GOOD COP, BAD COP

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"Less than 5% of all cops constitute the 'bad' element," says Ron Hampton, a retired Washington police officer who now heads the National Black Police Association. "But if the other 95% stand around and do and say nothing, that is where the real problem lies." The code of silence is formidable. For two days after Louima was assaulted in New York, no one in the 70th Precinct said anything about the incident. And even a department willing to act against bad cops is thwarted by police unions and civil service rules that allow officers to go over the heads of supervisors trying to discipline them. Boston police commissioner Paul Evans has complained that many of the officers he attempts to penalize for misconduct successfully appeal their punishments before the state's civil service commission.

Two weeks ago, however, a judge in Massachusetts' highest court provided police throughout the state with a compelling incentive to behave. He ruled that municipalities don't have to indemnify officers who break the law in pursuit of their duties. Says Boston police department spokeswoman Margot Hill: "[The city] can step back and say, 'You're on your own, kid.'"

The Louima case comes at the very moment when police departments around the country are fascinated by a crime-fighting strategy that New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani credits for much of his city's remarkable drop in crime. The zero-tolerance policy encourages police to focus on quality-of-life violations--public drinking, lewd behavior, loud music--as a means to discourage more serious crimes. The idea is that when left untreated, small disorders breed larger ones. The policy also goes by the name "broken windows," after the idea that one broken window on a street will encourage people to break more of them. Along with New York, such cities as Cleveland, Ohio, Milwaukee, Wis., and St. Louis, Mo., have adopted the approach.

Critics of the strategy say it encourages cops to sweep neighborhoods and harass ordinary citizens for minor offenses and opens the way to an us-vs.-them mentality. George Kelling, a Rutgers University professor who helped develop the idea, says it has gone awry in some places; it was intended to be carried out in the context of a larger strategy of community policing, the widely popular approach in which cops get out of squad cars to involve themselves in community problems. "Zero tolerance and 'sweeps' are not part of my vocabulary," says Kelling. There's plainly some tension between the confrontations required by quality-of-life enforcement and the kind of cooperation between cops and locals that community policing is intended to promote. How to resolve that is still a work in progress. "There is clearly a right and a wrong way to do broken windows," says Indianapolis, Ind., Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, whose city started adopting the strategy five years ago.