The "Reverse Sting" is just one in a series of new strategies that are being employed by today’s new breed of NYPD Narcotics cops, as the city’s new War on Drugs kicks off in Queens.

‘Identify, Investigate, Dismantle’

In and out of uniform, Queens cops are locking up drug users and abusers.

It’s the battle cry of the NYPD’s new Drug Initiative – an unprecedented escalation of the city’s war on drugs.

The new Narcs will work whenever the drug dealers work, police officials said. They’ll be out on the street whenever – and wherever– the drug dealers are.

New tactics employed by cops in the Initiative will also include:

• Information-gathering - tapping confidential informants and debriefing prisoners to learn the inner structure of drug gangs. The cops will identify gang members and carry out "ambitious attacks" on organized gang drug trafficking operations.

• Dismantling of organizations that supply the drugs – often with murderous overtones.

Police Commissioner Howard Safir said that 80 percent of all homicides in New York City are drug-related. Between 50 and 80 percent of people arrested by city cops have heroin, cocaine or marijuana in their system at the time of arrest, Safir said.

• Queens residents can expect to see far more flack-jacketed cops with shotguns – "RAM" commanders – banging down doors to execute warrants and bring in parole violators and other fugitives.

• The new strategy will leave cops in targeted, drug-infested areas for the long haul. More of the narcotics cops will patrol in uniform, giving the targeted areas additional police presence.

Police officials said the department realizes that the department’s 90-day rotation former of Narcotics cops was a mistake, because the drug dealers – and crimes associated with their presence, came back as soon as the cops pulled out.

• Both uniformed and plainclothes cops will sniff-out and padlock bodega "drug stores," apartment drug sites and other businesses that deal in drugs. The cops will work with search warrants in-hand, and will utilize wiretaps and other information-gathering devices to make their case before they make an arrest.

• The cops will also focus on targeted schools with drug dealing conditions.

"Our children should be able to walk to and from school without being harassed or confronted by drug dealers," Safir said.

• Along with street arrests, police will gather information and shut down indoor drug trading–"anywhere and everywhere," Safir said.

• Buy–And–Bust operations will continue, escalated and more frequent.

• Utilizing confidential informants, the cops will gather information on money laundering locations, "Beeper" stores and bogus "real estate" storefronts to determine long-time strategy they will use to dismantle the operations.

• Quality of Life enforcement will play heavily in the new strategy. Safir said that, along with identifying parole violators, bail-jumpers and wanted felons, the Quality of Life arrests net a significant amount of drugs and drug paraphernalia – found on the people arrested for "minor" crimes.

• Prostitution arrests and closure of known houses of prostitution. These arrests account for a "hefty" amount of drugs – seized from the women at the time of arrest, or in the houses during subsequent warrant searches.

Cautiously Optimistic

Queens community activists and borough residents said they will take a "wait and see" attitude before they rush to judge the new Initiative.

Residents hope the new enforcement will do more to eliminate drugs than its predecessor (TNT) did.

The execution of rookie cop Eddie Byrne on February 26, 1988 led to the creation of the original NYPD Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNT) in the spring of 1998 (See Sidebar).

The TNT teams burst into drug-infested neighborhoods like a shock wave, staying in defined "zones of operation" for 90-day periods, during which they netted thousands of arrests and seized multitudes of property from drug dealers and users. The teams’ arrests crammed borough courtrooms with drug cases, as the narcotics cops swept through Queens’ most drug-plagued communities.

The "Buy and Bust" became synonymous with TNT. The technique sat at the heart of the TNT drug strategy. In a Buy and Bust, an undercover officer buys drugs, as the transaction is witnessed by another cop from a "safe" distance. After a specified number of buys by the plainclothes cops, the team commander obtains a search warrant and moves in to make arrests and seize property and drugs. Buy and Bust operations are the most life-threatening form of enforcement employed by narcotics cops, law enforcement officials said.

While the TNT approach received excellent grades across the board for its effective methods of arrests and seizures, community leaders complained that the 90-day rotation schedules of the narcotics cops set a schedule for drug dealers. The cops would infiltrate a known drug area for three months, then move on – and the drug dealers would return to their old "territory."

"The strategy was as foolish as it was impractical," said Christopher Stone, president of the Vera Institute of Justice. The non-profit group published a study in 1992 on the TNT Operations which stated that the enforcement was "predictable" and did little to rub out the drug trade for good.

Local community groups and Community Boards complained that TNT enforcement "chased" the drug trade out of one area (while the narcotics cops were there), but the dealers took up their trade in new neighborhoods – usually just across the "border."

For example, when the original TNT started enforcement in neighborhoods in southeast Queens, the drug dealers moved their operations into South Ozone Park. It took police and community activists several years to rid that community of the drug trade – or at least most of it.

The truth is, officials said, the original TNT produced volume arrests, property seizures, etc.

"The numbers were phenomenal," Stone said. "But the TNT teams did very little to stop the drug trade cold."

George Delis, District Manager of Community Board 1 in Astoria said that in his opinion, "The TNT experience wasn’t a complete failure.

"It was a start," he added. "The problem was, it was never finished."

His Legacy... The other cops called him "Rookie." Police Officer Eddie Byrne was just four days past his 22nd birthday when he sat guarding the home of a man who witnessed and spoke up against drug dealers who ravaged a Jamaica neighborhood. Byrne sat alone in a patrol car on the frigid night of February 26, 1988, a "canine cage" blocking the young cop’s view of the mean street behind him. So Byrne couldn’t see the beat up yellow Dodge in his rear-view mirror as it rolled up toward the end of Inwood Street, his assassins inside. Suddenly, the face of a crackhead appeared at Byrne’s passenger window. "Aggghh!" the face screamed. "Aggghh!" Byrne reached for his holstered gun in his lap. He never got a chance to use it. Another crackhead, standing at the driver’s side of the car held a nickel-plated revolver roughly eight inches from Byrne’s head. In the flash of five shots that stripped Queens - and the city of it’s innocence, Eddie Byrne was dead - executed on the orders of imprisoned druglord Lorenzo "Fat Cat" Nichols. And suddenly, crack was everybody’s problem. "This was an order, not for the murder of a particular police officer," said Lt. Phillip Panzarella (then-head of the Queens Homicide Squad). "But of any officer, for the sole purpose of delivering a message of death to anyone who opposed Nichols." The three men who planned and executed Byrne’s murder did so on jailhouse orders from Nichols, in retaliation for a jail sentence he had received a few days before. Todd Scott, Scott Cobb and David McClary are behind bars now. They received a total contract fee of $6,000 from Nichols for the cop murder - that’s $2,000 each. Eddie Byrne’s murder touched the core of the city, setting in motion the most intense drug enforcement strategy up to that point in the city’s history. Byrne’s death would not be in vain, officials declared. Enter the War On Drugs, Part I. The NYPD Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNT) were established - a legacy to Eddie Byrne. Ten years later, city cops are pulling out all the stops in a new, unprecedented escalation of the War on Drugs. The TNT approach was successful at removing drugs and dealers from city streets, but it stopped short of leaving an area secure that the scourge would not return when the cops left. There are no memorials for Eddie Byrne - no scholarships for drug free students, interdiction or recovery programs that bear his name. But his legacy lives on, his heart still beating to the rhythm of hundreds of narcotics cops who currently fight the war on drugs. The 1998 Drug Initiative isn’t just the NYPD’s war, or our war. It’s Eddie Byrne’s war, and we should never forget that.