BY DAVID J. FOSTER
Staff Writer

Less than one percent of the Philadelphia Police Department is devoted primarily to tackling narcotics. Yet, drugs are linked to 40 to 50 percent of the major crimes committed in large metropolitan.

That's why "we've empowered the district commanders to form their own narcotics teams," said Police Commissioner John Timoney. "We just finished training the first 50 (officers) last week." The narcotics division, he said, is also being beefed up.

Though his reform package won't be released for weeks, the city's new police commissioner last week gave members of the Greater Northeast Chamber of Commerce a taste of the changes underway.

"Most police departments are not organized to deal with crime correctly," Timoney said, and too many commissioners have "bought into" the belief, espoused by some criminologists, that police have little effect on the root causes of crime, like racism and poverty. But Timoney focuses on another root cause: the tolerance of misconduct.

Using car theft as an example, Timoney said police frequently become report-takers for insurance purposes. In fact, up to 20 percent of car thefts are phonies designed to defraud insurance companies.

When police ask car theft "victims" to sign avadavats affirming their vehicle was stolen, many refuse.

Timoney also suggested police stop any tow truck hauling a vehicle after midnight since a frequent technique of thieves is to hook the last car on the block and tow it away.

Timoney, once second-in-command under former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton, rebuffed the conventional wisdom that simply "arresting vagrants" will lower your crime rate.

It takes "re-engineering," he said, "and a management accountability system" where commanders are held responsible. "That's what we're going to do here."

That reorganizing was evident at the Chamber's breakfast meeting, held at Friends Hospital, Roosevelt Blvd. and Adams Ave. Timoney seated himself among three of the new men hand-picked to oversee the Northeast division: Captain Frank Jonas of the Seventh District, Captain Vincent Strain of the Eighth District, and Inspector Joseph Fox, new head of the Northeast division.

So far, 50 captains have been transferred, the largest migration of commanders in the recent history.

"During my first six weeks here we spent every weekend doing a unit by unit analysis," Timoney said. He immediately halted all transfers and found 600 police officers who could not be accounted for. "We will now do a zero-based analysis of the workload and we will come up with a scientific model for allocating" those forces.

When he arrived, he said, the department's Deputy Commissioner of Operations was really Deputy Commissioner "of some operations," Timoney said. "He was in charge of 12 detectives, but had no functional responsibility over narcotics." Deputy Commissioner Sylvester Johnson now runs all operations.

Timoney also placed the department's three separate Internal Affairs divisions under one umbrella answerable to the commissioner.

Though Timoney praised the Captains for their "talent," the adjustments were necessary to "create a vision of what needs to be changed" throughout the department, he said.

"I'm brash enough to say that when we're through, we will be the top police force (in the nation), or in the top two," he said.

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