-Caveat Lector- http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/090799guns-police-chiefs.html September 7, 1999 Police Chiefs Shift Strategy, Mounting a War on Weapons By FOX BUTTERFIELD In Baltimore, Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier has made going after guns rather than drugs his No. 1 priority, reversing longstanding policy. In Louisville, Ky., in a state with a strong gun culture, Police Chief Eugene Sherrard recently joined a federal program that seeks to trace all guns seized in crimes, in an effort to cut off the flow of weapons from corrupt gun dealers to criminals and juveniles. In Minneapolis, to discourage drug dealers and others with criminal backgrounds from carrying guns, Police Chief Robert K. Olson has his officers use routine traffic stops for minor violations to search for weapons. Those actions are part of a little-publicized change on the part of police executives across the nation. As Americans debate gun control, those officials, in cities large and small, have made it a major element of crime control, and have also emerged as an important voice pushing for new federal and state gun-control laws. Their new attitude about police work is summed up by Olson, who says he frequently reminds himself that with crime, "it's about the guns, stupid." This is indeed a vast change, he says, because for many officers, "lock 'em up, punishment, was the whole approach of police to crime" only a decade ago. Large numbers of officers believed then that it was un-American to talk about gun control, he says, and that Americans needed guns "to keep the commies from coming up the Mississippi." This Thursday, in contrast, about 50 police chiefs will accompany their cities' mayors to meet with President Clinton at the White House, and then go to the Capitol to lobby for a bill mandating a background check on anyone buying a weapon at a gun show. The Senate has passed a juvenile-justice bill requiring such checks -- and up to three days in which to perform them, just as at federally licensed dealers -- but the House rejected the idea in its version of the legislation after pressure from the National Rifle Association, which objected to any waiting period longer than one day. The purpose of the chiefs' lobbying is to get a conference committee of the two houses to adopt that proposal and other gun-control provisions included in the Senate bill. For many years, most police forces attached little importance to tracing where a gun came from or trying to halt the supply of guns to criminals and juveniles. When the police seized a gun, they put it in an evidence locker and often resold it through a gun dealer. This contrasted starkly with police work on drugs, where investigators routinely offered reduced charges to low-level street dealers in an effort to track down drug kingpins. The change in police attitudes began in the mid-1980s with the dramatic rise in homicide brought by the crack cocaine trade and the gun industry's introduction of rapid-fire, high-capacity semiautomatic pistols, said Clarence Harmon, a career police officer in St. Louis who rose to be police chief from 1990 to 1995 and is now the mayor. "Every cop on the street was stopping somebody with a new semiautomatic pistol -- the bad guys were better armed than the police -- and we began to wonder what was happening," Harmon said. "I issued an order, to trace every gun we find." What his officers discovered, Harmon said, was that a handful of corrupt gun dealers in rural areas were selling to straw purchasers -- intermediaries buying on behalf of criminals -- or to traffickers, small-time operators reselling the guns out of the trunks of their cars. "I came to believe that the gun manufacturers had to know that certain dealers were selling to guys on the street, or ought to know," Harmon said, leading him to favor requiring that gun makers assume more accountability for the way their products are distributed. What police chiefs were finding back then, said David Kennedy, a senior researcher at the John F. Kennedy School of government at Harvard University, "amounted to a sea change." "When they discovered that gun trafficking was a major national problem," Kennedy said, "it meant the issue was no longer about the access of ordinary people to guns, but about a new kind of crime: the crime of selling firearms to criminals and juveniles. That was something law enforcement was eager to act upon." Edward A. Flynn, the police chief of Arlington County, Va., agrees that the police have become more sophisticated about a need for reasonable gun control as a part of crime-fighting strategy. With that change, he says, the police have also become frustrated by the terms of the gun-control debate. "It is hard to have a debate about gun control," Flynn said. "The people on one side only want to talk about gun owners' rights and the Second Amendment. That is not a debate about better crime control." The police in Boston and New York took the lead in going after guns as a way to reduce crime, and other cities have followed , including Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Stockton, Calif. Another recent convert is Baltimore, where Frazier has proclaimed his chief priority is a focus on guns, not drugs, "because it is gun violence that affects our quality of life and causes the most damage." "We cannot arrest our way out of the drug dilemma -- the courts and jails are already overcrowded," Frazier said. "So when I make decisions about where to target my discretionary resources, our tactical units or officers' time, we are going to focus on the guys who use the most gun violence." In the past year, Frazier has set up a new gun unit; begun tracing all guns seized in crimes, with assistance from the Maryland State Police and the federal firearms bureau, and undertaken a crackdown on gun traffickers. Though the mayors and police chiefs will lobby this week for the Senate bill requiring background checks at gun shows, some believe the proposal is too modest, and will push for more steps. Harmon wants to end congressional restrictions that bar the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from computerizing many of its records, a ban that stems from political opposition to anything with even a whiff of a national gun registry. Tom Sanchez, the police chief in Denver, says that even the three days that gun dealers are granted to complete the federal "instant" background check of prospective gun buyers does not allow sufficient time to search court records. He would like a more comprehensive system. The mayor of Louisville, Dave Armstrong, a former district attorney and Kentucky attorney general, believes owners should be required to register their guns, as they must automobiles. And in Minneapolis, Olson, previously the police chief in Corpus Christi, Texas, and in Yonkers, N.Y., takes the staunchest position, which, he says, "America is not yet mature enough as a society to accept": a ban on the manufacture, distribution and possession of handguns. Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company -- ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. 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