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By Associated PressForging law and order when there was none proves a challenge. But it's a start.
SAMAWAH, Iraq - It wasn't a big bust, but the Iraqi police pulled it off with apparent aplomb, thanks to some mentoring from the U.S. military. A marketplace was sealed off, a teahouse raided, and 15 traffickers of drugs and weapons are now in jail.
Most important, the raid brought a measure of respect to a reconstituted police force still identified with the recently toppled regime.
"Crowds patted them on the back in the marketplace," U.S. Marine military policeman Ben Harrison tells the newly chosen police chief inside the refurbished police station of crime-ridden Samawah in southern Iraq.
The chief, Col. Fadel Abbass Ali, grins in appreciation. As part of this week's action, the police and military nabbed a police sergeant on active duty selling drugs, even as he was under suspicion of helping regularly raid and rob a big cement factory in town.
"A bonus," Harrison tells Abbass Ali.
This looks like improvement in law and order, crime and punishment. The patrol officers, the chief says, are gradually gaining confidence in themselves as practitioners of a profession that few civilians respected under Saddam Hussein.
Later in the afternoon, Harrison, who is liaison to Abbass Ali, visits the evidence room, a suffocating little closet used to store guns when Hussein's men ran the joint. Harrison is miffed because a live hand grenade hasn't been marked with a papertag showing from whom it was seized, and hasn't been turned over to the U.S. anti-bomb unit.
"Why hasn't this been tagged?" the towering lieutenant from Fairfax, Va., asks the perplexed new police officer.
Not only that, the afterglow of the raid has been dimmed by the disappearance of some of the evidence, particularly some medicine.
"It's not all here," Harrison says sternly. "Where is the rest of the stuff?"
Soon, an Iraqi officer slips in with a punched out, partially filled package of pills. "Where's the rest of it?" Harrison asks. But some of the new police officers have vanished.
Harrison strides off to talk to the new chief. Abbass Ali, a firefighter of great respect but scant police skills, is the third chief chosen in two months.
The next day, at the same police station, a new Marine military police unit has transferred in to help keep the peace. During the four-to-midnight shift, a half-dozen members of the New York National Guard lounge around their Humvees outside the police station. All but one are regular cops. The raw recruits they're assigned to "mentor" sit and sprawl on the grass a ways away. In Arabic or Brooklynese, each group has its gripes.
Then, a shot from an AK-47 cracks the quiet of the main street, just 200 yards and a narrow alley away from the precinct house. More shots quickly follow. It's a nightly thing and no one gets excited.
"Uh, police?" Sgt. Rick Triarty, a Yonkers police officer, calls sarcastically to the members of Samawah's police force, who suddenly realize he is referring to them and jump to their feet.
One enthusiastic rookie runs straight to where the shots originated, and where four shadowy figures move about.
"He's not carrying his gun!" says Brooklyn detective Tara Dawe, 26.
The four other Iraqi police swing hesitantly into action of sorts, most armed this time, and take off down the alley with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
The New York National Guard members, both hands on sidearms raised skyward, creep and dart sideways like sand crabs, their bodies always flat against the alley walls.
Up ahead, they get to see one of Samawah's finest open his line of questioning by kicking an apparently drunk old man in the stomach. Two other officers saunter away with two other suspects.
Some Iraqi police officers ultimately return, with somebody who is either a suspect or a witness. The situation is a bit confused.
Marine reservist Greg Bruce, a 40-year-old Los Angeles Police Department patrolman who specializes in gangland crime, is philosophical.
"I think when you put together a police force, you don't necessarily pick the best, but the least worst," he says.