1936Year Plans for reorganization of air force as independent unit TOKYO'S AIR FORCE TO BE SINGLE UNIT

1922Year KENLON TO STUDY ABROAD.

1963Year BEAR MOUNTAIN, N.Y., Dec. 7--The chief of one of the few police departments whose members can tell an ash tree from a beech will retire at the end of the year. PALISADES POLICE TO LOSE HLAVATY

1931Year Mineola Fair Grounds BEST IN BREED WON BY MILBANK ENTRY

1929Year Death K.S. COWHEY DIES ON LINER

1991Year Talking about himself, which he clearly relishes, Nicholas Pastore slips easily into the third person. Nick Pastore, he will tell you, was "an outstanding patrol officer," a "super crime-fighting cop," "a good cop with the Mafia," "Sherlock Holmes." Most of all, the man who has been police chief here for the last 20 months portrays himself as someone who inherited "a city out of control" and led it out of an iron-fisted law-enforcement tradition into the promised land of community-based policing. Campaigning on Crime "I'm not a cop's cop," he said. "I'm a people's cop. You understand what I'm saying?" But turmoil over the Chief's flamboyant leadership as well as an ominously rising murder rate and random nightly gunfire -- including a shootout on the steps of police headquarters only weeks ago -- have led many to question whether this city of ivied Yale towers and concrete-block slums is on the right course. On Tuesday, the city's first black Mayor, John C. Daniels, seeks a second term after a campaign in which crime has been the most volatile issue. Although figures show major crime down about 10 percent for much of this year compared to last, New Haven in 1990 ranked sixth in violent crime per capita in American cities with more than 100,000 residents. In October New Haven had an average of six reported gunfire incidents a day. In effect, New Haven will also be choosing between two approaches to handling crime: whether to entrench, citywide, Chief Pastore's experiment with "problem-solving" foot patrols, an experiment on which the verdict remains out, or revert in large part to reactive policing by emergency-response radio cars and SWAT teams, as advocated by the Republican challenger, Alderman Jonathan J. Einhorn. Perhaps in no city in America is the dichotomy in policing more clearly drawn, with the outcome of importance to departments around the country. Dean M. Esserman, a disciple of the guru of community policing, Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown of New York City, recently took the job of assistant chief here, with Mr. Brown attending his swearing in. But the argument over the best way to fight crime in New Haven has been clouded by what amounts to warfare between the freewheeling Chief and his many disgruntled officers, backed by their union. He is treating them, they say, the authoritarian way he doesn't want them to treat the public. "The cops clearly hate the Chief and they say it," said Mr. Esserman, a former counsel to the New York City transit police, who has been working furiously to repair relations and win officers over to Chief Pastore's program. In many ways the 53-year-old Chief has made himself, as much as his program, the issue. Describing the department he took over in February 1990 as "brain dead," he has proceeded to turn it upside down, staging what he called a "coup" aimed at "ventilating" the 417-member force and wiping out the command echelon and a fifth of the ranks. A popular commander was literally dispatched to the doghouse as head of the department's animal shelter. From banning leather gloves as too intimidating to ridiculing officers who lingered in doughnut shops to secretive motel room meetings with a shadowy "Mafia informant," the irrepressible Chief has put his stamp on New Haven. To protest disciplinary action against two officers whose shots killed a fleeing drug suspect, more than 60 officers came down with the "blue flu," calling in sick on a weekend in September. Citing a "thunderous" no confidence vote in the Chief's leadership, the police union demanded his resignation, adding, "Please reserve a table at your retirement for the union executive board." The Troubled Years Politics, Wiretaps And a 'Stud Bus' The confrontation in this ethnically diverse city of 130,500 on Long Island Sound, a city of communal neighborhoods and small-town familiarities, springs from years of political maneuvering and personal ambitions and animosities. Politics and the police, in particular, have long been intertwined. In 1977, it was disclosed that the police had illegally wiretapped thousands of phones during the heyday of demonstrations against the Vietnam war, especially after the Black Panthers helped turn Yale into a center of protest. Mr. Pastore, who had joined the force in 1962 and briefly ran the wiretaps in 1968, was a star witness before a police board inquiry, an act for which some members of the force never forgave him. By 1981, Mr. Pastore concluded he could not serve under the new Police Chief, William F. Farrell, a former Marine Corps officer. They were just incompatible, he recalled recently. Suffering from a kidney ailment and wary of what he said were "all those people around who were going to get Pastore," he left the department as Chief of Operations after applying unsuccessfully for a medical disability pension. Increasing Violence Under Chief Farrell, whose office was adorned with military regalia and who still flies a Marine flag at his home near the coast, the department epitomized the reactive style of American policing of the time. Patrol cars raced from one emergency to another as officers fought a battle of containment against rampant drug-fueled violence. Cocaine was sold openly although New Haven was spared the epidemic of low-priced crack that devastated New York City starting in the mid 1980's. Between 1987 and 1989 alone, complaints of robbery and aggravated assault each rose by about 50 percent. The number of murders annually rose from 23 to a record 34. Yet the Police Department collected virtually no intelligence of its own and mounted no significant undercover operations. The existence of drug gangs, though well known to police officers, was officially denied, even in the face of a downtown gun battle between rival factions that had passers-by ducking bullets on the courthouse steps. Meanwhile, a hard-pressed Police Department developed its own reputation for harsh tactics. A squad of officers hidden in a van known as the "stud bus" often descended on youths gathered on street corners, seizing or roughing up many without cause, according to widespread complaints. The unit was referred to on the streets as "the beat-down posse." Mr. Farrell, in an interview, said he believed in "being firm" but denied tolerating improper force. "You didn't have to have notches in your gun to go forward with me," he said. One incident in September 1989 -- never publicized -- occurred especially close to home: in the jail adjoining police headquarters downtown at One Union Avenue. Despair Over Crime A jail clerk reported seeing an officer grab a handcuffed prisoner, a young man, by the neck and push him to a desk. "As I looked through the window I observed the police officer punching the prisoner in his back left side, the area of his kidney, and then punch him in the front portion of his left side," she said in a complaint. At first she thought the officer was using brass knuckles. Police officials now say it was his keys. An assault charge against the officer was dropped after the victim declined to testify. The officer, granted "accelerated rehabilitation" by the court, remains on the force. Such incidents, coupled with despair over rising criminal violence, led in November 1989 to a new city regime espousing the politically catchy gospel of "community based" policing. Mr. Daniels, the new Mayor, was a State Senator and former Alderman who operated a plumbing company. A report later written by two graduate students from the Yale School of Organization and Management quoted a senior Daniels adviser as saying that the campaign had advanced the idea of community-based policing to provide "a patina of technocracy" for the mayoral platform to appeal to New Haven's "progressive, intellectual community." Behind the scenes was Mr. Pastore. He spent the 1980's selling costume jewelry and, staked by large bank loans, investing heavily in real estate, including an ice cream parlor with a video game arcade in Madison, Conn. But when the real-estate downturn hit, he was sued by a variety of creditors for more than $2 million. Today, by his count, he owes $1.3 million and, hoping to avert bankruptcy, is looking for "a workout with the banks." Moving for 'Ventilation' During the 1989 campaign, Mr. Pastore quietly advised Mr. Daniels, a friend from high school days. And the following February, after what was proclaimed to be a broad search, Mayor Daniels stunned New Haven by bringing Mr. Pastore back to the Police Department as chief. Chief Pastore embarked quickly on his "ventilation." He removed the shield of bulletproof glass separating the public from desk officers in the fortress-like police headquarters, made a show of throwing open his office door to members of the department and replaced martial symbols with a photograph of himself and Lee Brown. A large mural of police activities, done by a police artist and prized by Chief Farrell, was unceremoniously painted over on a weekend. Among his first targets were some of the highest-ranking commanders, five of whom received a "golden handshake" giving them 75 percent of their pay as well as full health benefits for life -- well above the norm. The sixth, former Comdr. Leonard Gallo -- who had been supervisor of patrol services, the street crime and drug unit, the harbor patrol, and was a graduate of Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service programs -- suffered a more ignominious fate. Refusing to be, as he put it, "pushed out" after 21 years -- even at $43,000 a year for life -- he was reassigned to the New Haven Animal Shelter and required to "stay abreast of trends in animal epidemiology" and design a system of "intake-to-release paperwork for all dogs." The Chief also earned the enmity of many officers by ejecting them from desk jobs to street duty. Some quit. A One-Man Operation The Chief Meets In the Shadows In the spring of 1990, the Chief began an unusual operation of his own, one that would arouse the curiosity of a department lawyer and the Connecticut state police but was never made public. He rented rooms at the Holiday Inn in nearby Milford and met there with someone he later described as an informant on Mafia activities. At the same time, he said last week, he used other rooms at the motel for personal purposes, putting up friends at a special rate he was granted and using the swimming pool, sometimes with his granddaughter. According to bills reviewed by The New York Times, the informant operation cost the department thousands of dollars. The Chief said he never told anyone whom he was meeting with -- he gave conflicting descriptions of the person -- and never stayed overnight. He saved no notes or other record of the meetings but, he said last week, passed on to his aides information that became the basis of a continuing undercover operation into mob control of several small New Haven businesses. That operation produced several drug buys and would lead to arrests, the Chief said. But Assistant Chief Esserman said in a separate interview that the operation had been of little value and should be shut down. An inquiry into the motel expenses began last fall after a lawyer for the Police Department was shown some of the bills by a disaffected police major, Thomas P. Muller, who questioned whether the chief was using the rooms for personal reasons. The lawyer, Glenn Coe, a former state prosecutor now in private practice in Hartford, was concerned enough to pass the matter on to the state police. Bernard Sullivan, who was then State Police Superintendent, said recently that at a meeting in his office last November, he was told in general terms by the New Haven State's Attorney that Chief Pastore was engaged in a law-enforcement operation and so, before starting an investigation, dropped the matter with the questions unresolved. The New Haven prosecutor, Michael Dearington, declined to comment on the matter last week, and it remains unclear what he knew of Chief Pastore's use of the rooms. If some officers question the wisdom of a police chief meeting on his own with mob informants, Chief Pastore has no qualms. He boasts he had 108 informants when he was detective commander years ago. "I go anywhere in this community and speak to anyone at any time," Chief Pastore said. "A Mafioso, a drug dealer, a whore, a pimp." The Future Nightsticks To Plowshares The Chief created a sensation by giving an interview on drugs to a journalist who later sold the article to High Times, a magazine about the drug culture. In the interview, published in the August 1990 issue, the chief dismissed interdiction as a failure and urged: "Let's decriminalize and medicalize the problems." Going further, the Chief has discouraged his officers from arresting first-time drug offenders, attempting to steer them toward treatment while helping to clear clogged court calendars. "To this day," he said in an interview in his office, "we don't police with tenderness, kindness, understanding. In fact, much of the problem in American society has been caused by mean policing that exacerbates, perpetuates and results in mean streets." 'Service-Oriented' Officers So the Chief is looking for more than a few good women -- along with more black and Hispanic recruits. The department now has 77 vacancies out of 417 slots, and the Chief has told the union he would welcome another hundred openings -- jobs that generally would not be filled, he said, with "young white males from the suburbs" or "adventure-type individuals." The Chief's aim is to fill the ranks with "service-oriented" officers who would staff the 12 permanent police substations he intends to open throughout New Haven -- the heart of his community policing program. From here, the officers would fan out through the neighborhoods, getting to know the residents, winning their trust and spotting problems before they fester. In Chief Pastore's vision of "21st century policing," Yale would replace jail. "You're not going to spend $30,000 for one black inmate," he said. "You're going to send him to Yale. You're going to send him to the University of New Haven. Quality of life, that's the change." "Talk about the criminal mind," he said. "If we could rechannel that into positive behavior. That's what I try to do all the time, modify people's behavior." After less than two years, the payoff from the Chief's approach is difficult to read from crime figures, which can be skewed by inaccurate reporting and are subject to differing interpretations. But overall the data show complaints are down. With the 28th murder of the year on Monday, the city's homicide toll may top last year's 31 and approach or surpass 1989's record 34. On the positive side, reported robbery complaints were down 24 percent, rape complaints were down 21 percent and burglary complaints were down 14 percent, comparing the first eight months of 1991 to 1990. Assault complaints were level. But in recent years the percentage of robberies with guns has increased from about a fifth to over a third. And the high number of assaults, 2,008 in 1990, contributed to making New Haven the most violence-ridden American city of 100,000 or over, per capita, after Miami, Atlanta, Newark, St. Louis, and Tampa, according to figures supplied to the F.B.I. New Haven had 3,059 reported violent crimes -- homicides, rapes, robberies and assaults -- per 100,000 people. New York City was far down on the list, with 2,384. The Chief's program, real on the streets or still on the drawing board, has heartened many New Havenites. John R. Williams, a defense lawyer and longtime police critic who represented the plaintiffs in the wiretapping suit, has become -- somewhat to his amazement -- an admirer of Chief Pastore, calling his appointment "a brilliant move." The Chief returns the compliment by saying that without Mr. Williams "us scoundrels would be out of control." To Bea Dozier-Taylor, a gallery and bookstore owner in the crime-scarred Dwight-Kensington neighborhood, where community policing has already started, the officers on patrol are forging "a unity with the community." In the past, she said, the police were seen only in emergencies. Sgt. Achilles Generoso, who supervises her area, said he was "no bleeding-heart liberal" but he had become a convert to community policing, describing it as "nothing more than common sense." Nevertheless, Sergeant Generoso admits to dismay over the way he said Chief Pastore had stereotyped many officers as laggard. "I was angry with him," he said. Sergeant Cavalier, the union president and a 25-year-police veteran, said the anger against the Chief runs deep. "He puts officers in an area riddled with shootings and tells them to approach drug dealers to seek a better life," he said. "The drug dealers are laughing at the police." In his office, still unpacking his papers from New York, the new assistant chief, Mr. Esserman, shrugged. He had heard the complaints, he said. He knew the problems. And he had advised the Chief to get closer to his officers. "Great men have great faults," he said. Policing New Haven: Patrols and Politics - A special report.