Redeeming Mobtown

The city of Harbor Place, Cal Ripken and hardshell crabs is also a city of dubious records. Baltimore leads the nation in robberies, is second in murder, third in assaults and fourth in burglaries. Drive-by shootings are regular happenings. The city is also off the charts in noncriminal but socially related categories like teenage pregnancy, infant mortality and tuberculosis rates. It is a city where one in eight adults is a drug addict.

Only a few weeks ago, there was jubilation here when the city relinquished to its arch-rival Indianapolis the distinction of having the nation's highest syphilis rate. Baltimore's rate has dropped by 45 percent, putting the city in third place, behind Nashville also.

But the most meaningful fact that Norris would learn is this: unlike polyglot New York, Baltimore is a city of black and white, with very little in between. Norris' new constituency is 66 percent black and 33 percent white.

Though killings are happening at a faster pace than they did last year?through September of this year there have been 211 murders, as compared with 194 for the same period in 1999?Norris was recently able to announce a 13 percent overall drop in crime for the first nine months of 2000, and for the first five months of his tenure as police commissioner. Crime is down in almost every category, Norris announced. Robberies are down 19 percent, burglaries 16 percent and assaults 15 percent. Only auto theft is the exception: it's jumped nearly 10 percent over last year.

So it is fair to ask: for crying out loud, does this make Norris a cool gangbuster, or do the numbers prove that New York's policing methods are superior to those of other cities? (The Baltimore PD's public affairs office did not respond to requests for an interview with Norris.)

First, a little background noise. Norris arrived here not as a caped crusader, but as a consultant to a newly elected Democratic mayor, Martin O'Malley, whose campaign primal scream was "zero tolerance." That phrase resonates with New Yorkers as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's crimebusting rallying cry, which led to a troublesome rough-'em-up policing strategy. Norris was one of two consultants who helped to design Giuliani's strategy, as well as similar ones for New Orleans and other cities.

Predictably, the phrase "zero tolerance" set off reactionary alarms among black and church leaders in a city that has less than one-tenth New York's population and whose newly elected mayor received nine of every 10 black votes in the November 1999 general election. The election results indicated conclusively that blacks, as well as whites, were demanding an all-out assault on crime.

Before that, O'Malley, former prosecutor and City Council member, defeated two black candidates in the Democratic primary. This in itself created sharp divisions in the black community, not only over the new coloration of the city's leadership but over its policing policies as well.

Translation: Three of Baltimore's last four police commissioners were black, and black leaders believed they should dictate who holds the job in a city that is two-thirds black.

Only one issue was certain: O'Malley's election signaled the end of Police Commissioner Thomas Frazier, a white appointed by O'Malley's predecessor, black Mayor Kurt Schmoke. Frazier, who once described himself as "a social worker with a gun," resigned for the more accommodating bureaucratic halls of the U.S. Dept. of Justice, where he administers financial grants to cities.

O'Malley and Frazier behaved like the Mongoose and the Cobra. O'Malley, as City Council member, had been sharply critical of Frazier's softball, social-worker policing methods, and Frazier was apoplectically opposed to the zero-tolerance approach to crime-fighting.

So O'Malley named Col. Ronald L. Daniel, a black, to succeed Frazier, and put Norris, his consultant, into the uniform of a Baltimore Police Dept. deputy commissioner. But Daniel, too, expressed disdain for the zero-tolerance policy and resigned in protest as Baltimore's top gun shortly after his appointment. Norris rose to the top and received a resume upgrade in a few short months.

But it wasn't an easy climb for Norris, wunderkind of the NYPD. The black community opposed him, and a number of black City Council members objected to his appointment simply because he is white. Zero tolerance, they argued, would lead to racial profiling, which would lead to police harassment, which would lead, in turn, to a breakdown in police-citizen relations.

Norris, though, shrewdly helped his own cause. He remained cool and composed while he attended a dozen community meetings where he endured ugly personal attacks from black leaders. But in the end, O'Malley won Norris' confirmation with the unanimous support of the City Council and a mandate to sanitize the city of drugs and crime.

Norris rose from the sidewalks of New York to the NYPD's executive suite in just 20 years. At 40 he was the youngest deputy commissioner in the department's history. He has the awards and medals that let him strut his stuff. Among Norris' many notable achievements in New York was the implementation of warrant service procedures that resulted in a 104 percent increase in arrests, a program that he has replicated in Baltimore.

So far, and despite a widely instituted crime-fighting plan, the phrase "zero tolerance" hasn't been uttered by Norris?nor lately by O'Malley, for that matter, despite its campaign bumpersticker appeal.

The Norris approach to drugs and related crimes is disarmingly simple: snare the street-level dealers and they'll lead directly to the drug kingpins. Accordingly, Norris has presided John Wayne-style over a number of headline-grabbing "reverse stings" that have produced mixed results. Prosecutors are reluctant to take action because many of the more than 300 sting cases so far have been ejected from court.

Norris took a shot at the state's attorney's office as well as at the courts for their timidity, but he really tucked it to O'Malley's predecessor Schmoke, who viewed drugs as a health problem, not as a crime issue.

"I would like to see more [cases] being prosecuted than are being prosecuted now," Norris said. "I'm not going to stop doing the stings."

A recent federal Drug Enforcement Agency study, conducted at Norris' request, concluded that Baltimore's drug epidemic is worse than was suspected. The study found that Baltimore "is the most heroin-plagued" city in the United States, and has one of the nation's most severe crack epidemics.

"It confirms a lot of the suspicions we had," Norris said. "The drug problem is more serious than in most cities."

Norris recently admitted to a graduating class of Drug Court, an alternative program for recovering heroin and cocaine abusers, that his 20 years of policing in New York did not prepare him to deal with Baltimore's estimated 60,000 drug addicts.

"We all want a safer city," Norris told the recovering addicts, noting that police and recovering addicts have at least that in common.

Next, Norris tinkered with the Baltimore PD's organization chart. When he assumed command of the department, there were five officers on the warrant squad and 88 at Police Athletic League Centers across the city. Norris pulled the old jujitsu and turned that arrangement on its head. He closed the PAL centers and beefed up the warrant squad, much as he had done successfully in New York. The number of arrest warrants being served has increased measurably.

Next, Norris did away with the department's rotation system. Officers are now given permanent assignments instead of being shifted periodically through various divisions and districts within the department.

Norris also brought to Baltimore a New York administrative law judge to head the Baltimore PD's Internal Affairs Division, which investigates allegations of wrongdoing against police officers. IAD has been troubled recently by charges of racism in dealing out discipline. Before coming to Baltimore, Ellen K. Schwartz had spent the past six years as assistant deputy commissioner of trial in the NYPD. In that position, she presided over internal disciplinary hearings.

Norris also hopes to heighten his visibility in Baltimore by holding monthly press briefings, in addition to his one-on-one meetings with reporters. And he also, questionably, has hired an assistant public affairs director with experience in television, an Emmy award-winning reporter who just happens to be Kevin Enright, the younger brother of First Deputy Mayor Michael R. Enright, the Mayor's close friend since their high school days.

So what does a tough New York cop think of his new Baltimore gig? In Baltimore, neither drug addicts nor drug dealers are afraid of big, bad cops, no matter what chevrons they wear. The police get no respect on Baltimore's streets. "Shoot me, I dare you" is heard more often than "Please don't shoot."

And in Baltimore, the election is over and zero tolerance is a bad hangover in a city of racial wariness and suspicion. Welcome to Baltimore, Ed Norris.

Frank A. DeFilippo has covered the Baltimore lifescape for more than 40 years as a reporter and columnist and has witnessed firsthand the decline and fall of what H.L. Mencken described as "the ruins of a once-great medieval city."