A policeman's lot

The Baltimore Sun

The murder rate is an unfair measure of a police commissioner's performance. Mayor Sheila Dixon acknowledged as much yesterday, after canning Leonard D. Hamm. But she appears to have calculated that with the murder rate on track to return to 1990s levels, something dramatic was required - if only to show that she was taking notice - and Mr. Hamm didn't have enough positives after nearly three years in the top job to offset the nightly News at Eleven killings.

His firing was a symbolic act, then, a promise by a mayor running for election that she's ready to do something about crime in Baltimore. But it's not a promise that's likely to bear any fruit between now and Primary Day, because the problems facing the city and the Police Department are not the sort that can be solved by one man in a couple of months.

The Police Department is not a happy organization. It has changed commissioners about every two years since 1999, while the last two mayors have had strongly different ideas about how the department should handle its job. Mr. Hamm could be excused for feeling a bit of whiplash; an absurd moment came this summer when 85 homicide detectives in this homicide-burdened city were taken off the job and dispatched, temporarily, to augment street patrols.

But there have been too many serious lapses - cops accused of rape, evidence gone missing, special units out of control, a 7-year-old handcuffed, a fishy pension deal for a top deputy, a sergeant charged with stealing the wheel rims off the Cadillac of a suspect - to argue that Mr. Hamm has been running a sufficiently tight ship and should have kept his job.

The mayor says she wasn't "feeling that energy" from Mr. Hamm, and suggests that the new acting commissioner, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, has effectively been running the department for several months now, anyway. Patricia C. Jessamy, the state's attorney who has railed against police tactics and incompetence, virtually declared victory yesterday; this would be a good moment for her office to focus on more ways it can help those police officers who need it to learn how to do the sort of work that leads to better cases.

The mayor says she wants the police to go after the most violent offenders, to tackle quality-of-life crimes, and to be visible in every community. Those are three very different tasks, but worthy ones. She's asking a lot from a department that hasn't been at the top of its form recently; Mr. Bealefeld won't have an easy time of it.

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