CHICAGO POLICE RETHINKING CRIME-FIGHTING

Editor's note: In Chicago, murders fell from 598 to 448 in 2004.
Shootings declined by 1,000. More than 10,000 guns were taken off the
street. Impressed, Dallas police are modeling their crime strategies
on Chicago's get-tough methods.

CHICAGO -- It will be dark soon, prime killing hours in one of the
roughest parts of this city, which once had more murders than any
other in the country.

Tonight is expected to be especially hot. Two days ago, somebody
killed a man and wounded another. The victims were brothers and
leaders of the New Breed street gang, which has been warring with the
Black Souls for drug turf.

The cops predict revenge.

Officers Tom Curran and Mike Saladino cruise a west-side street of
boarded-up brownstones and weedy lots scattered with beer bottles and
plastic bags. They are hunting for six men who the department expects
will either kill or be killed in the ongoing rivalry.

Fifty cops have swarmed the area of 1 1/2 square miles. They will
stop people on foot and in cars for minor infractions such as broken
taillights and dice games in hopes of finding gang members, guns,
drugs and -- if they're lucky -- tips about where the next shooting
might occur.

Chicago's zero-tolerance strategy has become a model for the Dallas
Police Department. This summer, police began freeing up officers to
flood high-crime areas and revamping accountability meetings. They
plan to install surveillance cameras to watch open-air drug markets.

If all goes well, Dallas hopes it can duplicate Chicago's 25 percent
decline in murders in just one year. But it might not be easy. The
Dallas Police Department struggles to break down bureaucratic
barriers to criminal intelligence. And Chicago has more than four
times as many officers. Relying on experience

Officers Curran and Saladino roll up on a pair of teenagers hanging
out at 16th and Christiana.

"Put your hands on the squad car," they yell at the teens. Officer
Curran handcuffs them together and searches their slacked jeans for
guns and drugs.

Officer Curran knows this is an open-air drug market. He's arrested
one of these guys before. And he's trained to smell lies.

The older teen, the one with a puff of black hair tied in a ponytail,
tells him his address. Officer Curran recognizes it. It's near a drug
house where the suspect in this week's murder hangs out. He demands
to know where he is.

Pacing around the front of his squad car, Officer Curran turns to the
younger one. The officers ask him his birth date, grade and the name
of his school. To each, he answers, "I don't know."

He's lying. He's done something wrong and he's protecting himself --
or he's protecting someone else. Officer Curran calls for backup.

"You've got until the other car gets here to figure out your real
birth date or I'm locking you up," he warns.

With so many officers out tonight, it doesn't take long. They check
the in-car computer for active warrants and search the area for
drugs, pointing out gang names carved in the sidewalk.

Finally, the officers write down the teenagers' names, nicknames,
birth dates and addresses on green cards and let them go. Back at the
station, the information will be entered into a database for future
investigations.

Officer Curran slides back into the driver's seat and takes out a
police bulletin. He scans the mug shots of the six men again.

"I've worked in the 10th District," he says. "I've locked each one of
them up before. So I know every one of them." Crucial information

The bulletin was distributed earlier in the night during roll call.
At 7 p.m., the cops in Chicago's Targeted Response Unit milled about
the fifth floor of an old brick Army depot.

Officer Curran and Officer Saladino's unit crowded into a cubicle as
the sergeant briefed them on the crime statistics and gang
intelligence from the week.

The sergeant said the brothers were shot in retaliation for another
shooting a week earlier. The New Breeds and the Black Souls are
feuding to control a barren apartment courtyard nicknamed The Square.
It's perfect drug turf. Four buildings surround it and block the view
from the street. The parking lot is pushed back enough that a
well-placed lookout can warn at the first sign of police.

The shootings didn't even make the newspaper. But with information
from undercover detectives, crime analysis and the green cards,
Chicago tracks crime better than nearly every other department.

All the information goes into a central database of offenders,
locations and crimes that officers crunch all week to figure out
where the next homicide is likely to occur.

Such methods have solved murders in less than two hours.

Say, for example, police get a tip that "Mac and his boys" did the
shooting and that Mac has a snake tattoo. Officers can search for
people who live in the area with the tattoo and the nickname, and
instantly pull up a mug shot and photographs of the tattoos for a
lineup. They then can search everyone arrested previously with the
suspect to find possible accomplices.

In Dallas, commanders have struggled for years to get officers to
share criminal information. Until recently, a homicide detective had
to separately call the gang, narcotics and intelligence units and six
area investigative units to gather all the information on a suspect.
He would then have to search prior cases one by one to find accomplices.

But things are changing. The department has recently built a data
clearinghouse where officers can do a search using a name and get
information from all units. It's not as comprehensive as Chicago's,
but it's a major improvement.

"The barriers of withholding information are coming way down," said
Lt. Todd Thomasson, who oversees Dallas' new crime task force.

In Chicago, accountability is reinforced up and down the ranks. Hours
before the night's briefing, the sergeants listened to commanders
chew over every shooting. Now, they hammer their troops with the same message.

Stop the next killing before it happens. How? By finding the guns and
drugs that gangbangers use to support their violence.

The police can't be everywhere, every time. But with good
intelligence, they can be in the right place at the right time. In
the community

Back at 16th and Christiana, Officer Curran takes another look at the bulletin.

"The best thing is to pick up all these guys who are wanted, and
there won't be any retaliation," he says.

The sun has set, and residents of the three-story graystones mingle
on the stoops and sidewalks. The thump of car speakers clashes with
the whoop of police sirens.

Driving down a dark street, the officers point out a Star of David on
a long-abandoned synagogue.

"Three officers were shot at on this street in a month and a half,"
says Officer Curran.

He decided to be a cop when he was 16 after reading Red Dragon, the
prequel to Silence of the Lambs. Now 30, he says he was impressed by
how the book's sleuth broke down the crime.

Officer Saladino, 28, wavered about joining the force after
graduating from college with a finance degree. His father was a cop.
So were his brother and two of his mother's cousins.

A call comes over the radio.

An officer needs backup. A man in a sleeveless undershirt and
cornrows is raging as another cop tries to handcuff him.

He curses the cops. He says that they're racist, that they should be
catching murderers instead of harassing innocent black men like him.

"First you tell me I can't be on the corner. Now you tell me I can't
be outside my own house," he shouts.

Like officers in all urban police departments, Chicago police go head
to head with racial tensions every day. Chicago residents have
protested for years about racial profiling, and police shootings
frequently draw cries of racism.

The summer was especially heated after a patrol sergeant was accused
of pointing a gun and cursing at a prominent black state senator
during a traffic stop.

But Chicago police say the community has largely supported the
force's new anti-crime strategies. Despite more enforcement in
high-crime, minority neighborhoods, the department hasn't seen an
increase in racial profiling complaints, officials said.

"I haven't heard any complaints about it whatsoever," said Eric
Strickland, a business owner who runs a community development
corporation in North Lawndale, which is 99 percent nonwhite.

Chicago police say the support is a result of monthly crime-beat
meetings that officers have had with residents since the early 1990s.

Others have different opinions.

"I think that people have been responsive to it because the crime
rate has been so bad," said the Rev. Patricia Watkins, a South Side
civil-rights leader.

"I think the Police Department is doing a pretty good job, but I
think it has a lot of work to do," she said. "They're creating
animosity and also straining the relationship between police and
residents by pulling people over for anything. And they're treating
them as if they're criminals. And they're not doing that in every
neighborhood -- only in the minority neighborhoods." Quick sweep

At 10:25 p.m., another pair of officers radio Officers Curran and
Saladino about 10 men rolling dice on a sidewalk. They start at
opposite ends of the street and race down at the same time.

The red and blue lights flash. Some men run, littering the sidewalk
with an empty bottle in a brown paper bag, four dice and plastic cups
half-filled with malt liquor. The cops catch seven men.

Such a quick sweep might present a challenge in parts of Dallas,
where the drug dealing is often done inside garden-style apartments.
Officers must navigate slow-moving gates, winding roads and speed
bumps. Dealers can slip away.

Four of the men are handcuffed together and place their hands on a
navy blue sedan that has been in the yard so long that weeds tangle
its wheels. Officer Curran frisks them while Officer Saladino runs
their IDs to check for warrants.

The handcuffed men scoff at the attention police are giving to petty gamblers.

"All the real criminals got away," one man says.

But dice games often turn deadly, Officer Curran says. Somebody gets
mad that someone's making money and shoots him. If nothing else, it
sends the message that cops don't care about the neighborhood.

Dallas' new Operation Disruption follows a similar strategy. The unit
of 60 officers moves fast into high-crime hot spots to spread word
that crime won't be tolerated. Off with a warning

It's after 1 a.m. The officers cruise another dark street. A lookout
hollers to warn the drug dealers.

The officers pull up on a man sitting alone on a curb. He wears the
typical ball cap, white shirt and jeans that gang members have
started using to make police descriptions uselessly vague.

"Why are you out so late? Do you live around here?"

Officer Curran frisks him and finds a wad of cash as thick as a
paperback book. He slaps it onto the hood of the squad car and
spreads it out in three piles. There's $600.

Hands cuffed behind his back, the man leans on the hood and insists
that it was payday at his carwash job. Officer Saladino fills out the
green card and reaches into the driver's seat to run his name for warrants.

The man watches as Officer Curran points a flashlight at the curb and
searches the lot behind him. He bends down to turn over rocks and
pick up scraps of cellophane, sniffing them for drugs.

"Do you think I'd find any drugs if I called a dog out here?" he asks
the man. The man shrugs.

The officers debate taking him to jail. They have probable cause. But
they doubt he'll be charged for having a wad of cash at 1 a.m. on a
street known for drugs. Even if he's not dealing, being out so late
with that much money makes him a potential victim of robbery.

They let him go, warning him not to be on the corner the next time
they come by.

They make a few more traffic stops. A man driving slowly and dangling
his arm out the window tells the officers he's just cruising for
women. They find out he's on parole after getting caught with a gun.
Another stop: three guys coming home from a late-night of partying.
One of them is on parole for a drug crime.

They record the information and move on.

At one point, a middle-aged man comes out on the street to thank them
for being out tonight. He's lived here 40 years and has seen his
street get worse and worse.

Now it may be getting better. Murders declined from 598 to 448 in
Chicago last year. There were more than 1,000 fewer shootings. About
10,000 guns were taken off the streets.

Dallas poliec hope for the same results. If the department matches
it, the city will have its lowest murder count in more than 30 years,
at fewer than 200 killings.

As the night ends, Officers Curran and Saladino pull in behind the
red-brick warehouse that serves as their office.

They didn't catch up with the six men who police thought would be
consumed in the turf war. The shooting suspect, known as the Lion
King, was caught later.

But Officers Curran and Saladino accomplished something.

Tonight, no one was killed.
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[Sidebar]

Chicago: Dallas
Population* 2,862,244 : 1,210,393
Total area 228 square miles : 380 square miles
2003 murders 598 : 226
2004 murders 448 : 248
Officers 13,619 sworn, 2,525 civilian : 2,977 sworn, 556 civilian
Squad cars 2,980 : 1,073
Identified gang members 68,000 : 3,500

*2004 U.S. census estimates

SOURCES: Dallas Police Department, Chicago Police Department, FBI
Uniform Crime Reports, Dallas Morning News research

THE METHODS

A crime analysis center analyzes statistics and gang and narcotics
tips to pinpoint not just the existing hot spots but where the next
ones will be. Every Friday, the center assigns target areas for
increased police patrols across the city.

A targeted patrol squad enlists five teams of 50 officers to flood
the areas. They stop people for little things like broken taillights
and suspicious activity in hopes of finding wanted gang members and
guns. The goal is to prevent the next shooting and send the message
that crime won't be tolerated.

Surveillance cameras monitor high-crime areas. While the 65 cameras
have caught everything from urinating in public to shootings, their
main purpose is to disperse drug dealers. Some cameras are equipped
with devices that detect gunshots and automatically zoom in on the
source. It's all paid for with seized drug money.

A sophisticated computer database consolidates all its statistics,
intelligence and criminal history so officers can track trends and
solve crimes. Officers can search for nicknames and tattoos and pull
up mug shots and names of criminal associates.

Patrol duty for administrative officers is required one day out of
five to target open-air drug markets. The initiative puts 200 more
cops on the street every day.

Aggressive drug enforcement involves police officers taking over a
drug corner after an arrest and posing as the dealers. They then
arrest the buyers and impound their cars.

Accountability meetings drive home the department's focus on gangs,
guns and drugs. Everyone from commanders down to street officers is
held responsible for crime in their area. Officers can't be
everywhere, every time. But with good management, they can be in the
right place at the right time.