On a frigid November night three years ago, a senior police commander from New York City drove through Baltimore's east side slums and found himself thinking of plastic owls.
On tall buildings in New York, the owls roost with gleaming talons and painted beaks and menacing glassine eyes that catch the sunlight. They are designed to scare away pigeons. But the pigeons get wise over time, and many a plastic owl sits heaped in muck.
As he surveyed one of the most violent cities in America from the back seat of a police SUV sport utility vehicle in 1999, Edward T. Norris marveled that young dope hustlers continued to work the street corners with impunity while cops sat nearby in their squad cars "like plastic owls."
"I thought I saw everything as a New York City cop," recalled the man who is now Baltimore's Police Commissioner. "I was, like, "This is outrageous!' you know; "What is going on here?'"
It was to be the first of many shocks for the veteran police officer, a startling glimpse of how low the Baltimore Police Department had sunk and of how deeply rooted the city's culture of crime had become.
If Norris needed a fresh jolt after three years in office, an entire east Baltimore family of seven was massacred in an arson Oct. 16 for daring to confront neighborhood drug dealers. The killings revealed the limitations of a policing strategy that has sharply reduced violent crime in the city without altering the decades-old street code of blood vengeance.
Now, Mayor Martin O'Malley, who recruited Norris to help him keep a promise to stop the killing, is contemplating what to do next. The immolation of Angela Dawson, her husband and five children, he says, has been almost unbearable.
"We clearly have problems that other cities don't," he said last week, in a weary voice. "Especially since the Dawson tragedy, the sacrifice of that family, all those little kids, there's been a real awakening.
We're facing the biggest challenges of any jurisdiction in the country. M-' And that clearly requires that we take a totally new approach."
What O'Malley and his counterparts in other law enforcement agencies are now contemplating would represent a radical shift in Baltimore's balkanized and antiquated criminal justice system: a deliberate, coordinated and overt war against the city's most dangerous repeat offenders.
"We want to dispose of these guys," the mayor said last week, "with all due concern for their constitutional rights and due process guarantees, of course. M-' One way or another, we're talk ing about redballing the top 1,000 most predatory guys on the streets of Baltimore."
'Crisis level'
The Dawson arson-killings came against a backdrop of dispiriting numbers that are threatening to undo much of what O'Malley and Norris have achieved in the past three years.
Court data show that three out of every 10 killings result in a murder conviction. The rest go unsolved, or the suspects are acquitted or plead guilty to lesser charges that typically result in their immediate release from jail.
At the same time, Stuart Simms, Maryland secretary of Public Safety and Correctional Services, recently reported that Baltimore police are arresting so many people - most of them on petty charges - that the city's jail population has risen to "a crisis level."
"And I use that word intentionally," Simms added in a statement to the influential Criminal Justice Coordinating Council on Oct. 8. "We are running out of options."
So are Commissioner Norris and Mayor O'Malley. For the numbers all point to a crime fighting policy that has hit a brick wall.
Known as "zero tolerance" or "quality of life" policing, it is a back-to-basics law enforcement model that relies on voluminous arrests of suspects to prevent more serious crimes. During the 1990s, it worked marvels in New York City and elsewhere.
But it was transplanted to a Baltimore Police Department too ill-equipped, inexperienced and overwhelmed by major crimes to carry out its most ambitious mission.
'Expensive charade'
Over the past three years, the strategy has helped O'Malley and Norris achieve the sharpest violent crime reductions in Baltimore in decades: a 29 percent decline in the overall crime rate in the past three years; a 14 percent reduction in violent crime this year alone; homicides below 300 for the third year in a row.
But, in the process, a stunning percentage of those arrested for crimes small and large are brought up on charges that don't hold up in court because of flawed evidence, blunders by youthful police officers or a lack of forensic proof.
Thus, Baltimore police produce large numbers of arrests but not nearly as many meaningful convictions. And the question now being asked is how long can the city sustain it?
"It is dawning on a lot of people that this has been a very expensive charade - and insupportable in the long run," said Baltimore Circuit Judge John Prevas.
"The Police Department likes to focus everyone's attention on arrest statistics to show what a great job they're doing," Prevas said. "But arrests without convictions don't really mean much because the bad guy is back out on the street. It's not a long-term solution."
Simms noted that the Detention Center is under a long-standing U.S. District Court order not to exceed its design capacity of 2,933 prisoners, but the population routinely tops that by at least 4 percent. The city's 811-bed Central Booking lockup is 17 percent over capacity. And half of all the defendants in the system are being held on drug charges.
"It's very simple arithmetic for the police department," Norris told the council at the Oct. 8 meeting. "Would you rather have them under arrest or walking around the streets of Baltimore? These are not guys who are ever going to get a square job driving a delivery truck. They're out committing armed robberies for a living."
Norris added that 14 neighborhoods constituting 4 percent of Baltimore's land area account for 40 percent of all murders in the city. The department has been arresting people in these neighborhoods at an average rate of about 750 a month since the year 2000.
By removing so many young males from these neighborhoods - mostly on minor charges - police have cut down the population of both potential victims and potential killers.
But this is very expensive. Police overtime bills last summer came to about $20,000 on some weekends, Norris acknowledged in an interview last summer. And half of all suspects walk out of jail when their charges are dropped or reduced, only to be replaced by a fresh crop of short--term arrestees.
Inevitably, then, the O'Malley administration's crime reductions have become dependent on major expenditures of public dollars to lock up suspects for short stretches on often unsupportable charges.
"The problem now is that we are at a higher level of excess than we have ever had before" in jail population, Simms warned the council. "We can not be constitutionally indifferent with regard to this issue. ... This is extraordinary growth."
A week after he spoke, the Dawson family was wiped out. And O'Malley found his policing strategy failing on all sides, forcing him once again to come up with answers to seemingly impossible problems, on the fly.
"We've had several months' worth of meetings in the past few weeks," he said. "There's a higher level of cooperation between all of these agencies - parole and probation, the State's Attorney's Office, the Police Department, my staff, the Detention Center - than there ever has been before. There's a real sense of mission, that this family's sacrifice not be in vain."
Said Judge Prevas: "I think the mayor is finally starting to see that the data here is fairly undeniable, and that these problems are a lot harder to solve than he thought they'd be.
"Whatever he does, he has to find a way to get the hardcore felons off the street for good, or people will begin to understand that his crime reductions are a fiction. ... Voters in this city are pretty sophisticated on this issue."
Bold promise
It's an ironic turnabout for a man who has done so much to sensitize the public to crime. For nearly a decade, O'Malley has made the fight against murder his mantra.
"The homicide rate is the most glaring statistical example that this crime problem is out of control," O'Malley said as a young city councilman in 1993.
In an interview last summer, he acknowledged that he only ever had two issues on his mind: "One of them was public safety. And the second was everything else.
"There's a reason why we're leading the nation in the rate of reduction of violent crime," O'Malley said. "We're clearly doing a lot of things right. I don't know how to do them any quicker ... we've really been pushing."
He campaigned for office on the promise to reduce the city's horrific murder rate to below 200 by Christmas of this year. Despite all the progress against violent crime, that pledge will not be kept. The city reached 201 murders by the second weekend of October, and that was before the Dawson killings.
"People can hold that against me if they want to," O'Malley said after the Oct. 8 council meeting. "I rest easy knowing we're on a course of continuous improvement and we're doing everything we can to make this a safer city every day."
What O'Malley did not fully appreciate when he made his bold promise was the depth of the institutional deficiencies within the Baltimore Police Department.
In a series of interviews this year, the mayor and commissioner spoke with sometimes startling bluntness about the department's problems and the legacy of violence they inherited upon taking office in 2000.
Until now, these problems have not been widely understood by the general public, largely because of a relentlessly positive public relations campaign typified by O'Malley's "Baltimore Believe" billboards.
The crime reductions achieved to date are remarkable, especially given the city's sense of near hopelessness over the level of violence before O'Malley took office. But the administration's emphasis on good news effectively masked troubling facts that threaten to undo his most solemn political pledge.
Meanwhile, beyond public view, Commissioner Norris has grappled with the Herculean task of transforming "plastic owls" into an effective crime-fighting force.
"The challenges are huge, but only because of years of neglect," Norris said last summer. "It seems like we're always operating at a deficit, no matter where we start. ... Then, there's the youth of the department. It's one of the real weaknesses we're trying to address.
"I was never under the delusion that we were going to fix everything overnight. It didn't take a year or two to break it, so it's going to take a long time to get back.
"We were starting from zero," Norris added. "There was no technology, there was no functional homicide squad, there was no warrant squad to speak of, there was no drug enforcement going on at any kind of real level ... no sophisticated cases. All these things are happening now."
Then, this: "We're still going to be in the 10 most dangerous cities in the country when the [year-end] numbers come out ... because of where we were."
That was pretty close to rock bottom, according to a scathing report released in March 2000. In it, Maple/Linder police consultants hired by O'Malley offered the first comprehensive assessment of the department in decades.
They found "a police culture characterized by cynicism and distrust"; "unreliable and poorly designed data collection systems"; "little, if any, discussion about crime trends in command [meetings] or during roll calls"; an "extraordinary number" of unresolved complaints about police misconduct; and sagging morale among officers over the agency's "tarnished reputation."
While the agency had a "state of the art" computer system, the overwhelming majority of officers said they had received little training in how to use it.
"Members of the general public have lost faith in the resolve, skill, and even integrity of their police," Norris wrote in a preamble to the report.
In all, the consultants made 87 recommendations for the overhaul of the Baltimore Police Department - a catalog of problems that will take years to correct.
Reforms
Everywhere Norris looked in the opening months of his administration, he found duplicity, careerism, a directionless patrol force and what he called "systematic butt-covering" by middle managers.
"There were some good guys who are still here," he recalled. "But you had some weaklings."
Within a year he had transferred, promoted or recruited more than 50 supervisors into and out of critical positions throughout the department, jettisoning the "plastic owls" from his command staff.
"I wanted to make a statement," Norris said. "I wanted people to see that if you do a good job and you work hard, I don't care if you're 32 or 34 years old. I don't care if you're a woman, white, black, whatever, young, old. You're going to flourish."
Behind the scenes, however, he kept discovering internal problems that hampered the larger goals of "zero tolerance policing."
"All the things I had just taken for granted in New York just weren't here," he said .
The department had no surveillance vans and no video cameras to monitor drug trafficking corridors. There was no capacity to trace cell phone calls between drug gangs and their clients and suppliers. And wiretap equipment was outdated. So investigators were forced to rely on informants, who are notoriously unreliable witnesses in court.
Norris won millions of dollars in grants and private donations to address these problems, purchasing high-tech law enforcement gear - from potato-sized hidden cameras to a state-of-the-art communications van - that has enabled the department to undertake complex investigations as never before.
"He [Norris] can't rebuild Rome in a day," observed Judge Prevas in a recent interview. "He would do even more wiretaps if he had the manpower and the state's attorney's office had the manpower to do it. But they've got investigations basically waiting like stacked planes at O'Hare Airport."
Other problems have been tougher to crack.
In recent years, the antiquated evidence control division in the basement of headquarters has been so crammed with trial exhibits that evidence was routinely lost or inadvertently destroyed - effectively setting free suspects accused of violent felonies.
With an accumulation of crime scene artifacts numbering "well more" than half a million, according to Col. Robert Stanton, the department has been adrift in the by-products of Baltimore's three-decade crime wave.
"Everything from recovered purses to bicycles to refrigerators to TVs to guns to drugs," Stanton said in a recent interview. "Drug submissions are through the roof. We're 30-some percent ahead of where we were last year."
A new state law requiring Maryland police departments to retain all possible DNA evidence in major cases that result in convictions is expected to worsen the problem - even with the addition of 50,000 square feet of new warehouse space.
Meanwhile, the department's most valuable and expensive forensics equipment, the DNA analyzer, electron microscope, gunshot residue tests, fingerprint comparison gear - have at various times been broken, taxed to the limit or underutilized because of a shortage of qualified technicians.
"The cops are doing their job better on the street, but the support services that are behind them?" Norris said last summer. "It's a tremendous problem."
So it is that fingerprints and other forensic proof - hair, fiber, blood and other trace evidence commonly seen in television police dramas - continues to be available in only a fraction of Baltimore criminal cases.
O'Malley said last week that upgrading and refitting the lab is now of the "highest priority" and that he will soon seek to increase the pay scales of lab technicians and forensics analysts to aid in recruitment and retention.
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York, demand for these specialists by federal agencies has been fueling spiraling salaries nationwide - hamstringing Baltimore's efforts to fill openings for fingerprint technicians.
In the meantime, O'Malley said, the department has created a new "Liaison Officer" to work with prosecutors in identifying defendants who are repeat offenders so the lab can focus its limited resources on higher-priority felons.
"We want to fast track these guys every way we can," the mayor said, "to make better cases and give ourselves a better shot at them in court. Of course, that may mean making sacrifices in other cases, but that's the stage we've reached."
Time 'of the essence'
With so many deficiencies - and so many inexperienced officers on the force (57 percent have been hired since 1994) - Norris has continued to tackle Baltimore's crime problem with the only means available: arrests.
It has worked. In his first year in office, Norris managed to hold street killings citywide to 262, nearly 100 less than Baltimore's worst tally of 353 in 1993. And he has kept the number down ever since.
But the cost of transforming the "plastic owls" - and the department's inability to make hard cases that put the city's worst roughnecks behind bars - have raised major questions about whether Norris can hope to sustain the glowing numbers.
Before the coordinating council, a different set of numbers are regularly reported by state officials: Half of all routine charges filed by the department's patrol officers are thrown out or reduced by prosecutors for insufficient evidence. Likewise, nearly a quarter of all murder charges are ultimately dropped. And the jail population has ballooned beyond legal limits.
As Simms put it before the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council: "Time is of the essence."
And O'Malley knows it.
Known for his fiery outbursts about incompetent prosecutors, lenient judges and lax probation officers, the mayor is now striking a conciliatory tone. The killings of the Dawsons changed everything, he says. And the numbers all point to more trouble ahead.
Last week, O'Malley credited State's Attorney Patricia Jessamy with coming up with an innovation that might hold the key to several problems troubling police, prosecutors, judges and the state's jailers: the formation of a "War Room" at the city's Central Booking facility.
Staffed by probation officers, police supervisors and veteran prosecutors, the office would seek to identify arrestees who have heinous criminal records, then bring down the full weight of the criminal justice system on them.
"If we get a guy on a minor gun charge or drug possession on a Saturday night who also happens to be on probation for a more serious crime, we can use that as leverage to get him to take a guilty plea," O'Malley said. "Even if he only gets a four- or five-year sentence, that gets him off the street ... and into state prison."
By avoiding a trial, it could also get around the problem of flawed or insufficient evidence that continues to bedevil the police department."
"It's about thinking creatively about ways to put real pressure on these predatory offenders," O'Malley said. "We need a better systems approach to this problem."
Said Judge Prevas: "I think the mayor is beginning to understand that he and Commissioner Norris can't do it alone - and that simply arresting people isn't enough."