Sgt. Gary Childs is a machine -- an around-the-clock, door-banging, murder-solving machine. In his eight years as a homicide detective, he has sent many a killer to jail who might otherwise still be free.
While others spend their vacations in Ocean City, he spends his at FBI seminars in Quantico, Va. Not including his master's degree in criminal justice, he figures he's spent about $2,000 of his own money on books and conferences molding himself into a top-flight murder detective.
"There's no doubt about it," said Lt. Bob Stanton of the homicide unit. "He consistently has one of the highest clearance rates up here. And they're not lightweight cases either. Gary has cleared some of the worst homicides we've had in the past few years."
But Sergeant Childs may soon be out of his job, a casualty of a controversial policy by newly appointed Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier that will force police officers to change posts every few years regardless of performance. The policy will be implemented by the fall.
The new chief argues that it's the only way to circumvent "a good old boy system" that dispenses elite jobs with fat overtime salaries to officers with connections while excluding blacks, women and promising young officers.
That same system also keeps some veterans in plum assignmentslong after their productivity wanes and prevents junior officers from getting the experience they need to advance -- prompting many to leave for other departments.
"We're tremendously underrepresented in the raw number of black officers and the promotion of black officers," Mr. Frazier said. "And our attrition rate is killing us. We cannot hope to build a better department when people are leaving all the time because of a lack of opportunities."
But the policy has put the new chief on a collision course with the police union and longtime veterans of specialized units such as the bomb squad, K-9 patrol and homicide who say it is unfair and unwise to push them out of their jobs at the height of their careers.
"Where's the reward for a job well done?" asked Lt. Leander S. Nevin, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3. "Where's the incentive for these guys who busted their butts for 15 years and gave up other opportunities to get good at their jobs? He's changing the rules in the middle of the game."
The policy also has drawn concern from judges, medical examiners and prosecutors who fear that the new chief's plan to dismantle Baltimore's celebrated 47-member homicide division in the face of record murder rates two years in a row carries the potential for disaster.
They point to 1992 in Washington, D.C., where 467 murders occurred and the arrest rate dropped 50 percent after younger officers replaced veteran homicide detectives. Eventually, the department did an about-face by recalling the veterans and hiring more detectives.
The same year, Baltimore recorded 335 murders and city homicide detectives posted a 75 percent clearance rate with no staff increases.
"We're talking about drug dealers who have shown a marked propensity in recent years to kidnap or murder witnesses and to keep on killing until they are caught," said Circuit Judge Elsbeth Bothe in a recent interview. "We have been really fortunate in this city to have some of the best detectives in the business. It's hard to imagine what the last few years would have been like without them."
Rotation common elsewhere
Adding fuel to the fire, the commissioner's new rule will topple a promotion system that is almost as old as the department itself and will make Baltimore the only major East Coast city with such a blanket rotation plan.
But James J. Fyfe, a criminal justice professor at Temple University and nationally recognized author on police issues, said rotation policies in some form are common in the Sun Belt cities of the West.
"It's shocking to Easterners and very upsetting to cops who have gotten used to a certain way of doing things," said Mr. Fyfe, a former New York City police officer. "But these policies are the norm in other places. And you don't tend to see the disastrous consequences people in Baltimore are predicting -- as long as the chief is careful how he goes about it."
Contrary to the "myth of homicide detectives as supermen," he said, the job is actually not all that complex.
"Any good street cop with a pool of reliable informants who is willing to work a case to death can solve a murder," he said. "Homicide detectives have this mystique and cache from television and movies. But the fact is, most cases are not solved by guys like Columbo."
Commissioner Frazier, a former deputy chief in San Jose, Calif., notes that his old department has a rotation policy and that its rate of solved homicides is comparable to Baltimore's.
But critics point out that San Jose's 20 detectives only handled 43 murders in 1992, a ratio of two cases per officer. During the same period, Baltimore's detectives handled 335 murders -- or seven cases each -- in the year that the city rose to No. 5 among America's deadliest cities.
Beyond theory are legends
Lost in this general debate are names such as Donald Worden, Rick Requer and Ed Brown, homicide detectives of near legendary stature in the city's justice system who face transfer in the coming months to patrol jobs in the twilight of their careers. Ironically, two are black.
Like Sergeant Childs, they are the men whom the department relies on when the chips are down.
"You will be transferring people at the point that they are at their most experienced and most productive," said Ann M. Dixon, deputy chief medical examiner. "These are the men who make the hard cases."
They also are the men whom she relies on to help her figure out how someone died and to tell the difference between an accident, an illness or murder.
Consider Sergeant Childs.
His team of detectives was responsible for unraveling the November shooting of 10-year-old Tauris Johnson (although murder charges lodged against a paroled New York drug dealer were dropped last week); the arson killing of six children by their mother, Tonya Lucas, who set a rowhouse ablaze in July 1992 to cover up evidence of child abuse; and the execution-style slayings of bail bondsman Angelo Garrison and his 3-year-old son last April.
Sergeant Childs still receives Christmas cards from the second wife of Lee Drury Gerhold -- the 65-year-old Baltimore insurance agent who tried to hire a hit man to kill her in 1988. Gerhold later admitted killing his first wife 20 years earlier in Prince George's County.
In all, he has solved more than 60 murders, maintaining a level of productivity seldom equaled by his peers. But he is most proud of thefact that he hasn't called in sick once in 23 years.
And he is one of the few people in the department who sees both sides of the volatile rotation issue.
"The policy probably would give us a more well-rounded department," he said. "I also wouldn't be honest if I said some guys didn't get where they are because of connections or that some of them aren't laying back comfortable."
He said he and most of his peers would fully support a merit system tied to performance and would even back the mass transfers of ineffective specialists.
"But the bottom line for the average citizen is this: If your daughter gets kidnapped or your wife gets murdered, who do you want on the case? Some kid who's been at it a couple of years? Or a stone expert who won't sleep until the bad guy goes down?"
Technical problems, too
Then, there are the sheer technical difficulties involved.
The medical examiner's homicide school typically has a one- to two-year backlog of applicants. Thus, it could be years before the commissioner is able to send the eight new detectives he plans to rotate into the unit annually.
And in the notoriously low-tech Baltimore Police Department, the homicide unit has never had the computers necessary to compile information so it can be handed down to new detectives. All lessons are learned from veterans, mouth-to-ear.
"Get rid of those heads, and the unit loses its memory," said Circuit Judge John N. Prevas. "You could cut your clearance rate overnight."
Judge Prevas, a former prosecutor and "great believer" in the new commissioner, says the new policy also could run afoul of "grim realities" in Baltimore.
Most killings in the city occur on the street, depriving detectives of forensic evidence such as fingerprints, hair and fiber that frequently helps solve killings committed indoors. Drugs are the usual motive, leading detectives into a murky underworld of deceit and fluid relationships. And most suspects are now first-time killers who have no prior record of serious violence and no paper trail for investigators to follow.
"The commissioner is talking about a model that he has seen work in other places," Judge Prevas said. "But Baltimore is not like other places right now. The culture and the very nature of homicide are different."
Short- vs. long-term
But Mr. Frazier says he is "willing to take some short-term losses" in the number of cases solved "to make some long-term gains" in the number of blacks and women promoted and officers trained.
"I am also not convinced that what we lose in experience won't be made up in the energy, drive and commitment we'll get by having younger officers in those jobs," he said.
Mindful of the need for experienced hands in the unit, he said, he will allow homicide detectives to serve for six years instead of three for most other officers. And he will only transfer one sergeant every year -- meaning that the last of the current supervisors will not be moved until the turn of the century.
Nor is he considering an overnight purge of the kind that rocked Washington's homicide unit, he said.
Rather, he will only transfer eight of the unit's most senior members every year -- a rate that critics say will still succeed in removing all of the city's most experienced homicide detectives within three years, including six who are black.
To stave off charges of favoritism, the commissioner said he also intends to rotate his own staff and the 24 officers in Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's bodyguard detail.
Finally, the commissioner said, he will encourage district commanders to assign the expert investigators they are about to receive to look into shootings, robberies and other persistent crimes in their neighborhoods.
"No one should think for one minute that I don't recognize the exemplary work some of these people have done or that I don't care whether or not they leave the department," the commissioner said. "But I also hope these guys are smart enough to recognize that I have organizational problems to solve here."