries and fencing operations, Inspector Cutter
said.

Their job includes teaching patrol officers how to use information
they collect themselves to get search warrants in drug and gun cases,
something Chief Jaffe said patrol officers rarely did in the past.
Among the challenges for the sergeants and the new system in the
coming months will be to convince patrol officers to contribute their
knowledge of the streets and take advantage of the information that
will be available to them, officials said.

The sergeants report to eight 30- member Borough Intelligence Teams,
each of which is responsible for 4 to 16 precincts, housing or
transit commands. The borough teams look for patterns and trouble
spots and work out solutions.

The borough teams also serve as liaisons between the sergeants in the
field and the watch center at the Hidta Regional Intelligence Center.
There, analysts have access to all the department's databases, as
well as federal and state information and commercial information
databases. They can help detectives track suspects and witnesses, and
mine the databases for other information that can help investigators.

Robert Cordier, the special agent in charge of the criminal division
in the New York F.B.I. office, said the new program set a precedent
for cooperation between agencies. "We're all bringing our databases
to one table, all the federal agencies and the N.Y.P.D.," he said.
"This has never been done before."