DANIEL MUST DO THE MATH IN THE FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS

THE LAST thing the next police commissioner of Baltimore, Ronald L. Daniel,
wants to hear this morning are words from the last commissioner, who sent
him to Siberia and never imagined he would return. But maybe a little
arithmetic will give us all a sense of perspective as Daniel comes in from
the cold.

The last commissioner was Thomas C. Frazier, now departed against his will.
One autumn day a couple of years ago, he sat in his office and began
calculating the mathematics of a city's self-destruction.

"Fifty thousand," said Frazier. This is, by all the best accounting, the
rough number of hard-core narcotics abusers in the city. Hold that figure
in your head for a moment.

In his campaign for mayor, Martin O'Malley said he would wipe out the drug
traffic in Baltimore, beginning with open-air markets and brazen
street-corner operations. At yesterday's City Hall news conference where he
was introduced as the next police commissioner, Daniel alluded to this.

"I know that the mayor has said he can clear out 10 of these in the next
year," he said.

"Six months," said O'Malley before Daniel could utter another syllable.

Daniel didn't roll his eyes in exasperation, but he might have. He will
take office Jan. 3 with certain things clear: Stop the drug traffic, and it
stops the crime; stop the crime, and the city finds salvation.

Daniel knows this. He is a tough, short-tempered, smart cop who has been
around. He understands his city. He got into a messy fight about race with
Frazier a few years ago, and paid the price of temporary banishment. He
tried to dance around it yesterday. It made him visibly uncomfortable.

But, when you talk to other police, white and black, high-ranking and
street cops, they say the same thing: He's tough on everybody who doesn't
do the job properly. And race does not count with him. Crime does.

And this gets us back to those 50,000 drug abusers Frazier talked about,
and another number: $75. This, Frazier declared, was the average money
spent by the average junkie on an ordinary day.

From this, Ron Daniel might begin to calculate the true challenge of his
new job: multiply 50,000 abusers times $75 per abuser, and the figure comes
to $3,750,000. This is cash money, usually gained illegally, which is spent
to put illegal substances into human veins and nostrils in this city.

Per day.

And this is only the beginning, as Daniel knows, for we now come to another
number, because there are no off-days, no holidays and no timeouts for such
spending. Multiply the $3.75 million times 365 days of the year. It comes
to $1,368,750,000.

And we're not done. To raise this money, most junkies do not become members
of the clergy. They join the predatory ranks, breaking into houses and
cars, stealing from stores and selling the stuff they steal to raise money
for their next fix. The going rate on stolen property might be 10 to 1. A
$10 stolen item might get $1 in resale. Thus, take the $1.368 billion and
multiply by 10, and you have an idea of the money that fuels almost all
crime in Baltimore.

(The figure drops a little because some drug abusers work for a living and
support their habits without breaking into houses.)

Welcome to your new job, Ron Daniel.

At his news conference yesterday, he was asked for specifics about driving
dealers off street corners. How can it be done, and what will keep dealers
from simply going to some other corner?

It's a simple plan, he said, but, "I don't want to tell the people we're
gonna move how we're gonna do it."

What's your message to drug dealers? he was asked. This is known as a
softball, an easy pitch to hit out of the park. Daniel bunted. The man with
the snap temper, the tough cop who's seen what narcotics have done to his
home town, muttered, "They'll need to operate a different way."

Well, it was his first day in public. He wanted to assure everyone that
zero tolerance didn't mean police abuse. (In fact, he and the mayor pretty
much put the term to rest.)

And then he said something that echoed a line from two years ago, uttered
in the same ceremonial room the last time Daniel was there. It was the
moment of his confrontation with Frazier, and with Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke,
about racial strife in the department.

Yesterday, Daniel said, "We're gonna be one color, which is blue."

That's exactly what Schmoke said two years ago.

And maybe, if we're lucky, everybody means it. And the new commissioner can
focus strictly on the arithmetic of the moment, regarding drugs and the
crime it keeps driving.