NORRIS' SELECTION RAISES PROFILE OF N.Y.-STYLE POLICING METHODS

Zero Tolerance Strategy Generates Fear For Rights

The era of feel-good policing is over in Baltimore.

Any doubt about that ended Friday when former New York police officer
Edward T. Norris was named acting commissioner of the city's police
force after the abrupt resignation of Ronald L. Daniel.

As a deputy commissioner hired by Daniel, Norris is a driving force
behind a new law and order regime being modeled on crime-fighting
strategies of the New York Police Department.

It's a radical departure from the social policies of Daniel's
predecessor, Thomas C. Frazier, whose force promoted itself as the
only gang in town that could save a child, run a recreation center and
get a drug addict into treatment.

"Programs are for peacetime," said one of Norris' aides, Col. Bert L.
Shirey. In the war on the streets, officers arrest people. Crime goes
down. Social order follows.

"There's a crisis going on here," Norris said recently on WJHU
(http://www.wjhu.org) 's "Marc Steiner Show." "The mayor won the
election with a zero tolerance program. That tells me a lot of people
are tired of having people standing in their neighborhood selling
drugs openly."

Norris did not respond to requests for interviews over the past three
weeks.

While it's unclear whether Mayor Martin O'Malley will make Norris his
next commissioner, the sudden change in command has inflamed debate
over whether police tactics that helped New York drastically reduce
its crime rate should be used in Baltimore.

African-Americans in particular fear police will unjustly harass -- or
even assault -- honest citizens in the name of zero tolerance. Some
residents are worried that Norris, a white New Yorker, will become the
permanent leader.

Talk show hostLarry Young took to the airwaves Friday morning and told
residents waking up to the news that they had gone to bed "believing
you had a black police commissioner" and that the mayor "understood
the base of this city."

Young urged his listeners to speak out: "If you sit silent and say
nothing, then you are just as much part of the problem as the man
making the decisions. Mr. Mayor, please don't take us down this road."

Daniel was appointed by O'Malley to reform a department unable to tame
the streets, but he chafed under O'Malley's constant oversight and
balked at many of the reform plans being drafted by two high-priced
consultants brought in by the mayor.

Although the reform report hasn't been made public, there's no
question that policing will be much different than under Frazier, whom
O'Malley disdained.

A different approach

Frazier described himself as a "social worker with a gun." Norris, a
bull of a cop with a New York accent and attitude, just has a gun. As
deputy commissioner, he expressed surprise that hard-core criminals in
Baltimore thumbed their noses at police.

"I come from a place where if a police car comes by, the drug dealers
try to hide, and they scatter," Norris said during a radio station
call-in show, after he arrested a man who would not budge from a
corner stoop.

"I was a little upset when no one seemed to move."

Norris is regarded as an innovative strategist who helped engineer New
York's sharp decline in crime and homicide and sped nearly to the top
of the turbulent 40,000-member force at One Police Plaza in midtown
Manhattan.

Plucked from the ranks by a New York police leader who is now a crime
consultant in Baltimore, Norris promoted a zero-tolerance approach to
criminals that has been praised for making the city safer -- and
blamed for condoning police abuse.

Zero tolerance, Norris said on the radio show, does not mean wholesale
locking-up of litterers. It means targeted enforcement to attack
specific problems in neighborhoods.

If dealers use bicycles in one area to move drugs, then police will
crack down on bicycle infractions there.

It worked in New York, where police started ticketing bicyclists going
the wrong way on streets or using sidewalks. They confiscated 18 guns,
Norris said of the crackdown, "and the shootings stopped."

He noted that the killing of a New York police officer, one of his
friends, was solved after a routine arrest of "someone smoking a joint
in a subway."

Yet several police shootings of unarmed civilians, including that of
Amadou Diallo, who died in a hail of 41 police bullets, and the case
of Abner Louima, who was brutalized by officers with a broomstick in a
precinct house, have sparked calls for reform.

Clashes between angry protesters and police broke out last weekend
during the funeral for Patrick M. Dorismond, an unarmed man shot to
death in a confrontation with undercover officers trying to make a
drug buy.

The New York attorney general has concluded that too many people are
being stopped and frisked for no reason, and a U.S. Department of
Justice inquiry is under way that could result in a federal monitor's
being appointed to oversee and revamp NYPD practices.

Police there have defended themselves with gusto as they point to the
decrease in crime. "If we're culpable of anything, it's reducing crime
by 55 percent in this city," Police Commissioner Howard Safir said in
a television interview.

Some Baltimore residents have protested recent police shootings here
as a byproduct of harsher tactics copied from New York. After a man
was killed by an officer in February, East Baltimore residents
gathered at the scene and shouted, "O'Malley is a killer."

But in neighborhoods such as North Baltimore's Pen Lucy, where
homeowners have been struggling against guns and drugs for years,
people feel that police have not done enough to stem the violence and
clear corners of loiterers.

"They say it's their constitutional right to stand on our corners and
do as they please," said Robert Nowlin, a frustrated community activist.

"They have pushed these rights so far that they are hurting the good
people."

Norris' style is one that goes over well with police insiders. "Norris
is a man after my own heart," Shirey said. "He does basic policing and
leaves the programs to other people."

Shirey worked under Frazier, who warned that tough "New York-style
policing" would violate the rights of citizens.

Frazier said police could not arrest their way out of the drug problem
and ordered his troops to ignore addicts carrying small amounts of
cocaine and heroin. He allowed drug addicts picked up during sweeps to
seek treatment instead of going to jail.

The Californian poured resources into youth programs to steer children
away from crime. Recreation centers locked their doors when schools
let out to avoid violence, so who better to offer safety than armed
officers running Police Athletic League programs?

But homicides topped 300 year after year, and O'Malley ran his mayoral
election campaign on the promise of doing better. Daniel, who lasted
two months, was the mayor's choice as commissioner, with Norris and
the outside consultants as critical components of City Hall's
crime-fighting team.

Praised by Daniel

Daniel introduced Norris to Baltimore in January with a strong vote of
confidence: "After I talked to Ed just five minutes, I found out
something that I liked, which is, he is a cop. We think alike. He
knows how to fight crime. He's been successful."

Norris' influence has already been felt. He started an aggressive
warrant squad in New York, which is being copied here; detectives are
being sent out to the districts, similar to New York's set-up; weekly
crime meetings are becoming more confrontational, in New York style.

Norris is a protege of Jack Maple, a New York transit officer who
devised a new way of fighting crime: map where it occurs and
concentrate resources there. Norris was the man picked to make that
happen in New York.

He rose from a patrolman walking Times Square in 1980 to deputy
commissioner in 16 years -- a rise deemed unprecedented -- first under
Commissioner William J. Bratton and continuing under Safir.

Norris stands up for his troops. Last year, he condemned the New York
Times for its critical coverage of police tactics and said the
negative stories scared officers from clamping down, resulting in a
rise in crime.

"One of Eddie's traits, being so fresh from working the field himself,
is that he is very well liked by the rank-and-file officer," Bratton
said.

"He's not an armchair cop."

Louis R. Anemone, a retired New York City police chief and Norris'
training officer, called him "a natural-born leader."

"He exudes confidence in himself and those around him. I think only
good can come of this," he said.

As a rookie, Norris was one of the first officers to respond to a
midtown Manhattan robbery of an electronics store and helped catch a
suspect who spoke only Spanish.

"What the guy didn't know is that Eddie understood Spanish," Anemone
said. "He just sat there listening to him and he got the whole story
and was able to apprehend the guy who set the whole thing up."

Later, as a seasoned police commander, he found a rape pattern by
reading precinct reports sitting in his headquarters office -- a
thread missed by several detectives working in different parts of the
city.

He's doing the same thing here in Baltimore at the weekly crime
meetings, which were patterned after New York's. In one instance, he
noticed a common address link between a suspect and a witness in a
shooting that had been overlooked.

"He surprised the presenter," Shirey said. "They had to go back and
rethink the investigation. It was a case that was clueless that had a
clue."

It is important in a city where arrests are made in less than 40
percent of the homicides and 20 percent of the nonfatal shootings.
"It's just getting back to basic police work," Shirey said.

Tougher crime meetings

Weekly crime meetings in New York were famously harsh. Precinct
commanders were dressed down, and the surest way to ruin a promotion
or get demoted was to give a poor presentation or fumble for an answer.

Baltimore's meetings were less confrontational by design. Some
commanders now say the meetings were so soft that nothing got
accomplished. That is changing under Norris.

"We are focusing on things we haven't focused on for a long time:
crime -- how to solve it, how to prevent it," said Officer Gary
McLhinney, president of the police union and a strong critic of the
Frazier administration.

Shirey said that Norris "is more detailed. He gets into technique and
tactics rather than overall numbers and generalities."

Of police reports, Shirey said, "He's actually reading
them."

Maj. John L. Bergbower, the former commander of the Southwestern
District, said Norris is "no-nonsense, direct and to the point. I
think he has grasped the problems right off the bat."

Norris does not back down. On the Steiner show, he confronted Doug
Colbert, a University of Maryland Law School professor who sparked a
debate over zero-tolerance policing and what it could mean to Baltimore.

Colbert said that many innocent citizens will be stopped and searched
under the new plan, "and I just think that those kind of
police-citizen encounters are going to lead to greater hostility,
mistrust and, I fear, more shootings at police and between police and
citizens."

But Norris countered that police shootings in New York dropped from
212 in 1993 to 71 in 1999, "after six years of aggressive policing."

"We run the department now like a business," Norris told the radio
show listeners.

"The bottom line is not a profit. It's crime reduction. We need to
save lives and we need to cut this murder rate in half. You can't have
a city with a level of violence like this."

The Los Angeles Times contributed to this article.