ew books that spend 12 consecutive weeks on the best-seller list could be called a disappointment. But it appears that “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” the latest opus by Tom Wolfe, could be falling into that category.

According to Nielsen BookScan, the media-tracking company, “I Am Charlotte Simmons” has sold fewer than 250,000 copies from its release in November through the end of January. Even after accounting for BookScan’s acknowledgment that it typically measures about 70 percent of total hardcover sales, that would indicate that the book was selling at a slower pace than Mr. Wolfe’s two previous novels.

It would also indicate that the book might not be meeting the publisher’s expectations. When Farrar, Straus & Giroux published the novel, it announced a first printing of 1.5 million copies, a figure which, in the wink-wink world of publishing, usually means a commitment to actually print about half that many copies.

And despite its continued tenure on most national best-seller lists, “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is being discounted by 50 percent or more at bookstores and online, a move publishers often make to try to recoup some of their investment in a book that has not met expectations.

At Barnes & Noble and Borders stores, the book’s cover price of $28.95 has recently been slashed to $14.48, while on Amazon.com, the book is listed for sale at $11.58, or 60 percent off.

Executives at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Mr. Wolfe’s longtime publisher, said the discounting is a common marketing technique intended to keep a book on the best-seller list in the post-holiday period, when fewer people are visiting bookstores. It does not indicate that the performance of “I Am Charlotte Simmons” is disappointing, the executives said.

“We’re satisfied with the sales of the book given the fact that there has been a decline in the market for these big best-selling authors,” Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus, said on Tuesday.

Mr. Galassi and Lynn Nesbit, Mr. Wolfe’s agent, said they believed that the BookScan numbers were inaccurate, vastly understating the book’s sales. And while the book has fallen out of the Top 10 best sellers on many national lists, “nothing stays very long at the top anymore,” Ms. Nesbit said, adding, “It’s not a big deal.”

Mr. Wolfe’s novel is about Charlotte Simmons, a brilliant but sheltered freshman who succumbs to the hedonistic swirl of frat parties and casual sex at a big university. It received mixed reviews.

Best-selling authors are having a harder time making it to No. 1 on best-seller lists and staying there, partly because of the unflagging strength of two books, “The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown (Doubleday) and “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” by Mitch Albom (Hyperion). James Patterson’s recent novel, “London Bridges,” published in November by Little, Brown, spent only one week at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, an unusually short stint at the top spot for that author, while Michael Crichton’s novel, “State of Fear” (HarperCollins), published in December, never reached No. 1 on The Times’s list. According to BookScan, “London Bridges” has sold 434,000 copies, while “State of Fear” has sold 516,000.

Through Jan. 30, BookScan recorded sales of 239,000 copies of “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” reflecting sales at all Barnes & Noble and Borders stores and their online affiliates, and at Amazon.com, Costco, Target, Kmart, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Hastings and others. The BookScan survey also includes weighted estimates of sales at independent bookstores and at Books-A-Million, a medium-size chain.

What BookScan does not count are sales at Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart.com, at other nontraditional outlets like airport stores, and sales to libraries. Jim King, vice president and general manager of BookScan, said its data usually accounted for 70 percent to 75 percent of sales of a new hardcover book. But if Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club are selling a book heavily, he said, that percentage will decrease.

Even if BookScan’s figure measures only two-thirds of actual sales, that would mean about 357,000 copies have been sold, less than a quarter of the announced first printing of 1.5 million.

Asked about the BookScan number, Mr. Galassi said, “We’ve sold a lot more than that,” but he declined to say how many copies had been sold. He also declined to say how many copies the company had printed and shipped to stores.

Mr. Galassi also shrugged off the fact that “I Am Charlotte Simmons” reached only as high as No. 3 on The Times’s best-seller list, never reaching the top spot, as did Mr. Wolfe’s previous novels. After making its debut at No. 3, “I Am Charlotte Simmons” has spent the last seven weeks at No. 10 or lower on the 15-place Times list. On the list to be published Feb. 13, the book will be ranked No. 15.

“A Man in Full,” Mr. Wolfe’s previous novel, made its debut at No. 1 and stayed there for 10 weeks, spending 19 weeks over all on the list and selling 1.1 million copies in hardcover. His first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” took longer to build momentum, reaching the top spot in its 12th week on the list and remaining there for 8 weeks, while spending more than a year on the hardcover best-seller list and selling 725,000 copies.

“There are certain big kahunas who are sitting on the best-seller list who are preventing this book from doing that,” Mr. Galassi said. “That’s just the breaks. We came very close, but we didn’t get to the top.”

Mr. Galassi also dismissed the idea that discounting the book meant sales were not going well. “It’s the lowest bookstore traffic time of year,” he said. “We want to keep it on the best-seller list. It’s a fairly common practice.” He said he did not recall whether the company had similarly discounted other Wolfe novels.

Bob Wietrak, a vice president for merchandising at Barnes & Noble, said the current 50 percent discount for “I Am Charlotte Simmons” was a joint discount by the retailer and the publisher. Though the discounting strategy sometimes is used for underperforming books, Mr. Wietrak said that was not the case for “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”

“That was a huge success, a big best seller for us,” he said. “But there are still a significant amount of books that are still out in the marketplace.”

EST POINT, N.Y.

FOR most Americans, Iraq is very far away. But for the cadets at the United States Military Academy, particularly the seniors who will soon be officers over there, the war intrudes daily.

West Point has added classes on how to avoid ambushes, proper convoying techniques, the correct procedure for emptying a room when fighting door to door. “I’m 22 years old,” says Cadet Ramon Ramos, “and sometimes I’ll think, ‘Wait a minute, did I really just have a class on how not to get blown up by an insurgent?’ “

E-mail brings the war to the dorms. The night before the battle for Falluja began, Mark Erwin, a senior, got a message from his brother Lt. Mike Erwin, (West Point ’02): “Markie – I will be carrying your cadet picture in my right breast pocket with my prayer to St. Michael, dog tags and St. Michael’s medal,” the big brother wrote. “If by some chance something happens to me, you’re the voice to the family.” Cadet Erwin never deletes an e-mail message from his brother. “You worry there might not be another,” he says.

Lunch can be the worst.

“If they say the words, ‘Please give your attention to the first captain,’ you know it’s coming,” says Cadet Michael Linnington.

Another senior, Cadet Megan Williams, says: “Everyone shuts up. You’re so afraid of it.”

Cadet Linnington explains: “There was one the other day. The first captain gives a 30-second spiel – what year they graduated, how they died, if they were married.”

The death of Todd Bryant (’02) in Falluja touched many seniors. When Cadet Ramos was an 18-year-old plebe, Todd Bryant was his intramural football coach. “I sat at his table,” says Cadet Ramos. “Some upper class give plebes a hard time. Not Todd. He was just a nice guy.”

Company D named a meeting room for Todd Bryant last month. “His family and wife came from California,” Cadet Linnington says. “They had a slide show about his cadet life, and you watch it – it’s your life. What we’re doing now, it’s what he did. It puts it into reality.”

The cadets feel strange being so preoccupied, when their friends outside the military seem barely aware. Cadet Williams has a younger sister going to college at home in Texas. “You try not to judge,” Cadet Williams says, “but they’re very oblivious.”

Cadets go to more funerals than most 20-year-olds. Cadet Williams attended a service for David Bernstein (’01), killed in an ambush in Taza. “I didn’t know him,” she says. “But I’m Jewish, and he was, and that touched me.” When Cadet Brandon Bodor was in Washington for the inauguration, he stopped at Arlington National Cemetery, at the grave of Leonard Cowherd (’03), who was killed in Karbala. “Lenny was a good guy,” Cadet Bodor says.

Cadets don’t have to study the opinion polls to know they’re heading off to an unpopular war. Applications to the military academies are down substantially. At West Point, applications hit a post-9/11 high of 12,383 for the school year that began 2003. The 10,412 applications for the coming school year represent a 16 percent drop in two years. The Naval Academy is down 2,852 applicants, a 20 percent drop in just a year, and the Air Force Academy is down 3,054 applicants from 2004, a 24 percent drop.

AFTER two years at West Point, a cadet is given a last chance to leave without having to serve in the military. Last summer, 52 members of the sophomore class of 963 left, compared with 32 the year before and 18 the year before that. West Point officials were relieved it wasn’t more. “We were hearing rumors of mass resignations,” says the admissions director, Col. Mike Jones. “But it was just rumors. Our numbers are down, but still very strong,” he says, citing 10 applicants for every slot.

Cadet Bodor says it’s no mystery why the numbers are down. “Iraq,” he says. “Same as Vietnam. When you’re in an unpopular war, people question, ‘Is this what I want to be doing?’ “

These cadets, who get a free education in return for five years of military service, are likely to face two Iraq tours if current projections hold. Their own feelings about the war seem surprisingly mixed. While Cadets Erwin and Williams expressed confidence in the effort to establish a democratic society in Iraq, Cadets Linnington, Ramos and Jarick Evans sounded less hopeful.

“There are cadets who might not want to go, they might not believe we should be over there the same way the American public feels,” Cadet Linnington says. “But as military people we have a duty.”

Cadet Ramos sees the division of opinion in classroom discussions. “At this point, to me, it’s too late to debate,” he says. “We may not like it, but we have to make the best of it. We’re there.”

He is grateful, he says, “that the American public knows it’s not the soldiers’ fault if they disagree with the war.”

Among the 13 cadets I interviewed, Jarick Evans was the most openly critical. “The thing that disturbs me most, we don’t have an exit strategy,” he says. “When all we’re told is we’ll leave when the job’s done, it leaves a bad taste in mouths of soldiers. That’s the reason a lot don’t want to go back the second and third times.”

Cadet Evans estimates that half his class may feel that way. “There’s a big fear we’ll go back and forth, back and forth our entire military career because there is no clear mission,” he says.

The interviews took place in Grant Hall, and it was clear these cadets had mastered a central lesson of the life of Ulysses S. Grant (West Point, 1843). Grant fought brilliantly in the Mexican War, even though he hated that conflict as an imperialist land grab. And he fought brilliantly in the Civil War, which he believed in with all his heart.

Cadet Evans has two older brothers who have served in Iraq, including, Jerel, 26 ( ’01). “He told me the biggest thing is to have a good attitude,” Cadet Evans says. “If the leader doesn’t have a good attitude, he can’t expect his troops to have a good attitude.” And so, Cadet Evans says, despite any misgivings about the war, he’s good to go. “I’ll have a good attitude,” he says. “The Army’s been good to me. This is my job.”

Michael Winerip has returned from a leave. He and Samuel G. Freedman will write this column in alternate weeks.

E-mail: edmike@nytimes.com

RANSON, Colo. – With no grocery store or gas station and a population of 77 souls, this desert village seems an unlikely home for a fast-growing public school that has enrolled students from all across Colorado.

There are just 65 students attending Branson’s lone brick and mortar school, but there are an additional 1,000 enrolled in its online affiliate. And with the state paying school districts $5,600 per pupil, Branson Online has been a bonanza. Founded in 2001, it has received $15 million so far.

The school district has used the money to hire everyone in town who wants a job, including the mayor, who teaches 15 students via e-mail. It has broadcast radio commercials statewide to recruit students and built a new headquarters here. But if the school has been financially successful, its academic record is mixed, and the authorities have put the school on academic probation.

Branson Online is one of at least 100 Internet-based public schools that local educators have founded nationwide in recent years, often in partnership with private companies, and many online schools share Branson’s strengths and weaknesses, experts said.

The federal Department of Education does not keep track of enrollment numbers, but in a January report the department noted the emergence of scores of online public schools and said they were experiencing “explosive growth.”

“Cyberschools are the 800-pound gorilla of the choice movement, although vouchers and charter schools get a lot more attention,” said William Moloney, education commissioner in Colorado, where state financing for online schools has increased almost 20-fold in five years – to $20.2 million for 3,585 students today from $1.1 million for 166 full-time students in 2000.

“That’s a mighty steep curve, and nothing says it won’t keep growing,” Mr. Moloney said.

Like other online schools across the nation, Branson has proved to be an attractive alternative for parents who wish to supervise their children’s education at home, and for students who hold jobs or are disabled.

But the schools are beginning to draw scrutiny. As in Colorado, online schools in other states have also shown mediocre academic performance. In Florida, for instance, students at taxpayer-financed online schools run by corporate managers made slower progress last year on standardized math tests than did students at most traditional schools.

A report on online schools nationwide, issued last May by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, a nonprofit group based in Illinois, concluded that states should monitor the academic and other performance of Internet schools more closely. “The rapid expansion of K-12 online learning threatens to outpace the development of appropriate state-level policies,” it said.

Several Colorado superintendents have criticized Branson Online for enrolling their students, thereby taking money away from their districts. Others just say the quality of the education is questionable. Glenn Davis, superintendent of the Huerfano School District in Walsenburg, said that although he had lost a few students to Branson his main concern was that online schools had become magnets for low-achieving students.

“It’s not a good plan for 90 percent of kids,” Mr. Davis said. “They don’t have the discipline or the parental support to make it work, and in many cases it’s become a way to drop out legally before you’re 16.”

Online schools in Colorado are subject to the same regulations as the sponsoring districts, which need no special permission to found them.

State Senator Sue Windels, a Democrat who heads the Education Committee, introduced a bill last month that would tighten the monitoring of online schools. Even so, Troy Mayfield, Branson’s superintendent, predicted that Branson Online would continue to grow.

“This can get as big as our imagination will let it,” Mr. Mayfield said.

Only five years ago, Branson, which sits on an arid flatland of scrub oak and yucca 30 miles east of Interstate 25 near the New Mexico border, was dying. The Roman Catholic church had closed for lack of a priest, and the only nonranch employment was at the one-woman Post Office; the county garage, where three men kept the snowplows running; and the school, whose kindergarten to 12th grade enrollment had shrunk to 41 students.

But the superintendent at that time, J. Alan Aufderheide, a computer enthusiast and a bit of a visionary, had acquired an Internet server with federal money and used it to make computerized texts in calculus and other courses available to Branson students and teachers online. The experiment was so popular that Dr. Aufderheide proposed that the district build a K-12 curriculum and open a virtual school, assigning the town’s eight teachers to work with students via telephone and e-mail.

The school board agreed, and Branson Online advertised for students on radio stations in Denver and other cities, and in newspapers and ranch magazines. One enticement was the offer of a free computer and high-speed Internet hookup for each student, which Branson finances with the state per-pupil allotment.

The school’s curriculum was an online elaboration of courses taught in Branson’s existing school. Many courses were based on educational software that Dr. Aufderheide purchased commercially. For middle school social studies, for instance, Branson Online uses Prentice Hall course software, “The American Nation,” and some high school math courses are based on software purchased from Boxer Learning Inc., based in Virginia. Dr. Aufderheide said he expected the online school, www.bransonschoolonline.com, to attract perhaps 25 students its first year. But 110 students signed up in the fall of 2001; 739 in the fall of 2002; and 1,004 in the fall of 2003. Colorado education law allows students to enroll at almost any Colorado public school, not just at those in their home district. To keep up with the exploding enrollment, the school hired some 70 new teachers, most working from their homes. Today most but not all of the teachers are certified.

Branson’s students have included a girl training as an Olympic skater, a boy competing with his quarter horse in out-of-state livestock shows, and a teenager whose missionary parents were moving to Haiti.

Rhonda Allenback, who lives in Pueblo, Colo., 100 miles northwest of Branson, said she enrolled three of her four children in Branson Online because she wanted to help two of them pursue dance training while tending to the laser engraving business she runs from her garage.

“The Internet school fit the bill so that they could do school and I could do my business,” Ms. Allenback said.

Branson Online has also attracted bedridden students as well as those who have gotten in trouble or failed in traditional schools.

“Most of my kids, nobody else wants them or they’re sick,” said Beverly Shelden, a veteran teacher who has been Branson’s mayor since 1997 and a part-time instructor since the online school’s founding. Her students have included a 14-year-old girl serving probation for crimes, and, this year, two pregnant teenagers, she said.

Ms. Shelden communicates frequently via e-mail and telephone with her students, she said, sending messages like, “Haven’t heard from you, where’s your homework?” or, when they send work in, “Great, you filled my mailbox – love it.”

Self-motivated students prosper, but others flounder, school officials and parents said.

“It takes a lot of discipline, six to eight hours of work each day, just like regular school,” said Darlene Fuentes, who enrolled her two sons in Branson Online last fall.

One son, David, who is 17, successfully juggled online study and a part-time job, allowing him to make the payments on his pickup truck, said Mrs. Fuentes, a bank teller who lives in Walsenburg, Colo., 65 miles northwest of Branson. But Kevin, who is 14, lacked the discipline to sit at the computer and fell behind, she said.

“Things distract him and the first thing you’d know he was in the kitchen, getting a snack, so it was a battle,” Mrs. Fuentes said. She took Kevin out of Branson Online at the end of one semester and enrolled him at the local public high school.

Of the several Colorado districts that have opened online schools, Branson has the second-largest enrollment. The largest is Colorado Virtual Academy, a charter school based in a Denver suburb that is affiliated with K12 Inc., a company based in Virginia. Jeff Kwitowski, a K12 spokesman, said the company managed Virtual Academies in nine states and in Washington, D.C., with a total enrollment of about 15,000, which he said made it the nation’s largest operator of online public schools. The Denver Public Schools run an online school in affiliation with another corporate operator, Connections Academy Inc., based in Baltimore.

Some children have adapted to the computerized home study, mustering the self-discipline to advance academically without a classroom teacher to prod them. Others have not.

About one in four of the 1,000 students who had enrolled in Branson Online for the last school year dropped out by February 2004, and after only 5 percent of students took the required standardized tests in 2002, the state put the school on an accreditation watch list.

Of the Branson students who took the state tests last year, state records show, higher percentages scored “unsatisfactory” in math at every grade level tested compared with students at schools statewide. At Branson, 48 percent of eighth graders scored unsatisfactory, for example, compared with 28 percent of eighth graders at schools statewide. Still, Branson authorities are convinced that the school fills a need and will continue to grow.

“In the short term, our enrollment can double or triple,” said Ben Doherty, a cattle rancher and the president of Branson’s school board.

ALTIMORE, Feb. 7 – Outside a Chinese takeout in East Baltimore, a cluster of heart-shape balloons, a street memorial to the dead, tells a depressingly familiar story.

Last Wednesday, a 28-year-old was shot to death as he left the restaurant just before dawn. The block was known for drug dealing, the victim was a convicted drug dealer and the killing was almost certainly drug related, the police said.

“He committed crimes there; he was killed there,” a spokesman for the police, Matt Jablow, said.

So it goes in the toughest precincts across the city. After trending downward from a record 353 in 1993, homicides in Baltimore have ticked back up since 2002. They hit 278 last year, putting Baltimore in line for the title of deadliest big city in the nation, with a homicide rate three times greater than Los Angeles and five times greater than New York.

Last month, the city posted its bloodiest January since 1973, with 32 killings.

The high rate – as other cities, including Washington, are reporting fewer homicides – has fueled hand-wringing by city officials, criticism by civic groups and new strategies by the Police Department. But it has also posed an intriguing riddle for criminologists. Even as the murder rate has crept back up, officials say, the overall crime rate has steadily fallen. Can a city be safer, yet deadlier, at the same time?

City officials say it can. Turf wars have made Baltimore more violent for drug dealers, they assert, but the city is freer from crime for the law-abiding majority than it has been in decades.

“Baltimore is actually a very safe city if you are not involved in the drug trade,” Health Commissioner Peter Beilenson said.

To make their case, city officials have compiled studies that show a fine line between killers and their prey. Of the 38 homicide victims this year, 90 percent had criminal records and 68 percent had been arrested for violent crimes. The victims had been arrested an average of eight times each, typically for drug-related crimes.

“Our victims have identical records as our suspects,” Marcus Brown, acting deputy police commissioner, said.

At a review of crime statistics last week at the police headquarters, computerized maps flashed onto screens as ranking officers sharply questioned precinct commanders on crime trends. Forests of blue icons pinpointed drug-dealing hot spots, many accompanied by red X’s to denote homicides.

Yet as the maps showed killings increasing in some places, they also showed that other reported crimes, including rape, robbery, aggravated assault and burglary, were down in most precincts.

“As I ride down the street, I’d have to say the city is safer,” Acting Police Commissioner Leonard D. Hamm said.

Not everyone is so sure. Some criminologists have questioned the statistics, arguing that some precinct commanders may be downgrading serious crimes to lesser categories to make their districts look better.

Police officials vigorously deny that.

Other experts object to police officials’ assertions that just drug dealers are in grave danger on the meaner streets.

Dr. Carnell Cooper, an attending trauma surgeon at the University of Maryland shock trauma center here, said such theories ignored the plight of law-abiding residents of crime-ridden communities.

“We get patients in our hospital who are shot while they lay on their couches,” Dr. Cooper said.

Yet his experience confirms in part the police thesis that homicides typically involve criminals killing criminals. Many of the young men he treats for gunshots return weeks later with new wounds, sometimes fatal.

The surgeon became so tired of patching them up only to see them die – or kill -that he began a program to counsel victims of shootings, hoping to turn them away from the drug business.

“We put people in an environment where drug users are on the corner, guns go off all night, and we expect those kids to behave as if they live at Charles and Pratt,” Dr. Cooper said, referring to a tony section of the city. “But they can’t live up to the standards of civil society if we don’t show them how.”

The persistently high homicide rate has sparked debates over whether violence has become a part of the city’s fabric, as much as steamed crabs or Anne Tyler novels. The city may have inspired the quirky comedy film “Diner” by a homegrown filmmaker, Barry Levinson, but it also provided the brass-knuckled grist for the television police drama “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

The recent appearance of a homemade DVD, “Stop Snitching,” that glorifies retaliatory violence and features a cameo by a local professional basketball star, Carmelo Anthony, has only fueled such concerns. Mr. Anthony, who plays for the Denver Nuggets, said he was unaware that his image was on the DVD and has agreed to create a public service announcement in support of legislation to prevent witness intimidation, a major problem in Baltimore, prosecutors say.

The firebombing of Angela Dawson’s home in East Baltimore by a drug dealer in 2002 has crystallized the city’s anger and fear of witness intimidation. Mrs. Dawson, who regularly called the police to report that drug merchants were on her block, was killed in the attack, along with her husband and five of their children.

Dr. Beilenson, the health commissioner, said cyclical violence had become endemic to drug gangs. He recalled the case of a 14-year-old who, with the help of a counseling program, quit his gang, moved to a new neighborhood and began attending school. But a few months later, the boy returned for a family birthday party, only to be shot dead by a rival gang member who was nursing a grudge. The gunman was later killed by the boy’s cousin.

“This is the smallest big city I’ve ever lived in,” Dr. Beilenson said. “Violence is very personal, because everyone knows everyone else or is a relative. If you shoot someone, the retribution will be fast and sure.”

No one is watching the rising homicide statistics more closely than Mayor Martin J. O’Malley, a Democrat who was elected in 1999 on a promise to reduce crime. Mr. O’Malley was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2003 and is widely expected to run for governor in 2006.

He promised to reduce homicides to fewer than 200 a year, a goal he has never attained. Republicans have ridiculed him for falling short. And even Democrats have complained that repeated changes in the commissioner’s office – Mr. Hamm is the fourth commissioner under Mr. O’Malley and the first from Baltimore – have created abrupt policy shifts and hampered crime fighting.

Mr. O’Malley points a finger elsewhere to explain the homicide numbers, criticizing the United States attorney’s office as not prosecuting enough gun crimes and the state parole, probation and juvenile-crime agencies as not working closely enough with the city’s police.

But the mayor also notes that, on average, there are 50 fewer killings a year now than in the mid-90′s – several busloads of salvaged lives. And with violent crime down by 60 percent over the past year, job creation up and a $7 billion building boom under way downtown, the city is “by every objective measure doing much better now than five years ago,” Mr. O’Malley said.

“It’s not just a pipe dream or whistling past the graveyard,” he added.

Such progress is not always apparent in East Baltimore, where block after block of vacant row houses stand in testimony to the declining population, where the drug-addiction and H.I.V.-infection rates are among the highest in the nation.

On a recent evening, a plainclothes police officer, Eric Spilman, stood by a window in an abandoned house, watching drug merchants open shop on the street. An unmarked police car drove by. Then another. Then a police cruiser, lights flashing and siren blaring, raced past. For that night, at least, the police were out in greater force than the dealers, a result of a crackdown ordered by Commissioner Hamm.

As he watched a young dealer peddle his wares, Officer Spilman recalled how a few weeks before he had helped guard a 32-year-old accused of killing four people while stealing their drug money. A typical Baltimore homicide, he concluded.

“He was a junkie who was robbing drug dealers,” Officer Spilman said. “He looked harmless, like a homeless man. I guess you can underestimate some of those people.”