AS MURDER RATE RISES, OFFICERS SWOOP DOWN ON DRUG CORNERS

BALTIMORE -- Like 50 to 100 other normally desk-bound day-shift police
officers, Michael H. Hilliard showed up for the 5:39 roll call yesterday
afternoon and was soon dispatched to the streets.

"We've shut down the administrative offices for 30 days," said Officer
Hilliard, an administrative officer.

"We have 296 homicides, and the goal is to complete the year with no more."

Standing before the men and women, Lieut. Donald E. Healy urged them to go
after the drug dealers, who are responsible for three-quarters of those
homicides. "Shut them down and bring them in."

With officer clerks and computer operators assisting regular officers
assigned to high-crime areas, the department is hitting the streets,
following the threads that lead from street-corner questionings to arrests
for sales of $10 rocks of crack cocaine to whatever it is that makes this
city one of the nation's most murderous.

Baltimore, like other cities around the nation, has experienced a decline
in crime. But throughout the 1990's, this city has defied the trend in one
category of violent crime: homicide. Throughout the 1990's, it has recorded
304 to 353 homicides a year, three-quarters of them drug-related.

Federal crime statistics show the Baltimore area, with 2.5 million
residents, with a rate of 14.2 killings last year for every 100,000
residents. The rate is far above those of most other big cities, including
New York and its suburbs, where the rate last year was 9.3.

So early last week, Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier, who previously
assigned his troops more overtime during the Christmas shopping season,
started what he called an "enhanced holiday deployment." He has shut down
most administrative work for a month and assigned desk-bound officers to
the streets and directed the regulars to concentrate on the high-crime areas.

"We're going to make every effort we can to bring in the crime rate as low
as we can," Commissioner Frazier said. "We're bringing in everyone who we
can wring out of a non-enforcement assignment. I did 15 hours yesterday,
and I will be on the street tonight."

But even with the special deployment, the prospects of keeping the number
of homicides under 300, the department's goal, are grim. Through October,
it recorded 259 homicides, 5 more than by the same time last year, when 310
were recorded for the full year. Lately, the pace has continued, with a
homicide a day.

On Monday, the department reported No. 295. A man with multiple stab wounds
was found partly covered with leaves in the back of a row house. On
Tuesday, a woman in the trunk of a car that had been intentionally set on
fire became No. 296. Thirty minutes after midnight today, No. 297, a man in
his late 20's, was found shot in the back and sprawled on a sidewalk.

After roll call, Officers Warren Smith and Tim Palmer, each married, each
father of one child, both sinewy, proud members of Baltimore's SWAT team,
hurried off in their new unmarked cruiser. They were given a single
assignment, to seek out the furtive gestures and quick transactions of drug
dealing.

Twice tonight, with Officer Smith at the wheel, they turned their vehicle
into a rocket of siren and light. But mostly they wove their way through
the desolate streets of largely boarded-up row houses.

"Time out!" they heard someone shout from a cluster of six people gathered
at a corner as the well-recognized white Ford Crown Victoria approached.
The six, indistinguishable by sex or age in their loose-fitting, hooded
parkas, ambled off, hands in pockets. The officers left them alone.

The officers headed across North Avenue and into the dark side streets. A
woman about 50 crossed in front of them.

"What you got in your pocket?" Officer Smith asked, getting out of the car
with Officer Palmer.

"Nothing," she told them. Nonchalantly, she said she was on her way to buy
something.

"Who are you dealing with?" Officer Smith asked

"Heavy," she replied, a man named Heavy. Heavy is nowhere around. The
officers made note of his name and moved on.

They spotted a group outside a corner store. Corner stores -- delis,
take-out food stores, convenience stores -- are the only commercial
establishments along the streets off the thoroughfares, like North and
Pennsylvania Avenues.

"My pet peeve is the corner store," Officer Smith said. "The stores give
them an excuse to be on the corner. If you see people in the store, they're
not buying anything."

They told one cluster of young men to pull up their shirts, a way to find
if they were carrying guns. Or they called, "Show me your hands," a way of
finding drugs. "You look for somebody making a quick movement," Officer
Palmer said.

The law requires the police to ask before frisking anyone, but usually
permission is granted.

In front of a store on a corner on Edmonson Avenue, they spotted a
transaction. Slowly, Officer Smith followed one of the people onto a side
street. He turned on his search light and pulled up to a young woman in
gray sweat pants, a blue parka and a gray knit hat.

Frightened, just 17, she held a marijuana cigar, evidently not having
learned to surreptitiously let it drop. They stood near a gray brick wall
with "R.I.P" scrawled on it and the names Jeneen, Fade, Mark, Sean, Tish,
Lance, Oscar and Reggie -- all slain.

Officer Palmer asked what she was handing the man at the corner. "I didn't
give him nothing," she said, still holding the cigar. "Fifty cents. I swear
I gave him 50 cents."

They took the cigar and asked to go through her pockets. They found two
tiny bags of marijuana and called a patrol wagon to bring her in.

After she was booked and briefed, she smiled easily and innocently, saying
she is in the 10th grade, wants to be a lawyer or a basketball player and
works in a Burger King part time. She will be held in a cell block for
juveniles until her mother comes to get her.

"She's still reachable," Officer Palmer said. "I'd rather lock up the adult
who sold it to her."

Still, she could be a link in the chain that leads to Baltimore's many
homicides. As part of her debriefing, and those of the 10 other people
arrested in the night, Detective Irvin Bradley of the homicide squad,
suggested, without promising, that in return for leniency in court, they
steer him to the guns and the dealers.

Detective Bradley is particularly interested in leads to "stick-up boys."

"They rob the drug dealers," he said. "These drug dealers are not going to
call the police and say, 'He stuck me up.' They handle it themselves, and
the way they handle it is to kill them."

He also wants locations of "stash houses," places near the sites of their
sales where dealers hide guns so they won't be caught with them and can
still get to them. By late last night, he said he had collected the
addresses of four.

Checked-by: Richard Lake