Top cop makes bust

The city's top cop, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, joined a long list of his predecessors on New Year's Day by confronting a man he had seen firing a gun into the air and pinning him down at gunpoint in the basement of a house. He did all this while a member of his security detail -- in this case his partner -- searched the upstairs for another suspect.

It's certainly nice to see the commissioner on the streets instead of riding a desk. It certainly endears his troops -- though it turns out, not his wife -- and he needs to see what his officers see if he wants to make a real difference and a real impact. And being out on the street means he could find himself in some precarious positions.

In 1998, then Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke hit the streets with a Western District officer and ended up standing over two teenagers with bullet wounds in the back. A friend of the injured walked up the mayor and asked, "So what are you going to do with that boy's cigarettes?" The question startled the mayor, who just couldn't understand how indifferent one citizen could be toward another.

A few weeks later, Schmoke allowed me to accompany him on a tour of East Baltimore. He was equally appalled at meeting 10-year-old boys standing on street corners at 10:40 at night. It was after 11 p.m. when the officer he was with got a call for drug dealers in a playground. "They are preventing the children from playing," the dispatcher said. That's one problem; the other being, why are children playing so late?

The most memorable moment was for a routine call for a body. A 39-year-old woman had passed away on her living room couch; her children thought she had fallen asleep and realized she was dead when they tried to wake her. Schmoke arrived shortly after the paramedics to find a grieving family and the woman covered with a white sheet. It looked like a drug overdose, and the picture of the mayor standing over a body brought much of Baltimore's problems to the forefront.

Schmoke's police commissioner, Thomas C. Frazier, also patrolled city streets. I went with him in early December 1998 when he flooded Eastside streets with officers in a desperate, and failing, bid to end the year with under 300 homicides. In retrospect, the operation was leaderless, with cops hitting corners but working without a strategy. The national media made fun of Baltimore as a city that couldn't save itself.

Frazier himself realized this when about 9 p.m. that night a man was shot in an argument on North Chester Street and a few minutes later died. That put Baltimore nine shy of 300 killings and there was still two weeks to go in the year. There would be 313 homicides by Dec. 31. The commissioner noted the futility: "We have 80 extra cops over here. Cops are tripping over each other. If somebody is intent on killing, it's going to happen. The corners are clear and there's still a dead guy in the street."

Edward T. Norris would later, in 2000, repeat the Eastside offensive. But he did it earlier, in September, in an effort to show that police can do something about murder and crime. Norris was a different kind of cop than Frazier, and told officers on that day: "This is the one chance you are going to have to show people you can make a difference. If we don't, people will say it is the same old, same old, and it's not going to get any better."

Norris and his driver, Sgt. Anthony Barksdale, who is now a deputy commissioner of operations under Bealefeld, chased an armed man down an alley after a confrontation at homeless shelter and rushed to a hit-and-run accident in which a 12-year-old girl was critically injured. By that point, Norris had already arrested or help arrest six people.

When the boss hits the streets, there are funny moments, as even the most routine events become so much more inportant. I was with Norris one day when his car was rear-ended at a traffic light by a man who said his foot slipped off the brake. Why did it slip off? He was wearing a plastic bag over his shoe so the newly buffed footwear wouldn't get scuffed. It earned him a ticket.

And Ronald L. Daniel, who served as commissioner for 39 days in 2000, was out patrolling in a nor'easter when he spotted a drug deal and arrested a 30-year-old man who had driven 30 miles in a blinding snow storm to buy drugs. Daniel was in an unmarked car when the man in front stopped and blocked traffic to make the deal. He slapped the cuffs on the man and found four pink packets of crack cocaine.

But this suspect got treated better than he could have imagined. Daniel helped two other officers fill out the reports and fed the suspect homemade chicken soup and a cheesburger before taking him to Central Booking.

Daniel told me later that he believed the suspect had "learned their lesson and won't come back to the city again to buy drugs."

The man Daniel arrested was sentenced to probation for a year. That was nine years ago this month. According to court records I checked this morning, he was never arrested again, in Baltimore or any other county in the state.