WHEN COPS BECOME COMBAT TROOPS

The controversial use of force to seize Elian Gonzalez is just
business as usual in the war on drugs.

In the debate over the federal government's use of force to return
Elian Gonzalez to his father, the left and right have magically
swapped sides.

Liberals who protest the excessive use of police force under New
York's Mayor Rudy Giuliani have been quick to defend ferocious INS
agents in helmets, camouflage and ninja masks, brandishing assault
weapons, arguing that the ends justify the means. Meanwhile many
conservatives, some of whom never met a SWAT team they didn't like,
are up in arms over the civil-liberties abuses suffered by the Miami
Gonzalez family.

The debate obscures one fact: The shocking images of combat-ready
officers battering their way into a private home are routine in
America's cities today thanks to the war on drugs, as well as the war
on illegal immigration. All across the country, the SWATification of
policing has led to a proliferation of special units trained to rely
on aggressive tactics, barging into homes and swooping down on
citizens with impunity.

The excesses of the New York Police Department are finally well known,
thanks to the tragic killings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.
Each was killed by a special police division -- Diallo by the
notorious and now-disbanded Street Crimes Unit, and Dorismond by the
controversial Operation Condor, charged with randomly confronting
people on the street and pressuring them for drugs, hoping to identify
repeat criminals.

Meanwhile, the CRASH unit in the Los Angeles Police Department's
Rampart Division battled gangs by becoming a gang itself, with its own
violent initiation rites and "awards" for maiming and killing prey.
CRASH has made the headlines, too, thanks to its members' record of
murder, stealing drugs and setting up innocent people.

But all over the country, in small and midsize cities, police
departments are adopting militaristic, SWAT-like approaches to crime.
And thanks to an expanded mandate to combat illegal immigration, INS
raids like the one in Miami are now fairly routine in neighborhoods
populated by recent arrivals to the U.S.

It would be wonderful if one side effect of the Gonzalez family
tragedy was a new focus on the tendency of police to take a military
approach to crime, creating new, hard-hitting special units to handle
each new problem, whether it is drugs, guns or gangs.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little public enthusiasm for this
debate. That's because few voters live in neighborhoods where gang
units are likely to enter their kids' names and photos into the
department database merely for wearing their hats backward. Nor do
most of us lose sleep worrying whether the police might batter down
our doors by mistake in search of drugs.

The tactics used in Miami to extract Elian were shocking to mainstream
America, but they have long been commonplace in areas that serve as
the battleground for the seemingly never-ending war on drugs. The
educated and affluent seem to view policing like making sausage --
better not look too closely or you risk losing your appetite for the
end product. As long as crime rates keep falling, who cares?

Yet there is good reason to question the wisdom of the SWATification
of policing. Special units operate under the logic that tough problems
require aggressive solutions 96 zero tolerance, undercover
operations, intimidation, deception that borders on entrapment, even
though such tactics and procedures make such units notoriously
difficult to manage and restrain.

Just take the problem of gangs. The special-unit approach relies on
documentation, intimidation, arrest and incarceration. A white
sergeant in a major urban center once proudly told me how he had
confronted an African-American youngster and demanded that he hand
over his blue shoelaces, so that he could show him a "magic trick." "I
hid the laces in my hand and cut them into little pieces. Then I threw
them in his face and told him that if I caught him wearing gang colors
again, he might disappear."

And then we're surprised when studies, like last week's report from
the Youth Law Center, show that black and Latino youth are far more
likely to be arrested, prosecuted and jailed than whites.

What's the alternative to the military approach to crime? In many
cities it's community policing. In Boston, community policing has
helped reduce crime even more dramatically than in high-profile New
York.

This approach envisions generalist police officers as collaborative,
community-based problem solvers. It stations officers on a
neighborhood beat so they can distinguish the gangbangers from the
wannabes. It brings together community leaders -- ministers, business
owners, school principals -- to work on community problems, including
gangs, recognizing that these ills require addressing the underlying
dynamics that allow problems to persist.

Arrest is only one tool. But aggressive enforcement tactics that focus
on arrest give officers nothing but a hammer, so it's no surprise that
every problem begins to look like a nail -- even if it is a just a kid
wearing blue shoelaces.

Taxpayers have good reason to demand a say in the kind of policing
they will support. CRASH unit excesses in Los Angeles will cost the
city an estimated $125 to $200 million, eating up all or most of the
tobacco-tax money otherwise earmarked for public health and children's
programs.

In contrast, Leroy O'Shield, founding member of the American
Association for the Advancement of Community-Oriented Policing, saved
millions of dollars during his tenure as chief of the Chicago Housing
Authority Police Department. His dedication to involving the
community, which included creating a civilian review board with real
power, reduced annual liability claims from 27 lawsuits with a payout
of $1.5 million to one lawsuit settled for $27,000 within two years.
In Boston, too, police brutality complaints and claims have dropped
dramatically, thanks to the new approach.

Yes, police must always maintain the ability to respond quickly to
crises and to deploy a specially trained tactical unit to handle those
rare instances when force and the show of force are the only safe
solutions for citizens and police alike. But the pervasive problems of
crime and violence also require officers who understand the context in
which they occur and who have the department's support for exploring
creative, collaborative solutions.

Republican critics of the raid on the Gonzalez home have called for
congressional hearings about the government use of force. If they were
sincere in their concerns about civil rights, they'd hold hearings
about police tactics in the war on drugs, too. Instead, they're
playing politics, just like their liberal counterparts who blindly
defend Attorney General Janet Reno's show of force, and ignoring the
real threat to civil liberties that the military approach to policing
represents.