A CALM STRETCH ENDS IN NEWARK, BUT OFFICIALS CLAIM PROGRESS ON CRIME

NEWARK -- The day shift almost always stretches into night for this
city's homicide detectives, but on Tuesday at a little after 5 p.m.,
Sgt. Miguel Arroyo threw on his coat, picked up his umbrella, bid the
boss good night and headed for the door.

It had been 43 days without a killing in Newark: no late-night calls
to rush to homicide scenes in hopes of finding witnesses before they
disappeared, no new crush of paperwork. After a year that tested the
squad of 11 investigators with 99 homicides, including last summer's
high-profile killings of three college students in a schoolyard,
Sergeant Arroyo and his colleagues were catching their breath in the
longest stretch without a killing since before the 1967 riots.

They pored over old cases and made new arrests as Lt. William Brady
scheduled long-delayed out-of-town training sessions.

"People are seeing their families more," Lieutenant Brady said. Sgt.
Darnell Henry waved two unopened envelopes and said he was almost
caught up with old bills.

On a dry-erase board, the detectives kept cautious track of the
welcome quiet, each afternoon changing the number after the phrase
"Days without Murders."

But about 9 p.m. Tuesday, BlackBerrys buzzed with a still-familiar
bulletin: Another young man had been gunned down on the street.

Tearful relatives of the man, 20-year-old Andre Thomas, stood behind
police tape near a bodega in the South Ward, talking about how he had
been enrolled in college classes and was helping raise his
girlfriend's children. Police officials said that Mr. Thomas had been
arrested 13 times, including an arrest on the street where he died,
and said that his was a "targeted" killing, in which a gunman in a ski
mask chased him down a street and shot him in front of the bodega.

Lieutenant Brady and his detectives worked until 5 a.m. Wednesday, and
upon returning to their squad room, wiped clean the dry-erase board.

The streak was bound to end. But the homicide detectives, and the
commanders and politicians they work for, say these past six weeks
were not some bit of random luck but real dividends of a revamped
policing strategy, and that Newark, where progress is measured in
inches, not miles, may finally have turned a corner on crime.

During the lull in homicides, other measures of violent crime have
also fallen, including shootings and rapes, though assaults are up,
according to the Police Department. Last year, there had been 13
murders in Newark by Feb. 26; this year, Mr. Thomas's murder is the
third, officials said.

"There is hope in the city of Newark," Mayor Cory A. Booker said at a
news conference Wednesday. "Our city is one of the pace setters in our
nation for turning around the violent crime problem."

Mr. Booker, who has staked his political future on making the city
safer, ticked off a list of new initiatives that he credits with
reducing crime: a fugitive apprehension project, a unified narcotics
squad, a hot line for tips, more police officers on the street and the
renewed embrace of New York City's Compstat system.

The police director, Garry F. McCarthy, has pointed to other factors
as well, saying the drop in homicides could be tied to a sharp
increase in arrests, including the arrests in January of several gang
members, a result of the department's new collaboration with federal
law enforcement agencies.

"We are seeing the result of all that work, and all that activity,"
Mr. Booker said. "The trend line is heading in the right direction."

At the news conference, Mr. McCarthy reported that a Columbia
University professor had placed the odds of Newark going 43 days
without a murder at one in 111,482.

"There's no statistical anomaly here," Mr. McCarthy said. "Ten days
can be a statistical anomaly. But the fact of the matter is, there's a
science to policing."

But even among the scientists, or criminologists, there are major
disagreements about the ways in which police practices affect the
crime rate. Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, talked about one of the prevailing splits.

"How much of the reduction can be credited to the police and to the
criminal justice process?" he asked. "How much is due to underlying
social conditions?"

The drop in Newark homicides, he said, might be too rapid to be
explained by a change in social conditions or a demographic shift.
Looking at historical data about the city's homicide rate, Dr. Karmen
said that there had been reductions in the past, especially beginning
in 1997, when Compstat, a crime-tracking technique pioneered in New
York City and credited with crime reductions there, was introduced.
But the murder rates had crept back up.

"Initial gains are hard to sustain," Dr. Karmen said, pointing to
crime increases in Philadelphia and Baltimore after the introduction
of what has come to be known as the New York City model in those
cities. Efforts by law enforcement -- especially crackdowns on
so-called quality of life infractions -- had to be met with
corresponding social programs, like providing after-school and summer
jobs, and drug treatment programs, he said, adding: "It's hard to
maintain the momentum."

But it has been decades since Newark had seen the kind of calm of that
settled over the city in January and February. In 1941, the city went
95 days without a murder, and finished the year with its lowest murder
total since anyone started counting, 22. The longest more recent
stretch, 57 days, spanned the summer of 1961.

Dan O'Flaherty, an economist at Columbia who has studied crime in
Newark and has worked for the Booker administration, said that in all
probability, the streak signaled a change. He sent e-mail messages to
Mr. Booker and Mr. McCarthy on Wednesday, telling them that if Newark
was still on track to reach last year's total -- about 100 murders --
then the chances of going 43 days without a murder would be extremely
slim.

"It's like flipping a coin and it landing on heads 20 times," he said.
"The world is different. But you can't say statistically whether the
world will stay different."

In their efforts to explain their success thus far with the crime rate
- -- Mr. Booker called it "the tipping point" -- officials here have
pointed to the impact of arrests, especially of men tied to violence.
Lieutenant Brady, the homicide squad commander, said a dispute that
had started with a $70 debt stretched on for months, and led to at
least two murders and other shootings before detectives put a stop to
it.

The arrest of heavier hitters -- like Sharif Williams, whom officials
described as the head of a gang that trafficked cocaine and heroin in
Newark's South Ward -- also reduced the violence, Lieutenant Brady
said. Arms-length relationships with federal agencies had improved,
and now investigators trade encrypted information using BlackBerrys.
"Now," Lieutenant Brady said, "you have everybody running to the table."

Mr. McCarthy, as well as some of his critics, pointed out some of the
significant challenges that remain. As the Police Department has
focused on crimes at night, property crimes like burglaries, which
typically occur during the day, have crept upward, Mr. McCarthy said.

Police recruitment remains a problem, and union officials have warned
that the small size of incoming classes mean that the department,
already understaffed, could become overburdened by the demands of all
the new policing initiatives.

The change in the crime rate crept up on the people who work and live
here. Dr. Anne Mosenthal, a trauma surgeon at Newark's University
Hospital, said she and the other surgeons noticed a decrease in
shooting victims, especially in January.

Mr. Booker said he also took note of the quiet January, because he had
dreaded it: last year, there were 11 homicides in that month alone.

"We go to three weeks, and I began asking people, do you think we can
get a month?" he said.

Near where Mr. Thomas was killed on Tuesday night, Kimberly McClurkin
stood on her front lawn, watching the investigators. A resident of the
South Ward since 1994, Ms. McClurkin said the change had also taken
her by surprise. She had not heard about the murder-free streak, but
she had felt it: The corner where the gunman began chasing Mr. Thomas
- -- notorious for drug dealing -- had become calmer recently.

All around her, it had become calmer recently. Hours after the
shooting, after expressing sympathy for the victim, Ms. McClurkin said
the last thing one expects to hear from behind the crime-scene tape.
"Maybe it's a renaissance going on here," she said. "Like Harlem."