By Michael Norman; Michael Norman, a former Times reporter, is an associate professor of journalism at New York University.

It will always come down to this -- one mutt, one cop, eye to eye, struggling for control of the street. The cop is Kevin Jett, Badge No. 19980, Beat 12, Sector George, the 52d Precinct in the northwest Bronx. The mutt is Killer, a Jamaican drug dealer with arctic eyes and a taste for letting blood.

The cop patrols on foot from East 194th Street to East 198th Street, from Decatur Avenue to Valentine Avenue -- one man, eight square blocks, perhaps 12,000 people. Most of these, in the officer's words, are "upstanding citizens." They work hard, worry about their children, struggle to survive. Among them, however, boldly encamped on corners or lying in alleyways, is a species of citizen that Kevin Jett has come to despise: the urban predator -- Cuco and Sweet Pea, Gravy and Chisel Head, Scarface and Killer.

In the gathering warmth of a summer day, the officer has turned down Valentine in search of a murder suspect, a Jamaican dealer named Leopold. As it happens, Killer is on the street, his first day back after a while away.

Killer shot a man a few months back, a rival in the drug trade, then left the man for dead. The victim, however, recovered. When Killer discovered his blunder, he fled, eventually to Philadelphia, where his nemesis caught up with him. There, Killer was shot. Naturally, neither man sought comfort in the law, so the police had no case. But "we knew the deal," says Kevin Jett.

"Killer's feared around here, so every once in a while I got to bring him down a peg." And today, spotting him around the bend on Valentine, the officer has decided to do just that.

"Hey! Killer!"

The dealer wheels, his face sour, his eyes full of rage.

"What you call me Killer for!" he snaps. "You know my name."

Kevin Jett had only wanted to tweak the mutt, not force a duel. But one word has led to another and a line has been drawn, and now, too, from out of nowhere, come Killer's supernumeraries, five in all, among them a giant in a track shirt.

"Where's Leopold?" Jett asks. He stands squarely in front of Killer, but he can sense that the others are close. "Why don't you tell him to turn himself in?"

Killer lets the question dangle. His hands are deep in the pouch of his hooded sweatshirt -- hooded sweatshirt? On a day as hot as this? Maybe Killer has poor circulation. "Don't know where Leopold is." He's sullen and still full of fire. "I'm not into that -- that life anymore, man."

Jett closes the distance, closer . . . closer . . . so close, now, Killer can see the flakes of breakfast oatmeal still in the officer's teeth.

"There's no reason for you to get angry," says the cop. "What are you trying to do? Show off in front of your friends here?"

Killer spits and curses.

"You just tell Leopold if you see him," Jett goes on.

"I'll tell him," says Killer, pulling back from the edge, but still sullen, still snarling.

"You know what I like about you Killer? I'll ask you a question and you'll stand there and lie to me."

And all at once, Kevin Jett turns his back and walks silently away. Around the corner on East 194th Street, the officer looks over his shoulder.

"Guys like Killer will eat you alive, even with the uniform on. They can sense fear, smell it like a dog smells it. Some of the mopes will come right out and tell you you're nothing, and you don't want that, oh, no. If you're going to do this job, wear this uniform, you definitely don't want that. If it gets around that you're soft, that without your nightstick and gun you can't fight, that's bad. If you allow someone to smoke a joint in front of you or curse you out, word will spread throughout the neighborhood like a disease. You're a beat cop, out here every day, alone, so you set standards right away, and for those that don't like it. . . . "

There has always been a sharp eye in the streets: the colonial watch, the gaslight bluebottles, the Roaring 20's copper. Even after the advent of the radio car, most cities still relied on foot patrol, the cop on the beat. By the 1970's however, the role of the police had changed. Department after department, rocked by scandals and racked by recessions, saw their ranks shrink. Many decided to narrow their job to emergency response -- 911, a cop in a car racing from call to call, crime scene to crime scene. Soon, the police became isolated, strangers in the neighborhoods they were sworn to serve and, worse, little more than a passing annoyance to criminals. Disturbed by this state of affairs, a new generation of police executives began to experiment. In the late 70's, in Flint, Mich., and Newark, they took a lesson from history and put bluebottles back on the beat.

Watching all this was Herman Goldstein, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. From his work in criminology, he knew the experiments would fail if the police simply followed form: answered calls, filled out reports, made arrests. They needed to focus on substance, which meant attacking the circumstances that make crime possible.

Goldstein proposed what he called a basic "problem-solving method." Step 1: Analyze the problem. If there is a rash of burglaries in an apartment building, find out when the thefts occur, what floors they occur on and what's being taken. Step 2: Use this information to fashion solutions. Train a tenant watch, persuade the landlord to improve building security, install alarms and show the tenants how to cage their windows and secure their doors. Step 3: Follow up. Watch the building, stay current with the tenants.

In time Goldstein's method and the experiments in foot patrol coalesced in the practice known as "community policing." While some of the early trials in regular foot patrol had little real effect on crime, people in the test neighborhoods embraced the idea. The beat cop was back, and no matter what the statistics said, the neighborhood seemed somehow more secure.

Encouraged by this reception, a number of places, Portland, Ore., and Madison, Wis., among them, adopted the practice. By 1990, Lee P. Brown, then Commissioner in New York, declared community policing "the dominant philosophy" in his department. But in New York, a city of quarreling multitudes, the most densely populated major municipality in the country, community policing has been slow to take hold.

Part of the problem is the size and nature of the force. The N.Y.P.D., with more than 31,000 uniformed officers, is the largest such force in the United States. Its bureaucracy, which includes 8,000 civilian workers, is inflexible. Its rank-and-file officers, wedded to traditions that date from the middle of the last century, resist new ideas. What is more, the new policing demands a special breed of officer, tough but skilled, and smart -- an organizer, a planner, an ombudsman. Finally, there are the streets, which seem meaner and more savage than anywhere else -- perhaps, say beat cops, too tough for tenant patrols and problem-solving protocols and nuisance-abatement programs.

In New York, then, community policing is a mass experiment in urban order, maybe the largest and most important policing experiment any government has tried to conduct.

The question is, can a city this large, hobbled by chronic budget deficits and a hidebound bureaucracy, make it work in a violent world?

The sky is clear this morning, the sun white-hot. On Briggs Avenue, Kevin Jett stops in front of No. 2773, an apartment building with an elegant arch. Last summer a clique of teen-agers used the entryway as their hangout; by early fall, three boys in that clique -- boys absorbed by drugs -- were killed.

"That sobered the others up," says Kevin Jett. "They got jobs. They realized what was going to come of hanging out and doing nothing."

Two teen-age girls are sitting on the steps under the arch. One has a ponytail, the other a gold ring in her nose. Ponytail is talking about getting a job. Gold Ring is talking about her boyfriend, who is "on vacation," a neighborhood term for a stretch in jail.

"I don't need no job," says Gold Ring. "I got a man to support me. He got money."

Jett asks: "Doing what?" She laughs, sheepishly.

"So, what's he do?" Jett again asks, pressing for an answer he already knows.

"He makes lots of loot -- that's what he do," says the girl, sticking her tongue out.

"You ought to get yourself a regular man," says Jett.

"A regular man?" The girl shakes her head. "Ain't none of them out here."

In fact, there are legions of men and women leading respectable lives on Beat 12. They pack the aisles of the Roman Catholic Church, they usher their children through the streets to school, they crowd the busy bodegas and Laundromats. Without the regulars -- day laborers, office workers, welfare mothers -- the neighborhood would surely fall, as have so many others in the Bronx. But more and more of late, the regulars -- and their allies, the police -- wonder how long they can hold their ground.

So many stores have been robbed so often that many, including the Post Office, conduct business from behind thick Plexiglas partitions. Some streets are so dangerous that the auxiliary police won't drive down them. And when regular patrol officers respond to calls in some zones they are often met with "air mail," bricks and chunks of concrete that rain down from above.

At night Beat 12 echoes with gunfire, much of it random; few here are foolish enough to sleep with their bed by a window. When the gunmen have a target, as they often do, the next morning the neighbors are out with broom and hose sweeping blood from the sidewalk. All this, of course, creates an air of dread, a feeling best expressed by a T-shirt popular among teen-age boys. "Back up," it reads, "and live."

Now and then Kevin Jett does traditional police work -- writing tickets, making collars -- but usually only in passing. The sector cars answer most emergencies. And special units -- narcotics, morals and so on -- work the streets.

Jett's main mission is to insinuate himself into the lives of the people on his beat, to walk and talk, analyze their trouble and then find a way to stop it. He's a collector of suggestions, a clearinghouse for complaints. He listens, weighs options, takes action.

Sometimes he attacks the context of crime, the disrepair and disorder that make mayhem possible -- drunks on a corner, drug addicts in a lobby, trash on the sidewalk, burned-out cars in the street. And sometimes he moves against the criminals themselves -- a burglar preying on a building, a motorcycle gang staking out a block.

All of this seems to take place more at random than by plan. Kevin Jett is not a textbook cop. He has not read the department's new problem-solving manuals and knows almost nothing of Herman Goldstein's methods; his training in community policing was so short and superficial that he barely remembers it. He embraces the objectives of community policing, but seems to work more by instinct than design. In short, he is no poster boy for community policing. He's a street cop, a grunt who relies more on old-fashioned savvy than problem-solving protocols. As an average cop, one who has to moonlight to make ends meet, he stands as a good test of the new police science.

Down East 194th Street, then north on Bainbridge, then west to Valentine. Across the street four young Hispanic Americans are sitting on the hood of a car. "Let's stop," says Jett. "Just stand here."

He hooks his hands in his gun belt and studies the scene. "They've been dealing heroin up here. I've been in the precinct five years and I've watched them grow up from kids. They were about nothing then, so I guess I shouldn't expect much now. You hope things will change, but they don't."

A moment later, the group moves on and the officer seems satisfied. "If they don't know my name at least they know there's a big black cop who's always around. That's my reputation. I like that."

Always around? Not in this neighborhood, or anywhere else. With vacations, furloughs and sick leave, court time, paper work, meetings, training sessions, special assignments and details, the average beat cop can spend as much as half of his regular 43-hour week off the street. To put it another way, if a neighborhood sees its cop 1 hour out of every 10, it's lucky.

Actually, Kevin Jett is hardly ever around. He tries to stagger his shifts to create the illusion of omnipresence -- one of the new tactics. But while this gambit fools some people -- "Man, you is always working!" says a surprised mutt -- it does not mollify the regulars.

Down Valentine toward East 194th Street, half a block from the corner, a middle-aged Hispanic woman with reddish hair corners the officer. A pack of boys, she says, have been smoking marijuana in front of her building.

"I tell them to leave. I tell them I live here 18 years. They say, 'So what?' "The officer looks down the block. Four teen-agers are standing in front of the Right Spot pizza parlor.

"That them?" he asks.

"That's them," says the woman.

"Yo!" yells Jett. "C'mere!"

They are 14, perhaps 15 years old.

"You keep hanging out all day," he tells them, "and you're going to get in trouble, or catch a bullet. Don't destroy the neighborhood you live in."

"It wasn't us," one of them says. "It was our friend."

"I saw you," says the woman, so angry she begins to shake. "Don't come in our building! You got no business here! I don't want our kids to see the reefer. It's dirty. Dirty!" And suddenly she begins to cry.

Jett leans forward. "You hear her," he tells the boys, in a voice so soft it's almost lost in traffic. "This is somebody's mother."

Saturday afternoon and the station house is quiet. A sergeant mans the front desk. To his right an officer answers the phone.

The sergeant is writing in a log book and complaining out loud. "Another community event and it's pulling officers from the sector cars, but that's community policing. It's great, huh? We're all community policing."

The cop on the phone cups his hand on the mouthpiece. "Yeah, the community policing unit does something and we have to clean up the mess."

"Ten years," the sergeant goes on, "they've had it for 10 years and it's a failure, but the department keeps trying it because it's the new thing."

In one form or another, New York has had a cop on the beat since 1783. Even in the 1970's, when most of the force rode patrol cars, there were still walking posts and trial programs in foot patrol. Today, on average, about 40 officers in each precinct walk a neighborhood: some 2,700 cops on 1,320 beats, or roughly 20 percent of the patrol force. The experiment is broad, and the results, so far, show just how complicated and difficult the job of radically restructuring the police really is.

In the subculture of the station house, the answer to crime is swift punishment, not social work. To many cops, community policing is too "soft" to deal with the mopes and knuckleheads roaming the streets. Even those officers who joined the force because they wanted to "help people," as so many of them put it, do not relish the role of "government liaison," "problem-solving facilitator" and community organizer.

"If you live in Mayberry R.F.D. then it will work, but I don't see it happening in New York," says one cop, speaking anonymously for fear of official censure. Now an undercover man, he walked a beat for more than a year. "I don't think a police officer should be involved in community organizing. The department also wants you to solve long-term problems, but that was impossible -- the drug problem, that's never going to go away. Community policing -- it sounds great, but I think it's a big waste of time."

The bureaucracy adds to the problems by rewarding cops for "turning numbers," making arrests, not for solving problems. Then there are the dual diseases of brutality and corruption. Beat cops, for the most part, are on their own -- historically a risky practice, particularly in New York. In the early 1970's, a commission headed by Judge Whitman Knapp revealed an entrenched system of corruption -- thousands of cops on the take, mostly from bookmakers and gamblers. This year, two decades after the Knapp Commission's final report, another commission, this one headed by a former judge, Milton Mollen, found new pockets of corruption: small clusters of brutal cops beating up drug dealers and stealing their merchandise and cash.

Finally, as the most trenchant critics of community policing point out, it makes little sense for the police department to become "client oriented," to take its marching orders from the people it serves, if the rest of the city government continues on its centralized, bureaucratic, self-absorbed ways. To truly reform the police, one must first reform the other agents of government -- the sanitation inspector, the Health Department officer and so on -- making them problem solvers too, directed by the community and working in concert with the police. It makes little sense, for example, for the Police Department to target a building for action if it's going to take the Department of Housing Preservation and Development a year or more to evict dealers from their apartments. It's not a foothill that has to be moved, it's a mountain.

The day he learned the department planned to hire him, Kevin Jett drove to his parents' house in Mount Vernon to break the good news.

His father was elated. "Go on, boy." he said. "Go on!" His mother, however, seemed heavy-hearted. "A policeman?" she said. "Kevin, are you sure you really want to do this?"

By his own lights, Kevin Maurice Jett, 31 years old, a former amateur boxer and black belt in karate, six feet, 200 pounds, strong and swift, is a mama's boy.

He calls his mother several times a week. She asks if he's wearing his bulletproof vest; she worries the dealers will target him. Not long ago he bought a beeper so she would always be able to reach him. "The beeper makes her feel better," he says. "But I don't tell her half the things that happen on my beat."

Bennie Ruth Jett, an assistant teacher at an elementary school, and her husband, Morris Jett, a supervisor with the city Housing Authority, were born and raised in Mississippi. Twenty-eight years ago they came north in search of a better life, settling in the Bronx on the ninth floor of a 22-story building in a public-housing project, the Mott Haven Houses.

Bennie Ruth's passion was the Pentecostal Church. She sent her children -- Bruce, Cheryl and Kevin -- to Bible study and encouraged them to sing in the choir. Kevin, the youngest, spent so much time singing hymns and studying scripture his friends starting calling him Church Boy.

Mott Haven then was not as mean and dangerous as it is now, but it was still a place to be wary. So the Jetts set down rules: no smoking, drinking or languishing on the corner. After school, there were chores, then homework.

Church Boy went to Christopher Columbus High School, and it was there, one winter day midway through his freshman year, that he learned just how savage the streets can be.

He was on his way home in the late afternoon, walking along Pelham Parkway toward a subway station, when, nearing a corner, he heard footfalls from behind. By the time he turned, he was surrounded.

There were 13 in all, he says, white teen-agers, poised for an attack. He fought off the first, then the second -- even then he was sturdy and quick and well schooled in self-defense. Soon, however, the gang overwhelmed him. They beat his face and kicked and pummeled his body. And then he saw a silver blade catch the light, a sharp blade that sliced through his ear and came though his coat, again and again. He struggled onto the subway, then up the stairs to his family's ninth-floor apartment, where he sank into a chair. His mother came into the room. "What happened?" she asked. He looked up . . . then collapsed at her feet.

Roll call.  The afternoon shift. Down Webster to East 194th street, then up a block to Decatur. On the southeast corner looms a soot-stained brick building with Tudor trim, 384 East 194th Street, six stories, 81 shabby apartments -- a haven, the police say, for drug dealers.

The sidewalks are empty, the building quiet. "To look at it now," says Kevin Jett, "you wouldn't think it's notorious. Now is when real-estate brokers bring clients to see apartments. Little do those clients know what lurks in the shadows."

Informers say that business is booming, with at least 3,000 packets of heroin and hundreds of vials of crack sold every day. The dealers use women -- mothers, wives and girlfriends -- to fetch their stock. They are organized and they are ruthless. "You get personal with these guys," an informant told the police, "and they'll just blow you away."

The building is just outside Kevin Jett's beat, but he regularly slides a block east to check it. Sometimes he stands on the corner, as he is doing now, his thick arms folded across his chest, a bugbear in blue frightening away flocks of buyers.

Occasionally he'll cross the street and wade into the circle of young mutts who do the dealers' work -- the lookouts and ushers and cashiers. He'll ask for identification, demand to know what they're doing there -- question after question until he forces them to scatter. But a beat cop has to circulate, so he'll move on, up the hill toward Valentine, knowing, without looking back, that the boys have returned and the next sale is already under way.

The police in the 52d have tried everything to rout the dealers from Decatur Avenue, all the tricks from the old book, all the techniques from the new. Narcotics squads have conducted operations and made arrests. Building inspectors have issued 800 housing-code violations to prod the landlord to fix the building and evict the dealers. Police lawyers have invoked the city's padlock law and closed down crooked storefronts. Beat cops have talked to the "good" tenants, mining them for information; they've also used traffic tickets and miscellaneous summonses to harass the dealers and scare off their trade. Nothing has worked.

The tenants are terrified, and all the tickets and citations are like so many "flea bites," as one cop put it, "when you consider the volumes of money," the profit from drug sales, the revenue from rent. (The building is owned by L. P. East 194th Street Realty. Its lawyer, Irwin Cohen of Brooklyn, says his client knows of no tenants who are selling drugs.)

Still, every month when the precinct captain, the community-policing lieutenant, the sergeants and beat officers gather to identify the precinct's five most pressing problems, 384 East 194th Street is near the top of the list. They hope one day to build a case with enough arrests and complaints to convince a Federal court that the building is a "crime instrument" that should be seized, cleaned out and turned over to a nonprofit community group. But such a legal procedure takes time. Meanwhile, Kevin Jett's supervisors urge him to look for a "creative" solution to the problem.

"Here's the creative solution to that problem," says Kevin Jett, shaking his large fist at the building.

Up 196th Street to Valentine. School is out and the street is crowded with children.

"Excuse me, Mr. Policeman."

There are two of them, dark-eyed girls with wan smiles.

"Hey, hi," says Kevin Jett.

The taller of the two is holding a plastic cage. Inside are two hamsters, one very large, one very small. The large one is chasing the small one, round and round and round. And their keeper is worried.

"Do you think," she asks, "do you really think the father will eat the baby?"

Bennie Ruth Jett was afraid of animals, save the goldfish she allowed in the house, so Kevin Jett knows nothing of hamsters. But a beat cop must have an answer for everything, even a head-hunting rodent.

"I don't think the father will eat him," says the officer, watching the chase. "But you got to get the mother to help."

"Oh," said the little girl, her voice fading. "I just wanted the baby. I gave the mother away."

Down East 196th Street to Decatur. Across the street comes a short, stout boy leading a short, stout dog, both scowling. The dog is a pit bull, the boy is J. J.

"Oh, my, my, my," says Kevin Jett, "here comes the terror of the neighborhood. Now J. J. lives at 384 East 194th Street, so you can guess what he's into. He told me he's raising that dog to hate cops. He used to be the balls of a gang that robbed kids. Now he's a steerer, leading customers to the dealers at 384. He was away for a few months in a juvenile detention center. They should have kept him until he was 40."

Off the beat, for the moment, on Kingsbridge Road, headed for the New Capitol diner and lunch.

Kingsbridge Road is like a suq, or bazaar, clothing and shoe stalls as packed as old closets, produce stands with the world's fruit piled high. In the stacks of sugar cane and mangoes, there's a little Santo Domingo; in the cans of rambutan, a breath of Bombay. No neighborhood in New York is more eclectic: Koreans, Puerto Ricans, Albanians and Mexicans, Irish, Jamaicans, Italians and Guyanese.

Up the street comes Joanne Pritchard of Valentine Avenue with her companion and son.

"How you doin', Kevin?"

"Doin' fine, how about you?"

"Well, do you believe they shot a dealer in the chest on our street?"

"I heard a little about it this morning."

"We knew him," she says. "He was a nice guy, real nice to the kids. I'll tell ya, we're getting outta here. I got to get the hell out. It's really changed, the neighborhood. People have tried to bring it back, but. . . . "

"Yeah, ah huh, I hear you."

As it happens, two of the precinct's detectives are sitting across the street in a dark sedan. Jett walks over and leans down to the open window.

"What was the deal on Valentine?"

One dealer shot another, says one of the detectives. The victim was Tony Manning.

"Tan-gray Maxima?" asks Jett.

"Yeah," says the detective, "that's the car."

"Why did he get it?"

"Some kind of dispute. Don't really know yet. You know the saying, 'Dead men tell no tales.' "

For the moment, the murder troubles Kevin Jett. The drug dealer, his line of work aside, gave the police their "props," their respect. He was discreet about his business and well liked by his neighbors. Still, Jett says, "I guess if you live by the sword, you die by the sword."

Turkey burgers, yellow rice and marinara sauce. He eats light, lifts weights, runs to keep trim. After the meal, three more turns of the beat, then down to Webster to catch a bus back to the precinct.

Aboard climbs a young Jamaican, a thin man with a toothy grin. He looks toward the back for a seat, but, spotting the officer, decides to stand in front, by the door.

Jett looks up and smiles. Toothy Grin is new to the neighborhood, an apprentice in the drug trade.

"Let's go up front," says Jett.

Toothy Grin loses his glow. He looks at the driver. The bus isn't stopping. He's trapped.

Jett slides up next to him.

"What is it?" says the officer.

"I just be riding here, man," says the Jamaican, the grin now a faint smile.

"Guess you heard what happened to Tony Manning."

"I don't hear no-ting, man."

"You heard."

"No, man, what you say?"

"Better stay out of trouble or you might end up the same way."

Back at the station house, the shift is changing, with cops coming, cops going and the first arrests of the late afternoon crowding the cells. Jett climbs the stairs to the second floor and finds the detective in charge of the Manning case, a stocky man with a square face.

"What happened?" Jett asks.

The detective digs in a large folder and fishes out a stack of snapshots.

"Enjoy," he says.

Tony Manning, in blue jeans and a denim jacket, is lying face down on a white tile landing in front of an apartment at 2685 Valentine Avenue. The landing is covered in blood. Next to the body is a large red V-shaped smear, as if the victim had tried to raise himself before he died. He was shot twice. The first bullet entered his chest and struck an artery. This was the fatal shot. The second bullet hit him in the groin. This was a message.

"My, my, my," says Kevin Jett, shaking his head. "Look at that."

"How old was he?" someone asks.

The detective looks at the folder. "Thirty-two," he says. "But don't feel sorry for him. He wasn't one of the good guys. Shouldn't even investigate this one. Waste of the city's money."

Kevin Jett wasn't so sure. That night at home, he did his laundry, cooked some fish and wondered to himself how Tony Manning, by all accounts a polite and civil man, came to "waste his life" selling drugs. "I kept thinking, he wasn't a bad, bad guy. He wasn't a real thorn in my side. Maybe I'm getting soft."

He boxed his way into the Golden Gloves. He ran track. He played football. At the end of his senior year, Kevin Jett graduated with honors, but when it came time to sort through the scholarships and choose a college, he stayed home, close to his church and his mother, and enrolled at the City College of New York. He studied education, then began to think about the law. Along the way, he married a woman from his church and soon had a daughter, Charisse. Then he began to drift, away from his studies and out of his marriage.

He ended up in front of a sorting machine at the Post Office, "brain dead" and desperately wishing he were somewhere else. He took the test for the Police Department and passed, but when he was called to report, his wife protested that she was afraid. Before long the marriage had dissolved, and in April 1987, Kevin Jett reported for duty with Training Company 8746 at the New York City Police Academy.

Across the six months that followed, he heard lots of advice. "They told us: 'It's a war out there. You're going to lock people up on a Monday and on a Wednesday, they'll be back on the street looking for you.' That was true. We were also told that someone you know on the job will get killed in the line of duty. That was true, too."

Some of the training was easy. "Being from Mott Haven I already knew how to treat people in the streets -- like you want to be treated, even the bad guys, until they show you disrespect." The book work, however, left him struggling, so much so he almost gave it up. "I just kept thinking about graduation, that day when you wear the white gloves and stand and salute with your family watching."

His first day on the job, he left for work from his parents' house. "My mother said, 'Be careful.' I turned around and said, 'What do you mean?' Then I realized, Wow -- I'm a cop."

After six months of field training, he was assigned to the Five-Two, a precinct of about 300 officers on Webster Avenue in the northwest Bronx. He walked short foot posts at first -- back and forth on the same stretch -- then rode in a sector car. In 1991, he volunteered for the precinct's small community policing unit. He liked the flexible shifts -- beat cops set their own hours -- and, he says, "I like to work alone with no one looking over my shoulder." He was assigned to Beat 12, one of the most dangerous in the precinct.

He surveyed the neighborhood and sized up the "players." Then he did what beat cops have always done to make the terrain theirs -- he set out to establish a presence.

"You have to project an image, especially if you work alone. So you have a little talk with the knuckleheads, introduce yourself and tell them where your coming from. You say: 'I'm Officer Jett. This is my neighborhood. If you mess up and I see you around, I'm going to take care of you.' "

His background, of course, helped him do his job. "The average white rookie out of the academy on a beat like this is terrified. I grew up in Mott Haven, and the mutts understand that that's different from East Cupcake, Long Island. They feel that guys who came from there are soft.

"I also tell the rookies that sometimes you can use bluff, trickery and deceit with the bad guys. Some of the knuckleheads say, 'Without that gun you ain't nothing.' I say, 'If we have to do it, let's do it.' Then I say: 'This is my job. Let me do my job and you get on about your business.'

"If I have to fight, I'm the type who hits first and radios for help second. Most cops don't know how to fight. My technique is to pick you up and body-slam you to the concrete. Bam.

"Of course, you got to remember that no matter who you are, there will be somebody bigger, so you have to have the gift of gab. Once at the corner of Briggs and 194, I saw a guy I hadn't seen in the neighborhood before. He was only about 5 feet 8 inches, but he had muscles coming out of his ears. I said, 'Damn, that guys's got some muscles.'

"I go into a video store for a routine check and pretty soon this woman comes in and says there's a guy outside who had slapped her and had some money that belonged to her. I went outside. She says, 'Officer, officer, there's the guy who slapped me.' It was the guy with the muscles -- I mean, muscles in his neck, in his knees, in his toes, muscles everywhere. I said, 'Damn.' She says, 'They call him 'Grape Ape.' I said, 'Damn.' Then she said, 'He just got out of jail.' I said, 'Oh, no.' Then she leans over to me and whispers in my ear: 'The last time it took 10 cops to lock him up. His arms were so big they couldn't get them together to cuff him. They needed two sets.' I said, 'Lady, you ain't helping me none.' I could see myself going though the plate-glass window.

"I said to myself: 'Shoot, you don't want to get into a fight with this guy. You don't know how many of those 10 cops got hurt.' I said, 'I better do some talking.' I wasn't going to walk up and say, 'Look, give her the money or I'm going to lock you up.' So I said: 'Excuse me, fella. Could you come here for a minute.' I said: 'Look, I heard you just got out of jail. Here's the charges you face so far: robbery, assault three, and if you want to fight me, it will be assault on a police officer. Why don't you give her the money and you can walk.' He said, 'O.K., officer.' I was so happy."

Kevin Jett keeps his uniform spotless and neatly pressed. He carries a .38-caliber Ruger revolver with a four-inch barrel, two extra cylinders with six rounds each, handcuffs, a can of Mace and a radio. He also packs two additional pieces of equipment not listed in the regulations.

The first is a pair of black leather driving gloves. In the beginning, he wore the gloves as prophylactics, to search addicts and dealers, anyone with cuts or open sores. Then, perhaps acting on his boxer's instincts, he began wearing them for trouble. Now the gloves are a kind of signature. "When people see me with my gloves on," he says, "they know it's not about talking to anyone." Another part of his kit is a pocketful of quarters, which, every day, he slips into the hands of the small, often thirsty fold that tugs at his trousers or trails him wide-eyed and silent along the street.

It is just after 7 P.M. and Ted Husted is calling to order the monthly meeting of the Bainbridge-Marion Community Association, a neighborhood group bent on beating back the mutts.

Kevin Jett is at the head of the table. Meetings like these are part of his routine. Last month, the precinct commander, Capt. Raymond Redmond, was there. So were 150 angry and emotive citizens.

Tonight, the mood is different. There have been some changes in the neighborhood. "We've seen more police on the beat and more sector cars," Ted Husted is telling his neighbors. "And now that they've put helicopters up, there's not as much gunfire at night. We've even seen Captain Redmond on patrol in the neighborhood, so it's not just show. We don't have any promises, but they're doing something."

Kevin Jett leans back and smiles.

The meeting is in the parish center of Our Lady of Refuge Roman Catholic Church. The church and the church school are one side of 196th Street. P.S. 46 is on the other. Together they anchor the neighborhood and are a large part of the reason that Ted Husted, a teacher, and Milton Mendoza, a carpenter, have not fled.

They own homes on Bainbridge Avenue, across the street from the public school. They are neighbors and friends. In the fight for the streets, they are also a flanking force for police. If they and others like them leave, the knuckleheads will overrun the neighborhood.

Ted Husted teaches second grade at P.S. 46. He and his wife, Jo Anne, will not let their three children walk the streets or visit the homes of their friends. "Maybe a drug dealer might be living next door to the apartment they would go to and maybe someone looking for that dealer will get the wrong address, break down the door and start shooting," Ted Husted says. The Husteds lead a Cub Scout pack, a Girl Scout troop and the local Little League -- recreation for 600 children. Without them, there would be nothing but makeshift basketball in the street. More and more, however, the Husteds talk about leaving. To them, the neighborhood seems lawless.

"If a guy can drive down the block with his radio blasting so loud it shakes the buildings and no one stops him, then he might as well drive down the street with a megaphone announcing, 'I have drugs.' " It is a neighborhood with a hollow heart, says Husted, a place with no moral center. "Parents in this neighborhood teach their children they're entitled to certain things, like if the local bodega is price-gouging, it's O.K. to take what you want and walk out without paying." And children, of course, tend to absorb the worst of society, not the best. "I talked to kids who've seen movies like 'Sleeping With the Enemy.' One of my students said: 'Yeah, my Dad took me. It was great. The guy slapped the [expletive] out of that [expletive]' -- I'm talking about a second grader here."

Their values have become so warped, so twisted that violence, in the end, is the only ethos most people know. "I have one student in class who refused to do anything. One day I said, 'Joey, why don't you do what I tell you to do?' He said, 'Because you don't really want me to do that.' I said, 'What gives you that impression?' He said, 'If you really wanted me to do it, you'd hit me.' "

Milton Mendoza grew up in the Bronx. His father was a laborer, his mother worked in a sweatshop. Five years ago, he and his wife, Aurora, a nurse, and their two children moved into a house a few doors down from the Husteds'. It's a fine house, with a modern kitchen and parquet floors. Milton Mendoza the carpenter knows his trade. He has worked hard getting his place in shape. In a year, he says, he hopes it is owned by someone else.

It was winter when they arrived and the neighborhood was quiet. Then came the spring and the mutts emerged from their dens. They urinated on the sidewalk in front of his house, burglarized cars along the curb and filled the street with gunfire. One morning Milton Mendoza found three bullet holes near his front door.

He is 39, a man who has taken his lumps. "I come from the streets," he says. "I know how to handle myself." And yet:

One evening in November 1990, as he was driving home from work, something crashed against his car. He pulled to the curb to see what had happened and discovered that a teen-ager had tossed a brick at him. "I asked the kid, 'What are you doing?' He looked at me and said, 'Get the hell out of here or I'll put you in a body bag.' I thought of my family and said to myself, 'This guy is a moron.' So I started to walk away. Suddenly, seven or eight guys were surrounding me. The kid slapped me. So I grabbed him and slammed him against the building. I got in the car and took off.

"I was only a couple blocks from home. I stopped at the house to pick up the wife. When I came out, I saw them on the corner just down from my door. I figured I'd better try to talk to them. All of a sudden someone hit me from behind with a baseball bat. I went down. They sat me up and gave me 25 or 30 shots. Just about then the mailman came by and yelled at them. I was trying to block some of the blows with my arms. They broke my forearm, my wrist, my fingers. They dislocated an ankle and a knee. I had pins in my hand, a carpenter with pins in his hand. When I grew up we had fistfights, but today you look at the wrong person the wrong way and they want to shoot you, stab you, beat your brains out -- they want to kill you. These kids are like time bombs."

Street cops call his Popeye. He is short and muscular, with a balding pate and a canny smile. He worked his way from cadet to Commissioner -- the cops' cop. This year, an election year, is Ray Kelly's last as the top cop. New York's Mayor-elect, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has appointed William J. Bratton, the Police Commissioner in Boston, New York's next Police Commissioner. All three men support community policing. But Giuliani's campaign promise to push the police to make more street arrests contradicts the whole idea of the new police science. The professionals know that wholesale arrests are a pointless exercise when courts are overbooked and prisons are beyond capacity. "Turning numbers," as the police call it, does little to lower fear or restore order.

Ray Kelly believes that the upstanding citizens he has served all his professional life are more perceptive than most politicians grant. He's walked a beat, he ought to know. "The public," he says, "wants a more personal relationship with the police."

So the Commissioner committed himself to community policing. It's a "work in progress," says Ray Kelly. And progress is slow.

It has not been easy to sell the rank and file on the value of problem-solving protocols. Young cops have the lights-and-siren syndrome; they're all action. And the veterans, those who have been on the job five years or more, suspect that community policing is a smoke screen for "social work." They're angry at the courts, the revolving door of justice, and they're careworn by the suffering they see in the streets. Many are so cynical, so demoralized, they echo the ethos of the streets: justice is swift and sure, some say, only at the end of a nightstick. Kelly knows too that many of his beat cops are ill trained and poorly supervised. Field officers get just two days of training in community policing, and the sergeants who direct them on the job frequently do little more than "scratch," or sign, their log books.

Even Kelly's executive corps has often failed him. Who knows how many tradition-bound captains, inspectors, commanders and chiefs have issued daily orders that sabotaged the new philosophy. Recently two such commanders -- apparently convinced that a cop out of sight is a corrupt cop -- stopped their beat officers from patrolling in apartment buildings, an essential tactic in community policing. "They're paranoid about integrity," says one precinct commander. "The whole idea is to watch your back, to make sure nothing happens, so you can move up to the next slot."

But it is the Commissioner who directs the department, not a small corps of cautious traditionalists. And it is unlikely the new Commissioner will change policies. "We're moving," says Kelly, "there's no going back."

Out in the precincts, the rank and file watches and waits. Some cops long for the old days. Others believe Kelly is right: community policing is here to stay.

On most mornings the troops under his command find Capt. Raymond Redmond, the precinct commander at the Five-Two, an amiable boss, one worthy of respect. He jogs through the precinct and every week spends hours walking a different beat. "The old precinct commander," says Jett, "could barely walk to his car."

Redmond runs the Five-Two with an even hand, an approachable autocrat. This morning, however, the word has spread that the boss is grumpy.

"Well, yeah, I am grumpy and I don't care if my cops don't like it."

He's piqued, in part, from a trip he made the day before to 1 Police Plaza. He had traveled to headquarters for a ceremony to honor the good work of several community police officers, among them one of his own.

"They take them down there and give them a certificate. A certificate? I would have given them a detective shield. That's a reward."

Early afternoon and Kevin Jett is back on the job, in the cool, wood-paneled rectory of Our Lady of Refuge, conferring with the pastor, the Rev. John Jenik.

Father Jenik is a multifarious man, 49 years old, a firebrand from the 1960's who abandoned his bourgeois background, joined the church and, some 20 years ago, began a career with the poor in the Bronx. The archetype of the urban priest, he can quote from St. Augustine, plot urban policy, curse like a drunken marine.

He arrived at Our Lady in 1978 and formed the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, a nonprofit group that restores and runs buildings seized by the city or the courts. Then he went after the dealers. He organized boycotts of the stores that were drug fronts, then held marches and Masses and vigils at the neighborhood's "hot spots."

The dealers were angry; the priest was hurting business. And before long, John Jenik -- blond-haired, blue-eyed John Jenik, who daily walks his parish unescorted -- had a price on his head. "There's big money out here," he says. "You get in the dealers' way and you get killed."

Which is why Kevin Jett has come to the rectory today. Father Jenik has planned another all-night vigil and Mass -- this time at the hottest spot in the neighborhood, 384 East 194th Street, the six-story heroin house on Decatur.

"Well, Father, we're going to bring in big lights and flood the building and we're going to put people on the roof to make sure you don't get any airmail," says Kevin Jett.

"Good," says the priest. "We'll gather in the church and walk down from there. Thanks, Kevin."

Out on the street, the cop looks back at the rectory. "Father Jenik is a thorn in everyone's side," he says. "But he's a good thorn."

Across the street at P.S. 46, the afternoon session has just started. "Let's pay them a visit," says the cop, and he heads up the steps and though the gray Gothic arch.

Kevin Jett "owns" P.S. 46, and everyone in the neighborhood, including the school's principal, Aramina Ferrer, knows it. "He's told the bad element in the street, 'You don't come into my school and mess with my teachers and my kids,' " says Ferrer. "I feel like he's part of the staff."

The patron of P.S. 46 is always on hand. He speaks to classes about safety and drugs; he roams the peach-colored halls under the big clocks to keep the building secure; and when the final bell rings, he's on the corner, chasing away dealers and ne'er-do-wells.

Last year, when an angry parent confronted the assistant principal, Ferrer turned to Kevin Jett.

"I got five cops and went to the house. I asked him what happened, 'Why did you assault a teacher?' He said: 'I didn't assault him, I moshed him.' I said: 'Oh, you moshed him. Well this is my school, you hear me? Mine. And I don't like nobody coming into my school and moshing the teachers.' I said, 'You do it again, and you'll be getting locked up.' I said, 'If you really have an urge to fight, we can accommodate you.' "

When Kevin Jett surveys his career, three days come back to him: the morning he helped close the smoke shop on Briggs, the evening he saved the life of an asthmatic struggling to breathe and the afternoon he addressed the final assembly of fourth graders at P.S. 46.

"Come on into the auditorium," he is saying now. "Let me show you where I stood." He climbs some stairs, turns a corner and steps onto the stage. "Here, right here by the piano. See, this is where you stand. Then you have to shake everybody's hand. I wore my best dress shoes that day. Patent leather. Really shines."

He steps forward for a moment and stands silently on the apron, looking out into the quiet hall and the long rows of empty seats.

"I love what I do," he says. "But I'm not going to make detective here. No, that's not going to happen."

Any day now, Jett is scheduled to be transferred, most likely to a job as a narcotics officer in the Organized Crime Control Bureau. In New York there's no reward for walking a beat; no detective's gold shield, no sergeant's stripes, no cash bonus. The path to promotion and a raise is still through the special units -- narcotics, vice, organized crime. And Kevin Jett must move up: to support his three children he supplements his base pay of $3,100 a month with his earnings in a supermarket as a part-time fishmonger. By all standards, his own and those of his superiors, Kevin Jett has succeeded. Crime statistics in his monthly community policing log show that when he was off the beat for any substantial period, there were more burglaries, robberies, car thefts. His sources on the street have told him that when he's sick, injured or on leave, drugs sales go up, too. He attributes his success to his size, strength and background: a black belt in karate, a Bronxite wise in the ways of the streets. "Not every cop can work single patrol," he says. "I grew up in the city. I faced everything the knuckleheads faced." The advocates of community policing, however, would argue that even a less streetwise cop, one from East Cupcake, could have assumed ownership of Beat 12. It might have taken more time, but a smart, determined cop armed with the penal code can, they say, "establish a presence" anywhere.

To be sure, the baneful reality -- the swarms of drug dealers, gun merchants, loan sharks, pimps, robbers, burglars and extortionists -- powerfully suggests otherwise. But no one knows for sure. After rising inexorably for more than a generation, reported crimes have declined in New York for two straight years, to the lowest level since 1985. Yet officials are reluctant to ascribe the trend to any one factor, or even to recognize the existence of a trend based on such notoriously unreliable statistics. There is no data on community policing either, and the case studies are too narrow and anecdotal to serve as proof.

The basic idea of community policing -- marrying a cop to a piece of ground -- seems sound. If a cop can move onto a beat, roust the bad guys and teach the upstanding citizens how to resist their return, then that's one piece of ground where crime is unlikely to breed. But the job of organizing and educating places like Beat 12 is more daunting than the job of patrolling them. As one insider put it, "half the community is cheering the cops on, but the other half is still throwing things at them." And without the community, there is no community policing.

To imagine an N.Y.P.D. devoted entirely to community policing is to understand how far the department still has to go. It might have to be twice as large, perhaps 60,000 or 70,000 officers assisted by 15,000 to 20,000 civilian workers, with an annual budget of about twice the current $1.7 billion. A third or more of the force would be on foot patrol, covering the most dangerous and crime-plagued beats 24 hours a day. Cops would be community leaders, practiced in the political art of pushing city bureaucrats -- in sanitation, health and human services -- to do their jobs.

The officer on the beat would patrol where and when he wanted. His supervisors would be true colleagues, teaming up on tasks. The department would be decentralized; most decisions would be made by precinct commanders and supervisors in concert with neighborhood groups. All the support services -- from the sector cars to the vice squad -- would be organized around the beats and would work closely with the cop on the street.

In reality, of course, the municipal budget is tight and growing tighter, and the municipal mind is ill disposed to bureaucratic reorganization. Cops want to be crime fighters not problem solvers, Alexanders whacking the Gordian knot rather than unraveling it. The average cop sees himself as a lone agent, isolated and besieged, the mutts in front of him, his department nipping at his heels. And there is more -- the overwhelming issues of crime and punishment, rehabilitation, new prisons, disintegrating families, murderous teens, turbulent schools, immigration, the economic isolation of the inner cities, racial warfare, gutter politics, urban alienation and fear so rampant it threatens to make the idea of compassion a concept from another age.

Can community policing work? Yes.

Does it work in the tough precincts of New York? Again, yes, though, at the moment, only by degrees and, at times, as much by accident as design.

Will the entire force -- detective squads, patrol cars, narcotics division and so on -- adopt the new science? Will the "dominant philosophy" ever become dominant practice? Herman Goldstein says that David Couper, the recently retired Police Chief of Madison, Wis., spent 20 years trying to reform that city's tiny 311-member force. By that measure, New York won't have a comprehensive community police force until the year 4000.

Perhaps the problem-solving and organizing can wait a bit. In the Bronx, at least, it seems enough for now just to have some bluebottles back on the beat.

The reporting in this article draws on the work of the following: Michael J. Farrell, associate director, Vera Institute of Justice, New York; Michael A. Julian, coordinator of community policing, New York Police Department; George L. Kelling, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University and lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Felice Kirby, director for anticrime activities at the Citizens Committee for New York City; Mark H. Moore, Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the Kennedy School; Michael E. Smith, director of the Vera Institute of Justice; Robert Trojanowicz, director of the National Center for Community Policing, Michigan State University; Robert Wasserman, research fellow with the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the Kennedy School.

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company