TAKING ON CRIME IN A MD. SUBURB

She donned disguises to spy on the pushers. She snapped their photos. When
they beat her up, it only made her madder. "I don't care," Barbara Berger
says, "if I aggravate the whole world." Someone had to stand up for her
inner-suburban neighborhood.

She went to the top, to the governor. Send help, she wrote, we've got a
situation here. The e-mail bounced, office to department, but help did
come, in the form of a state trooper, a master of the art of working
undercover, one Edward M. Toatley.

And then, on an October evening, Berger turned on the TV news -- and
Toatley was dead, virtually executed in a sting gone bad. She had wanted
allies for her activism. She had gotten one, and now he was gone. If not
for her . . .

"I was devastated," Berger says.

Guilt-ridden, too. But unbowed. She will not give up. A neighborhood should
not be ruled by fear. Battling on is the least she can do to honor the man
she calls Trooper.

"If I have to prop people up and put a baseball bat in people's hands, I
will do it," Berger says. "He will not have died in vain."

Law enforcement often says it cannot fight alone, that it needs the eyes
and ears of the citizenry to combat crime. But few answer the summons the
way Barbara Berger did in Long Branch, a Montgomery County neighborhood
hard by the Prince George's County line.

Others thought she was too zealous, even seeing more problems than there
were. She believes, though, that if there had been more people willing to
act -- more people like her -- maybe there would have been no need for
Toatley. And he would still be alive. Toatley, for one, applauded her, says
Col. David B. Mitchell, the superintendent of the Maryland State Police.
The trooper felt she was "just great."

"Officers in this kind of business wonder sometimes, 'Who cares?' "
Mitchell says.

Why did Barbara Berger?

"Everybody asks me that," she says. "You know, it's just the right thing to
do. You just stop and help. You see something, and it's wrong, and you stop
and help."

She tries again: "I just felt like somebody had to do it. Everybody was
afraid -- everybody. I was, for a while. The difference is, it is better to
be afraid and try to do something than hide and do nothing. You can't hide
from it."

This fierce personality lives alone, except for five cats and a dog rescued
from the street, and comes in a slight package clothed in crew shirts,
mint-colored sweaters and corduroy pants. Enormous glasses magnify
heavy-lidded, sleep-deprived eyes. With her sharp tongue and boyish
haircut, she could be mistaken for head boy at a prep school.

Berger, 54, a process server for lawyers, has lived for 15 years in Long
Branch, a neighborhood rich in contrasts. Along Flower Avenue or Piney
Branch Road, the scenery unfolds like quick-cut cinema, from cityscape to
suburb, from solid brick colonials splashed with colorful touches to
sprawling apartment complexes squeezed beside frayed ramblers.

Outwardly, the landscape has changed little in 20 years, but an influx of
newcomers from El Salvador, Vietnam and elsewhere has transformed it. Many
are working poor, drawn by relatively affordable housing to an area with a
median income about two-thirds that of Montgomery County as a whole. Many
stay only long enough to get a footing before moving on. And among the
immigrants, there sometimes is a reluctance to approach police with
problems, community leaders say.

Such problems are most obvious in the heart of Long Branch, south of Piney
Branch Road. In May 1999, for example, a purse snatcher jumped a neighbor
at a bus stop. No one, Berger says, lifted a finger to help, except an
8-year-old boy. He ran after the mugger, retrieved the purse and agreed to
testify.

"I thought: 'This is ridiculous. We have an 8-year-old child doing the
right thing, and adults did nothing,' " Berger says. "That was the bravest
little kid I ever saw."

She resolved to act, something she has done often. When she was 12, growing
up in New Jersey, her mother dangled her by her ankles so she could snap
photos of dreadful conditions inside a dog pound. "I just remember looking
at all these scared, terrified animals. It was horrible."

But she also remembers the exhilaration of being swept along in a cause and
a feeling that she had made a difference. She is the first to admit that
she likes animals more than people, but she has an empathy for the helpless
and more than a little distrust of authority.

Other activists view Berger as a bold, if sometimes prickly, person who
somehow manages to be engaged with the community and reclusive at the same
time.

"She seems to have a passion for what she calls the little people, the ones
no one seems to care about in this society we live in," says Jim Johnson,
coordinator for the federal Weed and Seed Initiative in the neighborhood.
"I would also say that she's courageous, even though she doesn't see it as
courage. She just sees it as being ticked off about what's going on around
here."

Over the years, she kept watch on suspicious characters. She organized
meetings and noted where people bought drugs or sex. The mugging involving
the 8-year-old drove her to a new level of vigilance: She turned to her
Sony Videocam. That summer, Berger filmed prostitutes who worked out of an
RV in a parking lot. She filmed graffiti. She filmed drug deals.

Most of the people on the street wrote her off as the crazy cat lady making
the rounds, she says. Not the drug dealers. "It got to the point I couldn't
walk down the street anymore," Berger says. "I got cursed at. Spit at.
Threatened."

Berger took her films to Takoma Park police Detective Tyrone Collington,
who was glad to have them. But he also worried. "I told her it's good she's
looking out for the community, but let the police do the police work,"
Collington says.

One night, as Berger was filming drug dealers, some young men on bicycles
rolled up behind her, their T-shirts pulled over their faces like masks.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" they said, and jumped her.

Knocked to the ground, Berger surrendered the camera. All that was left was
the flap from the battery compartment, a piece she keeps as a memento.
Though she can joke about it now ("Never wear sandals when you're skulking
around"), Berger was scared.

"I went home and closed the door and cried for like an hour. I was, like,
'I can't do this anymore,' " Berger says. "Course, I woke up the next day
and I said, 'I'm really mad now.' "

County police and others say Berger and other activists have an exaggerated
perception of crime in Long Branch. Gustavo Torres, executive director of
CASA of Maryland, says the lack of jobs, recreation and good housing are
more troublesome issues. He suspects, he says, that some of the complaints
about crime reflect the uneasiness of longtime residents toward newcomers.

But Berger and others say statistics do not tell the whole story. The first
to admit it's no slum, they say that's exactly the reason the inner suburb
has received less attention.

"It's not where people are getting mugged by the hundreds every night,"
says Lora Meisner, chairman of the Flower Avenue Task Force. But she says
she often observes drug deals from her back window.

She, Berger and other activists formed walking patrols. Attired in orange
vests, each team headed out one night a month, equipped with a flashlight,
a cellular telephone and a notebook to jot down the location of suspected
criminal activity or burned-out streetlights.

One of the people the teams noted was Kofi Apea Orleans-Lindsay, a young
man whose family emigrated from Ghana when he was about 8 years old. By the
time he was 22, he had been arrested several times and pleaded guilty twice
to drug dealing and other crimes, according to court records.

To the activists, Orleans-Lindsay stood out among the hard-faced young men
who picked fights or strutted around with pit bulls. One day, as Berger and
Jim Johnson were driving together, they spotted Orleans-Lindsay near a
pawnshop. A steady stream of people handed over cash for whatever it was
Orleans-Lindsay kept in a mailbox nearby, Berger says.

She whipped out a camera.

"I said, 'Barbara! What the hell are you doing?' " Johnson recalls. "She
said, 'I'm going to catch this.' "

Fed up with what she saw as the neighborhood's downhill slide, Berger
e-mailed a plea to Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) in November 1999. Under
the heading "The Great Divide," she described Long Branch as an orphan,
forgotten by local governments. The message landed in the state Office of
Constituent Services, which forwarded it to the Maryland State Police,
which happened to be working on drug dealing along the Montgomery-Prince
George's border.

The state police were encouraged by Berger's enthusiasm and information,
which helped them zero in on a specific neighborhood. Toatley, 37, charged in.

"I said, 'Oh, my word, this is like a big Christmas gift,' " Berger recalls.

Toatley thrived on going where other police officers could not. He had
grown up near Baltimore in a blue-collar neighborhood, and he had key
skills as an undercover officer: a gift for gab, an ease among other
people. And nerve.

"He could go buy drugs from a college kid. He could go buy drugs from a --
excuse my French -- thug, on the street. He could go buy drugs from a
high-level drug dealer," says state police Lt. Frank Ford, who grew up in
Toatley's neighborhood. "He really saw it as a challenge. He wanted to go
out and prove he was the best."

When Toatley heard that other undercover officers encountered trouble
entering the chummy drug-dealing world in Long Branch, he saw his chance to
prove it again. Says Ford, "It was his ticket: Toatley to the rescue."

Berger never met Toatley face to face, only in cyberspace. She sent him
e-mails with fresh information on the lowlifes of Long Branch. Toatley
e-mailed back, telling of progress.

A few weeks before the ill-fated drug deal, Toatley visited state police
headquarters to handle some business for the Coalition of Black Maryland
State Troopers, an organization he headed. Over lunch, he told Mitchell,
the superintendent, that he needed $5,000 to wrap up the Long Branch
operation. Mitchell also recalls that Toatley looked forward to giving
Berger some good news: Arrests were coming.

"He said he just can't wait, because she's so excited. She videotapes. She
keeps her ear to the ground. She's just great."

On Oct. 30, police say, Orleans-Lindsay met Toatley at Aspen and Fourth
streets NW in the District for a prearranged drug deal. The two men drove
in Toatley's sport-utility vehicle to a Northeast Washington neighborhood.
After collecting $3,500 in marked undercover bills, Orleans-Lindsay stepped
away from the vehicle, as if to get the drugs from a stash house, police
say. Instead, they say, he returned and killed Toatley with a single
gunshot to the head.

Orleans-Lindsay was arrested Nov. 13 in New York City and is awaiting
trial. His attorney, Billy L. Ponds, says that Orleans-Lindsay's prior
convictions "speak for themselves" but that "there is no conclusive
evidence that [he] shot Trooper Toatley."

To this day, Berger has never even seen a picture of Toatley. The state
police have not released any, citing concern that a photo could jeopardize
the lives of his partners in undercover investigations. So Berger wonders
whether Toatley could have been one of the tough-looking characters on the
corner, doing his job when she was doing hers.

Defiant as ever, she wants to channel her anger into forming a new
community group. She works with Johnson to coordinate crime-fighting and
social service programs. She ricochets between gratitude for Toatley's
courageous work and guilt over his death. She has been thinking of writing
to his widow, if she can find the right thing to say. She wants a park in
the neighborhood to bear Toatley's name.

"Seriously, I just could not feel worse about what happened to that man,"
Berger says. "That's the least we can do for this officer, the very least."