SOME ANTIDRUG MONEY WILL BE SHIFTED TO PATROLS

A third of the $24 million in overtime money earmarked for an
ambitious, but much criticized, anti-narcotics initiative known
as Operation Condor will be used instead to pay for increased
uniformed patrols that will focus on a variety other offenses,
police officials said yesterday. The officials said that police
commanders in the five boroughs had requested more discretion
in using the overtime money after finding that several months of
narcotics sweeps had disrupted drug dealing at many street corner
sites and that the money could now be better used elsewhere.

They insisted the move did not reflect dissatisfaction with the Condor
program, which had been using the money largely for plainclothes
narcotics units under the theory drug dealing spawns most violent crime.

"Police are not disenchanted with Condor," Deputy Chief Thomas Fahey
said. "We have said from the beginning that Condor would be constantly
evaluated and would be used to cut crime."

Critics of the program have contended that the pressure to make
arrests and earn overtime has driven narcotics officers to use
aggressive tactics that led to incidents like the shooting last month
of an unarmed man, Patrick M. Dorismond. Although the plainclothes
unit that got into a scuffle with Mr. Dorismond was not being paid
with Condor overtime money, critics have said it was operating under
the same sort of pressure to produce arrests that typifies the program.

In a second incident, several elected officials criticized the
judgment of a plainclothes narcotics officer on Condor overtime who
chased a suspected marijuana dealer through a crowded schoolyard last
month with his gun drawn.

Police officials said the decision to expand the uses of the Condor
money and broaden the narrow anti-narcotics emphasis of the program
was not a response to public criticism, but a reaction to advice from
field commanders on how the money might best be spent.

One senior law enforcement official said: "It does have the appearance
of addressing the concerns that people have because it means more
people in uniform and not plainclothes. But that's not the primary
reason." The primary reason, the official said, is to make sure that
officers are not wasting their time pursuing criminal activity that
has largely disappeared.

The decision to realign the program's spending priorities came after a
meeting Wednesday in which Police Commissioner Howard Safir asked the
borough police commanders to assess the effectiveness of the
initiative, which began Jan. 17. According to Chief Fahey, who
attended the meeting, the commanders said the program had been a
success, with many of the violent crimes spawned by the drug trade
beginning to decline, including homicides.

The murder rate began decreasing after a rise in homicides at the
beginning of the year.

But some of the commanders, Chief Fahey said, reported that
street-corner drug sweeps were beginning to turn up little activity
and that some of the money could be better spent on uniformed patrols
that focused on other offenses.

A portion of the Condor money, which has placed an additional 500
officers on the streets each day, has always gone to uniformed
officers working with Street Narcotics Enforcement Units that
concentrate on arresting street-corner drug dealers. But now,
officials said, the money would go to uniformed patrols active in
other areas like the Housing Bureau, where commanders could use the
money to pay for overtime patrols in projects that had a particular
problem with muggings.

Or, officials predicted, other commanders would use the money to put
uniformed police on blocks where public drinking and dice games have
emerged as the causes of fistfights and gunplay. Many of these patrols
will be organized by precinct commanders as team led enforcement
units, in which five uniformed officers and a sergeant are dispatched
with a specific mission, like patroling areas where car thefts are a
problem.

Most of the money, however, will continue to be spent as it has been:
to field plainclothes anti-narcotics units that operate in six-or
seven-person teams and conduct undercover buy-and-bust operations.

In fact, one senior law enforcement official said, commanders in
Brooklyn have decided to continue to spend the vast majority of their
Condor money on narcotics operations. In several weeks, the official
said, analysts would be able to review whether using the money for
narcotics enforcement or for a range of purposes was more effective in
curbing violent crime.

Nonetheless, as one commander noted, the concept of spending more of
the overtime money on uniformed officers could not help but improve
morale within the patrol ranks, where some officers have grumbled that
they felt left out of the opportunity to earn bonuses. Chief Fahey
said the redistribution of the money was not meant to placate these
officers.

Another narcotics supervisor said he agreed with the decision because,
as serious drug dealers were increasingly driven inside buildings,
where it is much tougher to apprehend them, undercover units found
themselves chasing marijuana smokers and others involved in even
lesser offenses.

Although officers working on Condor overtime money have made 25,926
arrests in less than three months, 75 percent of the arrests, have
been for misdemeanor offenses like trespassing, not felonies like
narcotics trafficking.

"It isn't a major sea change," the supervisor said. "But it's a
realization that Condor is not a magic bullet and that you need to
have a uniformed presence."