NEW TACTIC GOES CITYWIDE AFTER IT ENDS DRUG BAZAARS

A two-year-old effort to rid the Lower East Side of its street-corner drug
bazaars has worked so well that senior police officials say they want to
expand it to every precinct in the city.

The two-pronged strategy would involve establishing a permanent anti-drug
unit in each precinct and retraining officers to go after not only
street-level dealers but also the organizations that supply them.

Under current tactics, squads of narcotics officers concentrate their
efforts in certain parts of the city and then move on. Police officials say
this approach focuses too much on arresting low-level dealers and has
little lasting effect on the drug trade. Permanent anti-drug teams would be
far more effective at dismantling a drug gang from its leadership on down,
and would have a better chance of keeping dealers off the streets for good,
the police say.

"The problem with most drug initiatives in the past was that you do the
initiative and leave, and then the trafficking came back," Commissioner
Howard Safir said in a recent interview. "The key to combating drug traffic
is to take a holistic approach, not just going after drug traffickers, but
focusing on the whole trade."

Charles Kammerdener, the assistant chief who oversees the Narcotics
Division, said that if a local drug gang is dismantled, "There is no one to
fill the void, because you have taken out the upper echelons, the people
who cannot be replaced."

Police officials said the number of narcotics officers was being increased
to 3,000, and Chief Kammerdener said that by the end of the year, their
retraining at the Police Academy would be complete and they would be
stationed in every precinct.

The department's strategy involves using undercover officers to buy from
street dealers while surveillance teams videotape the deals. The
surveillance teams continue monitoring the dealers to identify the
couriers, enforcers, lookouts and, most importantly, the middle managers of
drug organizations, officials say.

The undercover officers then approach the middle managers with

requests to buy larger quantities of drugs in hopes of identifying the next
tier of the organization, and eventually its leaders, officials added. No
arrests would be made until the officers have learned the hierarchy of the
drug organization and have enough information to arrest everyone on
conspiracy charges, from the leaders to the street dealers.

Commissioner Safir said that using a "holistic approach" meant working
together with other local and Federal law enforcement agencies to make the
best coordinated attack possible, instead of having agencies and
prosecutors working at cross purposes, a sentiment echoed by other officials.

"The strategy is working," Commissioner Safir said, adding that in the
neighborhoods where it is in place drug sales have been forced indoors,
where they attract less secondary crime and can be pursued with other laws,
like nuisance abatement statutes.

A decade ago on the Lower East Side, drug dealers sold cocaine and heroin
so brazenly to such long lines of people that local residents often mistook
the crowds for street fairs.

The new drug tactics began to take full form two years ago, when the police
began to look for something more effective than the old practice of sending
the Tactical Narcotics Teams, units of up to 100 additional narcotics
officers, into a neighborhood troubled by high drug sales and crime rates.

Lynn Zimmer, a sociology professor at Queens College who has studied the
Police Department's drug efforts on the Lower East Side, said that although
that practice was well intentioned, the results were limited. Zimmer said
drug gangs usually just waited for the police to leave, or moved
temporarily into poorer parts of the neighborhood that received less attention.

"People felt it got worse, rather than better," Zimmer said.

Commissioner Safir said permanent narcotics units were being created to
provide a "sustained presence" in neighborhoods. The size of the teams will
vary from 30 in neighborhoods with small drug problems to 100 in places
where the gangs continue to flourish, like Washington Heights, he said.

Police officials and their critics almost unanimously agree that the new
efforts have paid off on the Lower East Side, and could succeed in other
places. In the last two years, the police say, they have dismantled 31 of
the 43 Lower East Side drug gangs, and cleared the streets of brazen dealing.

"The open drug markets that you used to see, where you would see people
lining up to buy heroin or crack, or that kind of thing, is much more
rare," said Bridget Brennan, the city's special narcotics prosecutor. "The
organizations that are left there are less violent. You don't see the same
type of rampant violence that we saw in the 80's where people were killing
each other over spots."

The change is drawing praise from some of the harshest critics of the
Giuliani administration's drug policies, including the director of the
White House drug control effort, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who has disagreed
with the Mayor over plans to cut back treatment opportunities for addicts.

Robert Weiner, a spokesman for General McCaffrey , said: "New York City
deserves great praise. Law enforcement is learning that you have to work
toward the center of gravity, and that is what New York City has done, they
have worked smart."