Zero Tolerance

ALMOST everyone knows by now of the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, in a hail of 41 bullets fired by New York City police on Feb. 4. The incident has polarized New York, prompting hundreds of people of all ages, races and creeds to be arrested during 15 days of protests over the police slaying. The immediate focus of the demonstrations was the killing. But the broader focus is New York's so-called "zero tolerance" policy toward minor offenses supported by New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

THE BOARD OF Education of Anne Arundel County must have a secret agenda to bring back the 1960s student rebellion. How else to explain its refusal to change its punitive "zero tolerance" discipline policy?The board's current simple-minded, one-size-fits-all discipline system can't help but mobilize students.It was not surprising that about 70 students cut classes last week to attend a school board meeting. They protested in vain the current policy that resulted in the expulsion for the rest of the school year of John Destry, an honor student at Southern High School who happened to carry a penknife on his key chain to school.

"The only freedom that deserves the name is that of pursuing our good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs."-John Stuart Mill"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do."-Eric HofferZERO tolerance. The phrase acts as a kind of cultural and moral ink-blot test for the citizens of our town. Packed into these two words, 13 skinny letters, are more than a hundred years of history, a chronicle of the relationships between the police and the people they have sworn to protect and to serve.

AS A YOUNG PROSECUTOR, Kurt L. Schmoke thought he had seen the worst that one human being can do to another. Then he had to deal with a particularly brutal crime: A high school basketball star was gunned down by a youth who just wanted to show off."He didn't rob him, he didn't talk about drugs. He just shot him," Schmoke recalls, still incredulous a dozen years later. "And I realized some of the most horrendous things that people do to each other have no explanation."As a young councilman, Lawrence A. Bell III thought he understood just how hard life could be for men his age. Then he got an awkward phone call: A childhood friend was about to be released from prison after a drug-related bank robbery and needed help finding a job.Now in the highest levels of Baltimore government, Schmoke and Bell find themselves rethinking such encounters as they search for ways to rescue their city from the crime that has become constant and commonplace.

Despite a recent drop in crime, the city's criminal justice leaders have failed to do enough to make streets safe and stem the violence that makes Baltimore one of the nation's most dangerous cities, says a new report to be issued today.Northeast Baltimore Councilman Martin O'Malley charged in a yearlong assessment by the council's Legislative Investigations Committee that the city's crime strategy is failing because the state's attorney, District Court judges, the police commissioner and the mayor are refusing to work together to implement zero tolerance.

Republican mayoral candidate David F. Tufaro yesterday picked up the endorsement of an African-American community group opposing Democratic nominee Martin O'Malley's plans to implement zero tolerance.Group leaders from Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM), a small group of Southwest Baltimore community activists, said yesterday that they will back Tufaro, who supports the organization's call to create an intensive three-year drug rehabilitation and job training program. TEAM is pushing for more drug rehabilitation in the city.

Democratic mayoral nominee Martin O'Malley pledged yesterday "open, honest and public" investigations into police brutality and corruption if he is elected.O'Malley made the promise after again being questioned about his plans to implement a zero-tolerance policing strategy. If elected on Nov. 2, O'Malley has vowed to import the crime-fighting plan that has helped several U.S. cities, including New York and New Orleans, dramatically reduce violent crime.Critics, including O'Malley's Republican challenger, David F. Tufaro, worry that requiring officers to get out of their cars to enforce all violations will result in a rise of brutality complaints, particularly from minorities.

In the past three years, more people have been slain in Baltimore than the 632 city residents killed in the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.As the city moves toward finishing its ninth straight year with more than 300 homicides, the City Council -- with a municipal election year approaching -- is trying to hold Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke more accountable for the fifth-highest murder rate in the nation.Two weeks ago, the 19-member council passed a resolution renewing the call for Schmoke to adopt a so-called "zero tolerance" stance in dealing with the rising number of open-air illegal drug markets in the city, long considered the source of the bloodshed.

New York City will be the proving ground this week for two opposing city government delegations looking for solutions to Baltimore's high crime rate.Four members of the City Council will head to New York City later today to study that city's "zero tolerance" crime policy, which calls for arresting anyone who commits the pettiest of public offenses. The council delegation wants to show that the policy will work in Baltimore -- despite protests from Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier, who insists that it won't.

On a day when the city mourned the shooting death of a little boy, Baltimore's top two officials promoted their own, distinctly different approaches to trying to end the bloodshed.Hours before the funeral of James Smith III, a 3-year-old who was gunned down in a barbershop last week, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Council President Lawrence A. Bell clashed over anti-crime strategies in separate news conferences.As they expressed their sympathy for the boy's family, the two questioned each other's leadership and differed on how to combat the violence.