GOOD COP, BAD COP

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Police brutality works only in the dark. The sadistic assault on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was allegedly sodomized with a toilet-plunger handle by New York City police, was supposed to be confined to a station-house bathroom. But now that the attack is a public outrage--his injuries took him to the hospital, and from there to newspaper front pages--much more is at stake than just the reputation of Brooklyn's 70th Precinct, where four officers face charges. All around the country, the aggressive, "zero tolerance" policing strategy--which has contributed to New York's plummeting crime rate and is being imitated in other cities--is now getting a second look.

All but career criminals are happy with the nationwide drop in such crimes as murder, rape and assault. But the Louima attack, which is also an assault, has citizens wondering whether one kind of public order has been achieved at the cost of another. In short, is America's crackdown on crime bringing with it an increase in police brutality? The best answer, in most cities, is probably not--though harassment and violence against minorities remains endemic in some quarters. "This is a major problem in this country, particularly in urban areas," says Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. In truth, no one keeps reliable national statistics. And local claims are suspect. A decline in complaints to local police review boards doesn't necessarily prove that there are fewer occurrences; critics say that such complaints in New York are down because abused citizens have given up. Despite more than 16,000 complaints against New York cops since 1993, only 180 officers have been disciplined, most of them with just a lecture or the loss of a vacation day.

But New York is not America. In fact, several police departments that entered the 1990s with a reputation as out-of-control head bangers, including Los Angeles and New Orleans, have turned a corner. That's because cities have learned to simultaneously provide effective police training, install a credible oversight authority, develop better relations with the people they serve and send a clear message to cops that abuses won't be tolerated.

It's a lesson learned the hard way. Six years after the Rodney King beating, Los Angeles is policed very differently. The L.A.P.D. has shown impressive progress. Its percentage of white officers has decreased from 61.3% in March '91 to 50% in July '97, producing a rank and file less likely to see a minority community as a hostile planet. The proportion of female officers, whom studies show are less prone to abusive behavior, has increased from 13.3% to 17.4% in the same time period. Citizen complaints are monitored by a new office of inspector general. "It's quite a different face on the Los Angeles police department," says Edith Perez, president of the city's new police commission, a civilian body that oversees the 9,400-member department. Last Friday the city swore in a new police chief, Bernard Parks, an African-American veteran of the force who promised to "provide a better service to the citizens."