INNOVATIONS AT FPD ARE WELL-REASONED

Work In Progress

There appears to be a fair amount of "walking the walk" going on in Tom
McCarthy's domain.

Fayetteville's chief of police, reporting to the City Council this week,
outlined a crime-fighting plan that is notable as much for its guiding
principles as for its particulars.

The principles, summarized in terms we hope he'll find acceptable:

- - Use your resources to best effect.

Drugs are a persistent problem, and a major cause of another problem that
demands constant attention: street crime. Beefing up the narcotics unit is
an attack on both. Of particular interest is that three distinct
assignments have been made in order to attack what McCarthy calls
upper-level, mid-level and street-level drug crime.

- - Give your people what they need to do their jobs.

McCarthy's plan, implemented a month ago, gives senior officers greater
discretion -- and the authority to apportion it among the officers under
them. This has included letting them adopt the shifts that cause them the
least inconvenience. The likely results are greater efficiency and less job
frustration.

- - Take the fight to the enemy.

New Special Problems Units have put an intact team in each police district
to deal with street crime where it occurs -- on the streets. And a force
titled Special Projects and Focus will use data tracking to stalk trouble
into whatever neighborhoods it retreats.

- - Preventing problems beats solving them.

Putting investigations and patrol under one roof -- an Operations Control
Bureau -- addresses both an organizational problem and a perceptual one, as
does the selection of the senior officer who heads it. Whatever internal
problems arise hereafter are likely to take a different form from those
that led to an EEOC lawsuit against the department.

A month offers too little substance for a judgment, and no one knows how
big a blip all this will make on the statistical radar a year from now. But
McCarthy and his department are thinking ahead, and that's how progress is made.