Radio host Ed Norris, a former Baltimore police commissioner and superintendent of the Maryland State Police, knows what it's like to be on a force amid political change.

"There's always turmoil, and it trickles down to the streets," Norris said.

He said that he believes a Rawlings-Blake mayoral administration might be wise to conduct an audit of the Police Department's crime statistics to see whether the numbers are giving commanders an accurate look at crime in Baltimore.

Norris urged a greater focus on quality-of-life crimes, such as panhandling and prostitution. "The murder rate ... has gone down, but the quality-of-life stuff puts people in fear and drives people away," he said.

HER RECORD

Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake has expressed confidence in closed-circuit cameras as a crime-fighting tool and urged the Police Department to consider text-messaging to alert citizens about crime in their neighborhoods.

She objected to a policy change in which the Police Department ended a decades-long practice of releasing the names of officers involved in shootings, accusing the department of "spinning" information. As a compromise, she has floated a concept used by the Chicago Police Department, in which internal investigative documents related to police shootings are posted online once the investigation is complete. The officers' names are blacked out.

Rawlings-Blake summoned police brass to a City Council hearing in March to question the effects of cuts in overtime spending, complaining that police were clearing fewer cases and arresting fewer people.

Mayor Sheila Dixon and Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III have preferred a "targeted" approach of identifying known offenders and have touted declines in the number of overall arrests, saying that mass arrests are not the way to go.