Cops

Zeskind's hardware store at Payson and McHenry streets is a throwback to another time. You don't shop here as much as you line up in a cramped aisle, say what you want and wait for Rick Zeskind, the third generation of Zeskind owners dating to 1925, to search shelves cluttered with everything from shower heads to drill bits. If he knows your name, and he most usually does, he adds the total to your tab scrawled on a paper receipt. But these days, it seems Rick Zeskind talks to the cops as much as to his customers.

The way the attorney for the family suing Baltimore County describes it, heavily armed paramilitary police officers carrying ballistic shields and dressed in camouflage stormed a suburban Dundalk house over trace amounts of drugs without knocking and fatally shot a "devoted mother and wife" armed with a legally registered handgun to defend herself from intruders. The way the attorney defending the police officers and the county describes it, professionally trained members of the SWAT team raided a suspected narcotics den containing marijuana and cocaine that was occupied by a convicted murderer with access to weapons and a teenager who had just shot another youth in a fight, resulting in the shooting of a woman holding a gun who refused to comply with the cop's commands.

The heat descended on the building about 9 p.m. Thursday, sirens blaring, red and blue lights flashing and creating an almost hypnotic, strobe-light effect. The cops emerged from their cars and entered Mason Memorial Church of God in Christ in the 2600 block of Frederick Ave. "I thought they were raiding the church," observed Wayne Thomas, who was standing nearby. "I've never seen a church get raided before." In a way, Thomas was right: Mason Memorial was being raided. But the cheers, the applause, the whoops of sheer glee and delight from church members as police went into the church should have been the tip-off: these churchgoers loved this kind of raid.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Last month, shortly after a jury was seated in the wrongful-death lawsuit brought against the owner of a suburban shopping mall here, attorney Johnnie Cochran, who represented the family of the deceased, told me the case wouldn't go to the jury."

It took almost two years, but that infuriating, revolting, arrogant smirk has finally been wiped off Justin Volpe's face.Last week, in a Brooklyn, N.Y., federal court, Volpe pleaded guilty to sodomizing Haitian immigrant Abner Louima with a stick in the summer of 1997. It was a different Volpe from the one who swaggered into court after he was first charged with the assault, which took place in a Brooklyn precinct.That Volpe appeared with a countenance that belied his initial claims of innocence, his lips curled in a sinister sneer that seemed to say, "Yes, I sodomized Louima.

THE MESS OF blond curls that Ken Holtz wore under his sailor's hat when he was a gunner's mate on an aircraft carrier more than 40 years ago is gone now. In its place are white hairs on a pate going slowly bald.But shake his hand and you'll learn the hard way that the 67-year-old Holtz still has the grip of the tough, beat-walking cop who patrolled East Baltimore for 14 years. He sits behind a desk in the living room of his Severna Park home and gazes at the framed newspaper article on his wall.

HERE'S THE SKINNY on racial profiling, the alleged police practice in which members of certain ethnic groups are targeted by law enforcement for no other reason than being a member of that ethnic group.Rank-and-file law enforcers do use racial profiling, the assertions of police chiefs across the country to the contrary notwithstanding. Several officers spoke up in Jeffrey Goldberg's June 20 New York Times Magazine article "What Cops Talk About When They Talk About Race," and their comments were quite revealing.

If it's OK, I'd like to offer a prayer for Owen Sweeney and a condolence to his kin, and I'd like to say a few other things that hardly ever get said, probably because we think they're trite or corny. To tell the truth, it's hard to think of anything else that matters on a day when we bury another police officer killed in the line of duty.Events like these force us to stop running and consider what's in the bricks. By that, I mean what's always there, right in front of us, right under our feet, the stuff that holds our community together, gives us a solid foundation.

SHORTLY AFTER New York City police officers were accused of torturing a handcuffed Haitian immigrant in a police station bathroom, New York Police Commissioner Ho-ward Safir and his predecessor, William J. Bratton, labeled the incident an "aberration."The police commissioners' words eerily echoed those of former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates in 1991, when he was asked to respond to a videotape showing some of his officers brutally beating Rodney G. King.Yet, given the culture of both police departments at the time of the incidents, no one should be surprised that some cops were out of control.

As a change of pace to the cop vs. cop tale recently spun by the Baltimore City Police Department, I submit this column, which, I trust, will present all area cops in a better light.It happened on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Intrepid officers from the Baltimore County Police Department's Woodlawn Precinct donned their shorts and T-shirts to do battle with those well-known terrors of the basketball court -- the Catonsville Manor Community Association.But there was more than basketball going on here.

It seems like a no-brainer: pocket-size computer phones costing a few hundred dollars instead of the expensive, awkward-to-use laptops Baltimore City police officers have been using up to now. The laptops basically turned the department's fleet of patrol cars into mobile offices where cops could go online to look up information about criminal suspects, stolen property and other intelligence stored in the department's database. The only problem was that using the system tied officers to their prowl cars as securely as they would have been tied to a desktop back at headquarters.

Recognizing Baltimore's feuding gangs should be easy: Red for Bloods. Blue for Crips. But it's no longer as simple as looking for different-colored bandannas hanging from the back pockets of jeans. Gang identifiers, in addition to traditional signs and tattoos, can be almost anything, manifested in wardrobes of significant variety. A blue belt. Red rosary beads. Pockets turned inside out. The 'C' in a Colorado Rockies baseball cap. The red in a Cincinnati Reds hat. There's no set uniform, according to a law enforcement expert, but there are recognized symbols that gang members incorporate into their everyday attire.

No one was shot on Fairmount Avenue. It wasn't for a lack of trying. The gunmen who ravaged East and Southeast Baltimore Sunday night and early Monday, hitting at least 18 people and killing two at five locations, didn't spare this street. Bullets here didn't draw blood, but they found the sides of houses, car doors and hoods and rooftops. And a beleaguered Police Department ran out of plastic evidence cards used to mark the shell casings. At the scene of an earlier shooting, where a dozen people were injured at a backyard cookout, the technicians had used 31 cards.

The cops in Baltimore's Southwestern Police District knocked on 28 doors, searching for 28 juveniles they had locked up in the past month. They were serving not warrants to put them back in jail but invitations to a meeting, to teach, to guide, to inform, to keep them from being locked up a second time. Deputy Maj. Charles V. Carter Sr. led off the meeting, held Friday night at the Kedesh House of Prayer Christian Church on West Lombard Street, with a prayer and a reading of grim statistics of juvenile crime - 260 kids under 18 arrested this year in his district alone, 16 of them deemed violent, 27 of them repeat offenders.

The recent arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the African-American scholar and author, has become a frenzy of accusations, recrimination and good old political spin. Just as the fire was dying down - and it seemed Gates could get back to writing more books such as Colored People: A Memoir and In Search of Our Roots - President Barack Obama's comment about Cambridge, Mass., police acting "stupidly" stoked it again. As a former Boston resident, I'm well aware of the area's history of racial tension.

Baltimore's police commissioner took aim at city judges and liquor board inspectors as he defended his officers and called for more accountability from residents and others to solve the crime problem. Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III said during a radio appearance Tuesday on WBAL that sentences for crimes committed against African-Americans in Baltimore are too often light, something he said was "beyond human comprehension. All of us should be outraged." He referred to a case reported in The Baltimore Sun on Tuesday in which Circuit Judge John Addison Howard sentenced two men to two years each in prison after they were convicted of second-degree assault in the kidnapping and torture of two teenagers in an attempt to elicit information about a stolen PlayStation.

At 9:37 last Saturday night, as dozens of cops struggled to control an unruly crowd at the Inner Harbor after two teens were stabbed in fights, this is what the police put up on Twitter, the Internet site that city cops now use as one way to alert residents to breaking crime: A promo for a television station's soon-to-be aired report on the commissioner's "fight against bad guys with guns." Later that night came tweets for a double shooting in a Southwest Baltimore drug neighborhood, an arrest in a chilling murder-for-hire scheme and, the next day, an alert that a former Oriole was giving the department $125,000.

In Baltimore, the police commissioner is busy reviewing his much-maligned policy of refusing to publicly name officers who shoot people. In Richmond, federal judges concluded that a Baltimore police commander might have been unfairly disciplined for leaking to the media a report critical of cops who shot an elderly man in 2003. The unrelated cases, stripped of legal parsing and argument, are inexorably linked under the same umbrella: what and how much citizens should know about their government.

There was a time right here in Baltimore when police didn't worry about money. For an entire summer, cops spent $300,000 a week in overtime to put two officers in every patrol car. City officers got the highest pay raise in their history - $30 million over three years, boosting one of the state's lowest-paying agencies to parity with the suburbs. The mayor got a standing ovation in the union hall. It was 2000 and 2001, before the attacks of Sept. 11 that would bring a flood of federal dollars into Baltimore, and before people moved back to the city, helping fill long-suffering tax coffers.

To the city's recreation and parks director, Wanda S. Durden, news that her staff will take over Police Athletic League centers from the cops who have run them for 14 years, and shutter two more, marked a "great day" for Baltimore's youth, a day of expansion, a day "not to talk about closings but to talk about our future." The cops will be gone and put back on patrol to fight crime, but otherwise not much will change, except, a smiling Durden told reporters, maybe a new coat of paint and counselors in khakis instead of police uniforms.