SOME POLICE CHIEFS PUSH FOR TOUGHER GUN LAWS, REFLECTING ATTITUDE SHIFT

In Baltimore, Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier has made going after guns
rather than drugs his No. 1 priority, reversing longstanding policy.

In Louisville, Ky., in a state with a strong gun culture, Police Chief
Eugene Sherrard recently joined a federal program that seeks to trace all
guns seized in crimes, in an effort to cut off the flow of weapons from
corrupt gun dealers to criminals and juveniles.

In Minneapolis, to discourage drug dealers and others with criminal
backgrounds from carrying guns, Police Chief Robert Olson has his officers
use routine traffic stops for minor violations to search for weapons.

Those actions are part of a little-publicized change on the part of some
police executives across the country. As Americans debate gun control, those
officials, in cities large and small, have made it a major element of crime
control, and have also emerged as a voice pushing for new federal and state
gun-control laws.

Their new attitude about police work is summed up by Olson, who says he
frequently reminds himself that with crime, "it's about the guns, stupid."

This is indeed a vast change, he says, because for many officers, "lock 'em
up, punishment, was the whole approach of police to crime" only a decade
ago. Large numbers of officers believed then that it was un-American to talk
about gun control, he says, and that Americans needed guns "to keep the
commies from coming up the Mississippi."

The change in police attitudes began in the mid-1980s with the dramatic rise
in homicide brought by the crack cocaine trade and the introduction of
rapid-fire, high-capacity semiautomatic pistols, said Clarence Harmon, a
career police officer in St. Louis who rose to be police chief from 1990 to
1995 and is now the mayor.

"Every cop on the street was stopping somebody with a new semiautomatic
pistol -- the bad guys were better armed than the police -- and we began to
wonder what was happening," Harmon said. "I issued an order, to trace every
gun we find."

What his officers discovered, Harmon said, was that a handful of corrupt gun
dealers in rural areas were selling to straw purchasers -- intermediaries
buying on behalf of criminals -- or to traffickers, small-time operators
reselling the guns out of the trunks of their cars.

Police in Boston and New York took the lead in going after guns as a way to
reduce crime, and other cities have followed, including Minneapolis,
Indianapolis and Stockton, Calif. Another recent convert is Baltimore, where
Frazier has proclaimed his chief priority is a focus on guns, not drugs,
"because it is gun violence that affects our quality of life and causes the
most damage."

In Minneapolis, Olson, previously the police chief in Corpus Christi, Texas,
and in Yonkers, N.Y., takes the toughest position, which, he says, "America
is not yet mature enough as a society to accept": a ban on the manufacture,
distribution and possession of handguns.